Citrix Extends Google Alliance to the Cloud

Now that Google has focused more of its cloud computing efforts on enterprise IT customers, it is starting to attract broader support from vendors targeting those same classes of customers. Citrix this week announced it has expanded its alliance with Google to include an instance of Citrix Workspace Cloud for accessing Windows applications running on Google Cloud Platform in addition to the application delivery controller Citrix developed for container environments.

In addition, the two companies have tightened the integration between Google G-Suite personal productivity applications and Citrix ShareFile synchronization service. Coupling those services with Citrix Workspace Cloud should make it simpler for organizations to access both G-Suite and Windows applications when required.

Todd Terbeek, head of strategic alliances for Citrix, says previously, Google and Citrix have collaborated on making Windows applications available on Google Chromebooks running an instance of the Android operating system. The expansion of the relationship is being driven by customer demand, says Terbeek.

“We’re seeing a lot more of Google in the enterprise,” says Terbeek.

In general, Terbeek says, it’s still early, but there’s a significant increase in the number of organizations employing multiple clouds to run different classes of workloads. Citrix has already committed to making most of its portfolio available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds.

However, in terms of emerging classes of workloads based on containers, Terbeek notes the alliance with Google is significant given Google’s leadership in the development of open source Kubernetes container orchestrations software, which Google also employs to drive most of its cloud services.

In the public cloud, Google is emerging as a solid third alternative to segment leader AWS and Microsoft. The degree to which Google can narrow that gap in the future will depend heavily on how much Google can penetrate enterprise IT accounts. To accomplish that goal, Google needs partners such as Citrix to expand an enterprise ecosystem that until recently, it largely ignored.