It’s been an entire year of Citrix developments and the writers over at their blog want to celebrate the new year by rolling over their achievements. It’s been a huge year for them, with the revolution in virtualization and cloud-storage and computing. Companies everywhere have been moving their systems off traditional systems and putting them into virtual spaces that could be spread across multiple machines, or take up a small area on a shared machine.

The blog post gives a lot of thought to a process they’re calling “workshifting” but Citrix has really been part of a lot of different developments, not just thin clients and terminals.

It’s interesting to consider why 2010 was THE year for "workshifting." Sure, the iPad spurred things along. But only this year did enterprise infrastructure evolve to a point to make this degree of virtual computing possible. When I think back over the last year, I’m proud to highlight that Citrix has been at the forefront of an evolution that has brought about a revolution.

Our CEO Mark Templeton laid out his vision for workshifting in May at our Synergy event in San Francisco. Between that event and Synergy Berlin in October, Citrix delivered a series of products that have transformed the workshifting promise into reality.

This includes several innovations in desktop virtualization. The release of Citrix XenDesktop 5 included new technologies that make it easy for IT to incorporate mobile device users into a unified enterprise desktop virtualization strategy. Whether a corporate-owned laptop managed by IT or an employee-owned device such as an iPad or Droid, it’s now possible for users to access all their corporate applications and documents with unparalleled security and simplicity.

Not totally related to Citrix, but they are a big part of making the iPad business worthy, for a list of extremely likely examples see our previous coverage. The blog post did wander around talking about iPad and tablet concepts a bit, and the workshifting concept does require thin clients on mobile devices to deliver more powerful computing at a distance.

The Citrix crew has also been big in the telecommunications sphere by getting together with Cisco—and that’s quite important as well, as we don’t have a cloud without the ability to network computers (and people.) Which is where we’ve seen some of the other developments that came to light this year: with Citrix joining with GigaSpaces in order to amplify the power nascent in the open cloud. Virtualized data centers have been at the center of a lot of business endeavors, especially social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Dropbox, and others. Without this sort of technology, they would not be able to cope with the vast amount of data they need to transfer and the giant number of people they connect.

It’s also important that they speak about security and simplicity—the folks at Citrix themselves know that even cloud computing and the Internet today can be a hostile place for the uneducated. So they kindly released a holiday shopping season and e-commerce safety tips newsletter during the winter shipping season and the New Year.

We’ve seen a hugely diverse set of acquisitions by the company as well. Very recently they acquired Netviewer, a EU-based vendor who provide SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), which is right up the alley for Citrix and has set our expectations for the company expanding in the Europe.