| | May 20158CIOReviewopinionin myLeveraging Cloud and Big Data to Enable Mobile Work Stylesand Accelerate BusinessToday's mobile work style seems like it's a real productivity booster, compared to the idea of being tied to a desk and a computer every day. But it's just a taste of the kind of stateless, borderless collaboration, communication and control that will be central to the gains in productivity and innovation in the enterprise.Technology that enables seamless collab-oration sounds like the "paperless office" pre-diction, but it's closer than we think. The idea of connecting everyone to everything is reflected in a string of recent acquisitions Citrix has made, and that will have a sig-nificant impact on the way work is done in the enter-prise. Consider this example, which hap-pens count-less times around the world every day.Entering the conference room at two o'clock, you greet Carl and Lydia at the table, preparing to join the weekly sales meeting between ten regional offices. Carl is dialing the conference call repeatedly, trying to establish a connection with a bridge that won't take his pass code while Lydia is struggling to get logged onto the virtual meeting. Twenty documents are clogging the pipeline trying to jam their way onto Lydia's laptop, turning the conference video feed into a series of still images. Once the meeting does get underway, the entrance and exit of attendees continually interrupts the meeting flow prompting the inevitable "Who joined?" and "Who left?" again, and again and again.Sure, those meetings are still more productive than what they replaced, but they're still far from ideal. Smooth collaboration and communication with anyone, anywhere is becoming essential to the enterprise. And not just with employees. As innovation enters the enterprise from the outside in, it's more important now to be able to connect effectively with customers, partners and vendors as well.All of this may illuminate the thinking behind a series of the recent acquisitions by Citrix. It's all about enabling a mobile work style: ShareFile to distribute content; Podio to organize workflow; Framehawk to quickly mobilize legacy applications; Zenprise to manage and secure large-scale deployments of mobile devices, and Octoblu to tie devices together in a seamless mesh. These are just a few of the key By Jim Kaskade, VP and GM, Big Data & Analytics, CSCJim Kaskade
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