Citrix Receiver for iPhone: Run Windows Applications Remotely

Since the release of iPhone 3G or firmware 2.0, Apple packed some essential enterprise features such as VPN and Microsoft Exchange support into iPhone and target to lure enterprise users. As an IT practitioner at a global MNC, I’m delighted to see my beloved to become more enterprise-ready. The Exchange support is sweet and promising. It’s so easy to gain access to my corporate email with iPhone.

From an enterprise user’s viewpoint, the current enterprise features bundled in the latest firmware are great but still not enough (at least for me). With most of the corporate systems are running on MS Windows, there is a huge demand from enterprise users to run Windows applications on iPhone and access corporate desktop remotely. Yes, I’m one of them. Especially, it’s inevitably to access the corporate system from home or elsewhere remotely to provide system support or fix any urgent issues. Citrix Receiver for iPhone, (aka Citrix XenApp) is the answer to the overwhelming demand.

Probably you haven’t heard about Citrix XenApp, but it’s hot and not uncommon in any large enterprise. In simple term, Citrix is a technology that can let users to connect to computer remotely via a wide variety of devices and run applications (here that is Windows App) directly on the remote computer.

For better understanding, the video below will show you how Citrix on iPhone works. But you should note that the Windows applications is not running on iPhone locally. They are actually running on a remote powerful computer and you can think of iPhone as a viewer.

Pretty amazing, right?

As of today, Citrix XenApp has already supported mobile device running Windows Mobile and Symbian. Mentioned in Citrix blog, Citrix will soon extend the support of XenApp for iPhone and targets to rollout the release in first half of 2009.

I’m looking forward to the release of Citrix for iPhone. This will probably an enabler for enterprises to switch from other Windows mobile device to iPhone.

Citrix XenApp is not the only product to provide remote access of Windows Desktop. VNC is an alternative but it’s not the corporate standard. Earlier, Mochasoft has released an iPhone client that you can access Windows desktop via VNC remotely. You can check out this post for more information.

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