Citrix and Microsoft announced in July 2020 a new multi-year agreement showcasing how we partner to accelerate the future of work, focused on the joint benefits of combining our Citrix Workspace solution with the power of Microsoft Azure.

We are pleased to announce two of our exciting Citrix-on-Azure cloud services are now available inside the Azure Marketplace to help our customers rapidly scale environments into the cloud, and accelerate the transition to the future of work:

  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Standard for Azure: Our easy-to-use, simple-to-deploy cloud-hosted virtual apps and desktops-as-a-service (DaaS) solution designed exclusively for Azure and Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly Windows Virtual Desktop) resources.
  • Citrix Workspace Premium Plus: Our comprehensive digital workspace solution that integrates with Microsoft 365 and Azure to give organizations a modern workspace experience that simplifies and secures access to all your organization’s applications, devices, data and networks to deliver the best employee experience to accelerate productivity.

Of course, Citrix thrives on providing deployment flexibility — and our hybrid-cloud model has customers large and small rolling out Microsoft Azure in a variety of different ways. In traditional bring-your-own Azure deployments, IT uses their existing Azure subscription as an extension of infrastructure, extending capacity and adding resiliency.

In newer cloud-enabled deployments, we help IT leverage new Azure Virtual Desktop entitlements with Citrix, using our sophisticated tools to manage image and app lifecycle, scaling their deployments as they grow. Both provide a great path to the future of app and desktop virtualization and delivering a high-performing modern IT environment.

For example, Centrica, an international energy services and solutions company serving 26 million customers in the UK, Ireland and North America, used Citrix and Azure Virtual Desktop to streamline IT management processes like patching, app testing and delivery.

“Using the Citrix platform, Microsoft Teams and working in an agile fashion, we were able to respond very quickly,” says James Boswell, Centrica’s Global Director of End User Computing. “Azure and Citrix Cloud services meant we could go rapidly from 2,000 users a day on the new platform to 14,000, taking tens of thousands of customer calls. We had whole contact centers working from home, almost immediately. As we added more people, the platform just auto-scaled to handle the additional workload.”

Whether your deployment is sizeable, like Centrica, or you are just starting out in Azure these new offerings are designed to help. Of course you can use your own Azure subscription as many large customers do, or you can opt to integrate new Citrix Azure Consumption Funds letting Citrix manage the Azure infrastructure for you. This enables you to attach Citrix Managed Azure capacity directly to your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment for the fastest path to deployment. Simply subscribe, provision new desktops in Azure, and take advantage of DaaS pay-as-you-go flexibility alongside your existing Citrix deployment.

To help estimate costs, we have a new Citrix Azure Consumption Funds Calculator that you can use to estimate how much Citrix managed Azure to purchase directly from the Azure Marketplace. Citrix managed Azure Consumption is billed monthly and there is no penalty for going over on what you need. If you use more than you purchased, you are simply billed at the standard rate on the end of the month for the additional usage — enabling scalable cost flexibility for all your virtual app and desktop compute needs.

Citrix also provides administrators with a base desktop images that are regularly patched and updated with the latest Microsoft and Citrix features for fast and easy deployment, making it easy for any organization with any level of cloud or virtualization expertise. Citrix is making it easy to combine the power of Azure with the user experience, management and security benefits of Citrix digital workspace and virtualization solutions, directly from the Azure Marketplace.

What’s the fastest, easiest way to take advantage of Azure Virtual Desktop capabilities in Azure? Citrix digital workspace solutions, of course — now available from the Azure Marketplace.