We asked our Ivanti experts to answer the following five questions about how we're helping IT professionals all over the globe.

Q: Ivanti’s offerings include solutions from AppSense, which has been a key contributor to the Citrix ecosystem since 1999. Can you give us some examples of joint customers? 

Of our 3,000 + joint customers, let’s highlight a couple:

Seattle Children’s Hospital was struggling with patient care and safety concerns due to slow logons and application performance. Their Citrix investment was giving them reduced management costs and easier application deployment, along with the usual benefits of easier roaming between patients and desktops, and working with Ivanti (AppSense at the time), the hospital implemented a centrally-managed personalization solution and optimized application performance to reduce logon times by over 75% and ensure that applications and desktops always remained responsive.

LB-BW Bank in Germany wanted to add robust access control and security to their Citrix XenApp investment. The bank needed full auditing of security events and maximum protection against malware attacks. Ivanti (AppSense at the time) was able to deliver a simple but powerful rules-based approach that provided strict lockdown by user and group membership at the kernel level, as well as full auditing through both passive and active enforcement. This allowed users to work securely from anywhere, but also ensured that the bank met its regulatory requirements.

 Q: What other value do you bring to Citrix offerings?

There are too many areas to cover in one post! Let’s focus on three highlights:

Office 365 performance optimization, especially for Outlook – Office 365 brings savings in infrastructure and operational overheads, but when Outlook is used in a XenApp or XenDesktop environment against a cloud-hosted Exchange server (which is at the heart of Office 365), then the user experience can be poor if Cached Exchange Mode is not enabled. More info here: https://community.ivanti.com/docs/DOC-60824

Advanced Patch Management – One of the most important protections against cyber-attacks and ransomware is keeping all systems and applications patched, including servers, desktops and Microsoft and third party applications, especially frameworks like Flash and Java. The (former) Shavlik products in Ivanti’s portfolio give best-of-breed visibility of patch status across all systems, and can download and centrally manage patches across Citrix servers, receivers, clients and applications. More info here: https://www.ivanti.com/solutions/needs/manage-my-os-and-third-party-application-patches

Get more users on every XenApp server! – There are plenty of apps in healthcare, insurance and security industries that we know can run more efficiently—especially older applications that leak memory and hog CPUs. Ivanti Performance Manager can get those rogue applications under control and get you up to 40% more users on each server. More information here: https://www.ivanti.com/products/performance-manager

Q: How did AppSense become part of Ivanti? What is Ivanti?

AppSense was acquired by LANDESK in 2016. Ivanti was formed early in 2017 by a convergence of veteran, well-respected software companies, including LANDESK, AppSense, RES Software, HEAT Software, Lumension, and Shavlik. Ivanti’s goal is to Unify IT by integrating the disciplines of Operational Security, Service Management, Asset Management and Endpoint Management. We have over 27,000 customers and over 1,800 employees, and you pronounce the company name to rhyme with Chianti!

Q: What connection do you have with Citrix?

As you noted, AppSense (and RES Software) have been key contributors to the Citrix ecosystem since 1999. Both companies started in Europe, grew steadily, and became global companies prior to being acquired. While both vendors initially focused on User Environment Management, AppSense diversified its offerings to evolve its solutions to provide holistic management of the entire user workspace across physical and virtual desktops, whereas RES diversified into Identity Governance and Administration. With both organizations under one roof, we can add much more value Citrix offerings that we could have done separately.