Citrix has acquired ShareFile, a six-year-old cloud storage file sharing and collaboration player, a move Citrix said fortifies its personal cloud roadmap.
The ShareFile acquisition, for which the financial terms were not revealed, comes on the heels of a Forbes report that indicates Citrix offered a whopping $600 million to scoop up cloud file sharing and storage upstart Box.net.
"[ShareFile] becomes the foundation of our strategy for 'follow-me-data' … which can be tied into the fabric of Citrix's portfolio," said Wes Wasson, Citrix senior vice president and chief marketing officer in a conference call unveiling the ShareFile acquisition.
Citrix's follow-me-data strategy is basically its plan to offer secure and seamless access to data from any device and any location at any time.
Adding ShareFile to the mix gives Citrix a tool that lets business users share, access and send files and folders in a secure environment leveraging any Web browser. ShareFile offers the ability to create online folders, send large files with or without login, tracking and alerts, 128-bit encryption and custom branding.
Wasson said ShareFile will be a central component of Citrix's personal cloud push, which offers access to data across devices, preferences, contacts, location, applications and data. Citrix estimates that the personal cloud will be a multi-billion dollar market come 2015 with cloud computing, fast bandwidth, e-mail limitations and the consumerization of IT acting as personal cloud catalysts.
Bringing aboard ShareFile and tying it into its follow me data strategy fine tunes Citrix's "follow-me" portfolio, which includes "follow-me-desktops" and "follow-me-apps."
According to Citrix, ShareFile makes products that make it easy for businesses to store, sync and share documents and files in the cloud both inside and outside of a company. ShareFile's centralized cloud storage capabilities let users share data across device types and access them from anywhere.
Through the acquisition, ShareFile founder and CEO Jesse Lipson will become vice president and general manager of a new Citrix product group, the Data Sharing group. The Data Sharing group will be responsible for the ShareFile product line and sharpening Citrix's follow-me-data strategy.
Citrix's follow-me-data is a platform approach to data.
The approach enables Citrix to make services like search, share, sync, secure, authentication, open and preview available to a wide range of applications, service and use cases through open APIs. It extends secure data sharing services to new and existing apps that are stored in public or private clouds, and accessed from different business and consumer devices; and connects data seamlessly into collaborative tools and ensure the correct documents and files are always available and up to date.
Citrix said that as partners and customers build on the follow-me-data platform they will be able to add follow-me-data services to their software, leverage the data that other apps store there and instantly inherit all of the management, mobility and scalability that's in the ShareFile infrastructure.
Wasson said Citrix will further detail its ShareFile plans and its follow-me-data strategy later this month at Citrix Synergy Barcelona.
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