In October 2014, Citrix announced a strategic investment in AnyPresence, a mobile-application platform vendor. This came amidst a flurry of other activity around enabling enterprise mobile apps. In September, Kinvey raised $10.8m in series B funding, just after Red Hat announced it would acquire FeedHenry. In October, Capriza raised $27m in a series C, salesforce.com announced its Lightning architecture for mobile apps, Oracle issued a slew of mobile apps around its E-Business Suite, Google purchased Firebase, and Progress Software purchased Telerik.
None of these events in and of themselves were groundbreaking. But together they point to how strategic the marketplace of enterprise mobile-app enablement solutions is becoming. The M&A activity in particular is noteworthy – 2014 was a bumper year with $35bn worth of mobile M&A activity, a 170% increase over the previous year.
In this context, Citrix's investment in AnyPresence flew a little below the radar. The two companies could, however, make compelling partners or, potentially, AnyPresence a compelling acquisition for Citrix. A partnership would bring together critical pieces to help firms become more mobile-mature, and strengthen Citrix's armory as its large enterprise-software peers tool up to win over the mobilizing enterprise.