The race to the cloud is on and it's about to pick up speed. Citrix Systems, Inc. today announced plans to extend Citrix Workspace to Google Cloud, expanding the flexibility and choice companies have in transitioning to the cloud by enabling them to quickly and efficiently deliver apps to Google devices and operating systems and create a superior digital work experience that unleashes productivity and innovation. The news came during Citrix Synergy, the premier digital work conference taking place in Atlanta this week.

"As companies move more apps to the cloud, they need an easy, secure way for employees to access them anywhere, anytime from any device," said David Henshall, President and CEO, Citrix. "In delivering Citrix Workspace for Google Cloud, we are enabling our customers to accelerate their digital transformations and deliver a simple, intuitive experience for their users."

"Many of our customers have existing software and infrastructure investments, yet still want the freedom to invest in their cloud future," said Rob Enslin, President Global Customer Operations, Google Cloud. "In expanding our partnership with Citrix, we can better help these customers with their transformations by enabling them to access and run the apps their businesses depend on anywhere-simply, flexibly and securely."

A Productivity Powerhouse

Extending Citrix Workspace beyond Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for companies using Google Cloud will enable them to modernize their apps and deliver unified access across Google devices and operating systems to create a productivity powerhouse for employees and IT administrators alike.

Planned interoperability with Google's Cloud Identity, for instance, will allow for the seamless authentication of users using G Suite credentials to access Citrix Workspace, which will provide a more secure and unified end-user experience. In addition, the integration of intelligent capabilities into G Suite will enable companies to automatically notify employees of important events from their Google calendars through personalized feeds within Citrix Workspace. This will create a simple, intelligent experience that boosts engagement and productivity by reducing frustration from constantly switching apps and searching for information.

"With Citrix and Google Cloud Platform, we have the possibility to create a compelling work experience that has a tremendous effect on efficiency and employee satisfaction," said Mari Wasström, IT Solutions Service Management Lead, Neste. "Instead of a solution based in Finland, we now have a global concept that we can deploy to all our sites worldwide giving users a fast and secure application user experience from the cloud."

Enterprise-Grade VDI

Using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Machine Creation Service (MCS), IT will be able to quickly and efficiently provision Windows-based Citrix workloads at scale and create a modern digital work environment in which employees can access all of the tools they need to collaborate and perform at their best. Automated provisioning for Google Cloud Platform is available on demand today and will be rolled out to all customers in the third quarter of 2019.  Linux virtual desktops from Citrix will soon be supported on GCP as well.

Highly Reliable Application Delivery

Keeping users engaged and productive requires organizations to ensure an always-on infrastructure. This can be a challenge in hybrid cloud environments, but with Citrix Workspace for Google Cloud, companies can leverage the powerful combination of Citrix ADC and Citrix SD-WAN to optimize and secure connectivity when transporting applications from GCP or connecting users to those resources.

Changing the Game

We officially live in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. And it's changing the game for IT. "In the old days, all the apps people needed to do their jobs were on their laptops. Now, some are local, some are in corporate datacenters, some are in the cloud," Henshall said. "In extending Citrix Workspace to Google Cloud, we're giving companies greater flexibility and choice in how they deploy the SaaS, cloud, and web apps their employees need to be engaged and productive and a simple, efficient way to do it."