There is no denying that Microsoft is moving more and more focus into their cloud offerings, even with solution such as Office365, EMS (Enterprise Mobility Suite) and of course their Azure platform.
EMS being the latest product bundle in the suite gives customers Intune, Azure Rights Management and Azure Active Directory Premium. So if a customer already has Office365 (their users are already placed with Azure AD and can then easily be attached to EMS for more features)
We are also seeing that Microsoft is adding more and more management capabilities against Office365 into their Intune suite (Which is one of the keypoints which no other vendors have yet) but is this type of management something we need ? or is it just to give it a “key” selling point?
Now Microsoft has added alot of MDM capabilities to Intune, but they are nowhere close to the competition yet. Of course they have other offerings in the EMS pack, like Azure Rights Management, which are quite unique on the way it functions and integrates with Azure AD and Office365. As of 2014 Microsoft isn’t even listed on the Gartner quadrant for EMM (which they stated would be the goal for 2015)
But it will be interesting to se if Microsoft’s strategy is to compete head-to-head on the other vendors or if they wish to give the basic features and dvelve more into the part of Azure AD and identity management across clouds and SaaS offerings.
Citrix on the other hand, have their XenMobile offering which is a more complete EMM product suite (MDM and MAM, Follow me data with Sharefile, and so on) Now Citrix has a lot of advantages for instance over using Sharefile against OneDrive. Sharefile has encryption of data even thou it is locally and running on a sandboxed application( on a mobile device), while the only option that OneDrive has is using as a part of Rights Management Service (of course OneDrive has extensive data encryption in-transit and at rest https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn905447.aspx
Citrix also has MicroVPN functionality and secure browser access running VPN access using Netscaler, while Microsoft also has a secure browser application which is much more limited to restricting which URLs to open and what content can be viewed from that browser.
So from a customer side you need to ask yourself.
- what kind of requirement does my buisness have?
- Do I use Office365 or a regualr on-premise setup?
- Do I need the advanced capabilities ?
- How are my users actually working ?
Is there a best of both worlds using both of these technologies ?
While yes!
Now of course there are some feature that overlaps using Offic365 and EMS + XenMobile, but there are also some features which are important to be aware of.
* Citrix has Sharefile storage controller templates in Azure (Meaning that if a customer has an IaaS in Azure, they can setup a Sharefile connector in Azure and use that to publish files and content without using OneDrive)
* Citrix has a Sharefile connector to Office365 (Which allows users to use Sharefile almost as a file aggregrator for communicating between Office365 and their regular fileservers) which allows for secure editing directly from ShareFile.
* Citrix XenMobile has alot better MDM features for Windows Phone that Intune has at the moment.
* Azure AAD has a lot of built-in SSO access to many of Citrix web based applications (Sharefile, GTM, GTA and so on) since users are already in Azure AD premium it can be used to grant access to the different applications using SSO)
* Netscaler and SAML iDP (If we have an on-premise enterprise solution we can use the Netscaler to operate as an SAML identity provider against Office365 which allows for replacement for ADFS which is required for full SSO of on-premise AD users to Office365
* Office365 ProPlus with Lync is supported on XenApp/XD with Lync optimization pack (Note that this is not part of XenMobile but of Workspace suite)
* Netscaler and Azure MFA (We can use Azure MFA against Netscaler to publish web based applications with traffic optimization)
* Netscaler will also soon be available in Azure which allows for setting up a full Citrix infrastructure in Azure
But in the future I would be guessing that Microsoft is moving forward with the user collaboration part, it is going to become the heart of identity management with Azure AD directory and rights management, while Citrix on the other hand will focus more and enabling mobility using solutions like EMM ( MAM ) and follow me data aggregator and secure file access and devices. Citrix will also play an important part in hybrid setup using Netscaler with Cloud bridge and as an identity provider on-premise