Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) this week announced both a newly integrated vision of IT architecture built around managing enterprises’ “application delivery infrastructure,” and a joint effort with high-profile application vendors including IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) to promote that vision.

Both announcements underscore new enterprise realities: according to Nemertes’ Building a Successful Virtual Workplace benchmark, 90% of workers are virtual, as enterprises spread across more branches and workers go mobile or remote. Simultaneously, enterprise IT is moving all services into data centers, and consolidating to fewer data centers. Consequently, nearly everyone now uses enterprise applications remotely. Whether applications are delivered via fat client (a waning practice), web interfaces, or thin clients, both WAN and Internet are now critical infrastructure for delivering enterprise applications.

Meanwhile, IT is transforming itself into a services-oriented part of the enterprise. With that transformation comes a change in perspective putting user experience at the center of performance assessment and optimization. Nearly all participants in Nemertes’ Delivering the Enterprise: Service Delivery and Management benchmark said they wished they could monitor performance from the end-users’ desktop – but only 20.5% of enterprises regularly do so. A full 64% never do. The main reasons cited for not doing so were either that they didn’t actually need to, because they watched all the components – servers, networks, processes – or that, although they wanted to, the complexity of the infrastructure driving performance made it impossible for them.

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