Citrix and Grasshopper Make a Good Pair

Citrix has many products – DaaS, NetScaler, ZenApp, SingleSignon and the GoTo suite of products: GoToAssist, GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar, Podio and ShareFile. Citrix is firmly in the cloud, collaboration and remote worker space. Nabbing Grasshopper was probably a good move.

Grasshopper is auto-attendant in the cloud for about 150K very small businesses. I am not certain that those 150K VSB do use or will use other Citrix products.

If you take this Citrix slogan: “Because in this new era, work is no longer a place – it’s something you do anywhere inspiration strikes.” Grasshopper is a good fit, allowing small businesses to be virtual.

The Citrix “vision inspires us to build mobile workspace solutions that give people new ways to work better with seamless and secure access to the apps, files and services they need on any device, wherever they go.” The very essence of cloud services should be about this same vision.

last May, Citrix launched “Workspace Suite, its bundle of desktop virtualization, mobile device management and collaboration software”, which was its push into Enterprise – the opposite of the Grasshopper buy. It will be a challenge to be all things to all businesses from VSB to Enterprise. Many companies try it and fail. See Cisco’s acquisition of Linksys for an example.

[Good advice for people and companies.]

Earlier this year, Citrix “launched Workspace Cloud, a platform for delivering apps, data and desktops to any device through a Web browser.” “Formerly called Citrix Workspace Services, Workspace Cloud will revolutionize the way access to apps, desktops, mobility and data is designed, delivered and managed,” according to their blog. Once again, they pulled out all the marketing buzzwords to make it seem like this is everyone’s answer to everything app and cloud. Horse Hockey. And apparently having products named similarly caused confusion: “The Suite is a bundle of products and Workspace Services is a delivery platform and control plane.”

In January of 2015, “Citrix … snapped up virtual storage purveyor Sanbolic. In doing so, it has completed its lineup of virtual infrastructure technology building blocks.” Besides acquisitions, they have been losing a few key people — a company in turmoil? Or a company growing fast?

This is just another cloud component for Citrix. The Grasshopper purchase is just one small step in the Hosted VoIP consolidation (much more is needed). It is interesting that it isn’t a roll up play like Vonage made with Telesphere and Simple Signal. I’m waiting on Dell to buy one.

Tags: cloud communications, cloud computing, mergers, voip
Related tags: citrix launched, citrix products, workspace cloud, launched workspace, workspace services, citrix