Sometimes technology can be both a savior and a burden.

When much of the working world turned to remote connectivity in 2020, employees embraced collaboration tools to keep businesses up and running. This proved to be a huge plus for workplace continuity, but it also came at a price.

A survey of IT decision-makers and workers by Citrix Systems Inc. released earlier this year found that 64% were using more collaboration tools than before the pandemic, but 71% said those tools had made work itself more complicated.

The challenge for many businesses is to find the right balance between tools that help employees where and how they want to work without creating unnecessary complexity at the same time. A recent set of announcements from Citrix set out to address this.

“We’ll have to hold the hybrid model as the primary model; we may eventually go back to the way we were, but for the next several years it’s going to be that,” said Dion Hinchcliffe (pictured), vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “What we’re seeing with the Citrix announcements is a wave of design to properly deal with these changes. Now they’re adding features to streamline, to reduce the friction, to simplify remote work.”

Hinchcliffe spoke with Lisa Martin, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE, as part of the new Citrix Launchpad Series. They discussed the recent Citrix announcements, including app personalization, new protocols for security management, integration with Microsoft Teams, and help for the contact center worker. (* Disclosure below.)

Intelligent security analysis

The latest releases focus on providing new capabilities for Citrix Workspace, the company’s app management and security product. A new app personalization feature in Workspace enables companies to tailor the user experience.

A key part of this experience involves security and making sure that workers can access the data they need without being shut out of critical information needed to do their jobs.

“The part that I liked about the Launchpad announcements in terms of security was this much more intelligent analysis,” Hinchcliffe noted. “Only when it’s clear that a bad actor is in there doing something can they restrict access and protect information. I liked how the analytics inside the new security features really try to make sure they are applying intelligent analysis of behavior.”

Citrix also announced an integration of its Workspace app with Microsoft Teams, the visual communications platform that has reached 145 million active daily users.

“Workers collaborate a lot, and Teams, as part of Office 365, is a juggernaut,” Hinchcliffe said. “This announcement says you can have the goodness of Teams and the power of Citrix Workspace in one place. I like this announcement; it brings Citrix up to parity with a lot of their competitors and eclipses several of them as well.”

Citrix has also formed a partnership with Google LLC to support customers that shifted thousands of contact center employees to remote work. In collaboration with Google, Citrix shipped Chrome OS devices with the Workspace app pre-provisioned and ready to launch.

“They are ready to go with the employee experience, and all of the right things are in place so workers can be effective with the least amount of effort,” Hinchcliffe said. “The contact center worker has the toughest of all of the different employee profiles I’ve seen. It’s a big step forward for a worker that is often neglected and underserved.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Citrix Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Citrix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE