Virtualization firm Citrix has recently invested in two up and coming startups as a part of its seed funding program, the Citrix Startup Accelerator. The two companies are Nukona, the maker of an app management platform, and GridCentric, a company that makes a VDI optimization solution Citrix has expressed interest in.

Starting off with Nukona, the startup offers software that allows enterprises experiencing the consumerization of IT to manage the apps installed on their employees’ devices.

From the Citrix blog:

“Chris Perret and the team at Nukona are addressing mobile app management with a fresh perspective, allowing enterprise IT to reliably deliver mobile apps across their organizations in accordance with corporate security and governance policies at scale.”

In essence, customers can setup internal app shops and define policies using Nukona’s ‘Policy Engine.’  Admins can dictate whether or not an app is allowed to write data to a given user’s device, implement automatic encryption and manage other settings concerning file sharing, etc. This is not the first offering of its kind, and Nukona has quite a bit of competition to tackle.

Moving on to GridCentric, the company developed a virtualization solution that optimizes VDI memory requirements, reducing the amount of physical and virtual servers per deployment.  The software keeps one ‘master copy’ of the most common elements in desktop images, meaning the OS and business programs, while storing user- files, specific applications and such separately.  It’s interesting to note that GridCentric’s offering is very similar to that of RingCube, a company Citrix acquired earlier this month.

The Citrix Startup Accelerator was launched on the 15^th anniversary of Citrix’s IPO, back in December. The program was set to support up to 12 startups throughout 18 months.

Along with Nukona and GrindCentric, GlassHouse Technologies is another startup Citrix invested in.  GlassHouse is a provider of enterprise storage services.