Enterprise Mobility Summit 2014: Most organisations still based on traditional client/server - but change is happening

Citrix expects a long transition period as mobility and cloud march hand-in-hand

The shift towards cloud computing and mobility are indelibly linked, according to Citrix enterprise mobility senior product specialist Paul Roberts, with the shift towards the cloud already well underway - and the goal of mobility to get apps and data to people and devices.

"There's a few businesses that are actually in the cloud, but most organisations are still based on traditional client/server applications. But there's a shift happening," said Roberts, who was speaking at the recent Computing Enterprise Mobility Summit.

Even banking groups are now looking upon the IT hardware that they need to support vast swathes of their business as a hindrance, he added, which they would rather offloaded to Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft or other providers of cloud computing services - in particular, for non-core activities such as storing marketing and other materials.

"There's going to be a hybrid model where you have got some services in a data cloud, some in traditional data centres and some on PCs and laptops," said Roberts, referencing staff habits of transferring corporate data to do their work at home and on the move. "It will take some time before we move full to the cloud."

The most high-profile first step that many organisations take - which Citrix itself had taken - is to shift from monolithic customer relationship management software to Salesforce.com, paying as little as £12 per user per month instead of spending millions on the implementation of a new packaged CRM application.

For legacy client/server applications, continued Roberts, applications such as Citrix XenMobile, are intended to help organisations port those applications to mobile and other devices. In some cases, Citrix even "re-skins" the likes of SAP enterprise applications so that they can be run fluently on touch-based devices, such as Apple iPads.