The year 2011 according to Citrix: iPads and thin clients

Last week Citrix released the results of a recent survey and shared some information about what trends it sees for the coming year.

Citrix didn't say too much about how the survey was conducted, other than that it was a worldwide survey of corporate employees in 2011. See the full survey results here. There were a few surprising results.

Cloud computing pie chart peace sign, sure. From Citrix's results.

Most interesting to me was that 23 percent of the survey's respondents said they take a tablet with them when traveling so they can work. (87 percent said they take laptops and 80 percent said they take smartphones.) This surprises me for two reasons. One: I had no idea that many people were using iPads. (I guess some of that percentage could be other tablets, but I doubt it's enough to matter.) Two: I had no idea there was any work you could do with an iPad.

Also interesting to me was the statistic that only 21 percent of respondents never work outside the office, 52 percent work outside the office one or two days a week, 15 percent three or four days and 12 percent five days a week.

Citrix is planning to offer new Citrix Receiver apps for all kinds of devices, including Macs, smartphones, and tablets. With all this talk of tablets, I asked John Humphreys, Citrix Senior Director of Product Marketing, Datacenter and Cloud Division, if Citrix thinks tablets are going to be around for a while or if they were a fad (like how everyone loved netbooks not too long ago). He said the tablet form factor is likely to be popular for the longer term.

Citrix's other bet for the year is an increase in the use of thin client computing. The slides sent out by Citrix list this as a counter-trend accompanying an increase in the use of the "bring your own computer" model. The prediction seems to be that as companies start to use solutions, such as VDI, that let data be more mobile, it'll make more sense to deploy thinner and cooler IT devices

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