Mark Templeton, Citrix
“Collaboration” was in the spotlight during Citrix Systems’ Synergy conference in San Francisco last week. The software company unveiled a number of enhancements designed to help organizations better support user interactivity.
Citrix announced GoToMeeting HDFaces for the iPad – a web conferencing system with video, audio and screen sharing; it’s been tweaked to work on Apple’s latest tablet device.
Citrix has been quietly climbing the charts with GoToMeeting, according to Sampath Gomatam, VP, product line, collaboration, online services division. In an interview at Synergy on May 9, he explained that while Cisco Systems’ WebEx still has the largest share of the web conferencing market, GoToMeeting has a 15% market share.
“We overtook Microsoft last year,” he said, referencing Microsoft’s LiveMeeting. He added that it has been a slow advance. GoToMeeting was one of the last web conferencing platforms to offer video connectivity, largely because Citrix didn’t want to rush the feature just to keep up with competitors. Gomatam explained that at the heart of Citrix’s product development is the end-user experience; it’s a challenge to introduce new features while ensuring that the interface isn’t compromised. “It’s a lot more work to make it less complex than it is to just cram more features in.”
Citrix also introduced new enterprise-class capabilities for ShareFile, its file-sharing application. Now with a StorageZones feature, ShareFile can be configured such that data can be saved in specific places – in a particular part of the data centre, or in a particular geographic area as per government regulations or internal security policies… even according to the end user’s location, to reduce the distance between the user’s workstation and the storage spot for faster access.
