As businesses today face tectonic shifts within the global economy, success is increasingly defined by the ability to optimize the information surrounding people, organizations and devices. Today at Citrix Synergy, Citrix and Microsoft unveiled an expansion of their strategic partnership to meet the needs of the modern workforce with application and desktop virtualization in the cloud, network delivery and enterprise mobility management. From the keynote stage today, Kirill Tatarinov, CEO of Citrix, accompanied by a special video address from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, announced that Citrix has selected Microsoft Azure as its preferred and strategic cloud for its future roadmap. This partnership will empower joint customers to capitalize on the convergence of cloud, mobile and big data and drive digital transformation in their organizations. In addition, Citrix and Microsoft are working together on new integrations between Citrix XenMobile, NetScaler and the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), based on customer demand.

“Companies of all sizes across all industries around the world have an amazing opportunity to embrace digital transformation and empower their people to work productively from anywhere at any time,” said Kirill Tatarinov, president and CEO of Citrix. “Our customers are asking Citrix and Microsoft to work closer together to help them fully leverage innovations like Windows 10, Office 365 and Azure. This enhanced partnership ensures we can be more agile in responding to our customers’ needs and help them accelerate the move to digital business.”

Accelerating the Move to Windows 10

As part of the expanded partnership, Microsoft and Citrix will offer customers flexible options to deploy Windows 10 Enterprise within their organizations. Later this year, Citrix will offer customers who have licensed Windows 10 Enterprise (Current Branch for Business) on a per-user basis the option to manage their Windows 10 images on Azure through its XenDesktop VDI solution. This will help customers deploy virtual apps or desktops and accelerate Windows 10 adoption for those customers who are using Microsoft cloud solutions. To support the testing of custom-built corporate apps on this advanced operating system, Citrix customers can use AppDNA to accelerate their migration to Windows10 by providing application lifecycle management tools to discover and resolve application compatibility issues.

Enabling Productivity in the Cloud with Office 365

Together, Citrix and Microsoft are enabling companies to realize the collaboration and communications benefits of Office 365. Customers will be able to take advantage of an optimized Skype for Business “dial-tone” level of experience delivered with the high security of Citrix XenApp and in XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. XenApp also allows customers to run the full versions of Office 365, including Office plugins and macros giving customers more complete usage of their Office 365 subscriptions.

Expanding Enterprise Mobility Capabilities

To further help companies deliver great productivity experiences for their employees, while enabling IT professionals to help protect company data across both cloud and on-premises applications, Citrix and Microsoft are integrating Citrix XenMobile and NetScaler with the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS.)

Citrix NetScaler will integrate with EMS to provide virtual private network capabilities for more secure, identity-based access to on-premises applications on Microsoft Intune-managed devices. This will give customers a broad array of options for managing access to on-premises applications in an increasingly mobile-first world.

In addition, the Citrix Worx Mail and Forms applications, ShareFile enterprise file share and sync and Citrix Receiver will support EMS, so that customers can manage and secure these mobile app experiences using the same mobile application management capabilities used to manage Office 365 and SAP Fiori apps.

“Our relationship with Citrix has always been founded on the commitment to making our mutual customers successful by empowering their people to be more productive,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft. “By selecting Azure as its preferred and strategic cloud, Citrix is helping companies mobilize their workforces to succeed in today’s highly competitive, disruptive and global business environment.” Read the Microsoft blog post about today’s news here.

This agreement provides enterprises with more reasons than ever to partner with Citrix and Microsoft, in order to optimize productivity across all devices that modern users demand, while ensuring enhanced compliance, manageability and IT cost efficiency.