Stevenson believes that the consumerisation of IT is a pressure that has been building for a number of years and that this is something that the CIO will have to address:

“The question is how does the CIO enable the user to have choice and still keep the things that are important to him, such as delivering services which are effective in their environment? We think it's inevitable – look at how the Mac is being introduced to the corporate environment due to widespread iPhone adoption. The bottom line is that CIOs are going to have to embrace this new environment.”

This has led to a struggle for CIOs regarding budgets, maintenance and how to safely allow users to bring unmanaged devices within the secure corporate domain (see p.1). Stevenson explains how Citrix is addressing through an innovative “bring your own PC” (BYOPC) programme: 

“Citrix is in phase one of rolling out a programme to enable employees to buy their own machine running a PC environment of their choice - the concept is similar to a company car allowance. Staff can even buy a top of the range Mac if they want to supplement from their own pocket.”

Part of the of the programme’s criteria is that devices must cost at least 20% less to purchase and maintain than devices managed through the traditional system. Therefore Citrix has created a BYOPC website as a self-service application portal, interactive support community (ensuring that internal IT do not have to support devices) and online shop offering discount purchases through the Citrix channels. Interestingly, it was found that the productivity increased for the majority of employees, that better care was taken of equipment due to a pride of ownership, and Citrix has a fairly unique edge in wooing technically savvy employees.

Stevenson feels that this programme represents the beginning of a fundamental change to how IT is supported within the corporate environment, and that this is something which Citrix can support from a user experience and IT management perspective:

“We have given our employees a choice over which devices they use. We can do this because we use our own technology – the Citrix Receiver allows users a simple, ubiquitous access point to drive their applications on Mac, Windows, iPhone operating systems (and soon Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and Android) as they wish.”

“Through enabling choice of device, and giving more control to the user we are moving toward a publisher-subscriber model, and delivering IT as an on-demand service. By embracing SaaS and Cloud-based technologies anyone with network connectivity can securely access to corporate applications remotely. Despite this abundance of connectivity and devices, IT still maintains control over data, applications and security ensuring a risk free and compliant environment. We are already seeing growing interest and adoption from our customers as they identify with the user experience, control and management benefits.”

Wide adoption could mean forced change for the channel as Stevenson notes:

“If you are a reseller which sees the main bulk of your business coming through laptop or general end-point device sales, BYOPC could impact your pipeline. However, with consumers driving the device side of IT, it frees IT decision makers to focus on the strategic, infrastructure and service delivery aspects of their role – a real opportunity to add greater value for our channel with virtualisation and networking technologies.”

BYOPC is part of Citrix’s strategy to reposition IT as a service provider rather than an over-controlling obstacle to progress and innovation.