Having an enterprise-wide mobility strategy provides a competitive advantage as arecent IT survey from Cisco concluded.  Working with many customers over the last couple of years we have come to recognize that mobility is a multi-stage journey that every organization is taking at its own pace. While some of you might think of this journey as just getting your employees' devices onto your network, there is significantly more to the journey -device-focused leads to application-focused, which then leads to experiences-focused.

Being a dad to my 5-month old son, I can relate our customers' mobility journey to the 3 stages a child goes through in his first year as they learn to be mobile -roll, crawl, and walk!

Babies start off without the ability to move from one spot to the next-think of this as your enterprise 10 years ago before the popularization of smartphones.  Then babies learn to roll.  Suddenly, the world opens up to them.  This is the first stage of the mobility journey -similar to a device focused BYOD strategy.  The focus here is to provide a secure onboarding experience for your users while having the right policies in place to enable context-aware secure access control. The Cisco Unified Access solution -with ISE for policy, Prime Infrastructure for management, and converged wired and wireless network -provides the foundation for enable this BYOD solution.  However, would you really want to stop at the rolling stage of development?

The next step for kids is learning to crawl. This is often the most exciting stage as kids can now move with intent. Crawling provides true mobility to the kid as he can explore the fascinating world around him and get access to all his toys. This is the application-focused strategy in your mobility journey. Now that you have enabled secure access for your workforce, you can decide on the right set of applications to enable your workforce to be productive -on the go. This is where Cisco has been working with our ecosystem partners to provide a complete mobile workspace solution.

One of these ecosystem partners is Citrix and in this blog, I'd like to highlight a first-of-its-kind solution for employee mobility, that Cisco & Citrix have developed in close collaboration.

This newCisco Mobile Workspace Solution with Citrix, built on the Citrix Workspace Suite, provides the complete hardware and software technology stack for delivering all the applications, content, and tools workers need on any device. This new Workspace Solution is excellent for companies moving into the second stage of their mobility journey -where their focus is on providing all the applications, content and services their employees need on their devices.

This solution can help your employees, partners, and consultants work and collaborate on their mobile and desk devices, from pretty much anywhere.

The workspace solution also provides support for various mobile application delivery models. These include, application delivery natively on the device, virtually from the data center, as HTML5 browser-based apps, as software-as-a-service, and as real-time communications. With the workspace solution you can simplify and secure delivery for each of these models. And it enables you to provide a great mobile user experience for all your employees, wherever they are located.

Application teams within your company can use a combination of these models based on, among others, cost, performance, security, integration and time considerations.

This joint solution brings the best of Cisco Unified Access, policy, security, data center, and collaboration technologies, together with Citrix mobile device and application management, app virtualization, and secure content sharing technologies. It also builds on our existing successful joint solutions for mobile device access, BYOD, and desktop virtualization. That allows you to build your mobile solutions, incrementally, at a pace that's right for you.

So how can Cisco and Citrix help your organization on this mobile workspace journey today? If you are attending Synergy in Los Angeles this week please come along to our Booth#204 and get a personal demo of the solution. Also come along to our Mobile Workspace session on Wednesday at 1:30. If not, you can learn more about Cisco's mobile workspace solutions at www.cisco.com/go/mobileworkspace

Some of the attentive readers here would now be asking the question -hold on! Where is the 3^rdand final stage of this journey -where the kid can now really use his feet to run around and experience the world? Glad you asked! This is the "experience-focused" phase of the mobility journey where you build transformative experiences on top of your mobile workspace solution. Over the next few quarters, you'll see Cisco leveraging our location-based services, service automation, and application customization solutions to deliver this "experience" phase of the journey. Until then, please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think of the mobile workspace solution and our partnership with Citrix.

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Resources for the Curious:

• Product Page: www.cisco.com/go/mobileworkspace
• Citrix Press Release: http://www.citrix.com/news/announcements/may-2014/workspace-suite-announcement.html
• CXO Unplugged! http://cxounplugged.com/2014/05/cisco-mobile-workspace/
• Cisco Press Release: http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1415818