Citrix Acquires MDM Vendor Zenprise

Citrix Systems will buy mobile security company Zenprise. In a conference call Wednesday, Sumit Dhawan, group VP and general manager at Citrix Systems, and Amit Pandey, CEO and president of Zenprise, announced the deal and touted the shared vision of the two companies "to enable people to work and play from anywhere."

Zenprise is best known for mobile device management software, used by enterprises to control mobile devices connected to their networks. In this market it competes with MobileIron, AirWatch, Symantec and dozens of others.

Citrix plans to integrate Zenprise's software into its Citrix CloudGateway and Me@Work products. CloudGateway is a central console for managing access to software and data on mobile devices. Me@Work is a collection of mobile apps for various collaborative business functions.

The acquisition continues a long string of such deals in which Citrix has built a family of cloud-based management and collaboration services. These include acquisitions of Netscaler in 2005, Xensource in 2007, VMlogix in 2010 and both Kaviza and Cloud.com in 2011.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.