Citrix technology helps organizations around the world provide employees the flexibility they need to work anywhere, on any device, while reducing energy consumption and supporting sustainability initiatives. In his role as Senior Sustainability and ESG Manager, Citrix’s Keith Littlejohns focuses on Citrix’s global sustainability strategy, reporting and performance. For Earth Day 2021, we talked to Keith about sustainability at Citrix and how we’re helping our customers along their own journeys toward sustainability.

What does sustainability mean at Citrix?
Citrix enables business efficiency by giving people the ability to work from anywhere, on any device, on any network. This can dramatically decrease the greenhouse gas emissions associated with employee commuting and client computing. With 100 million users in more than 100 countries, Citrix believes that sustainability at scale is one of our biggest opportunities. But we’re also interested in the wider knock-on effects of remote work and how our solutions allow people to do their best work, nurturing more sustainable lifestyles and helping people to feel fulfilled professionally and personally.

Why is sustainability important to an organization’s business operations?
Because the climate crisis is an emergency, the risks to corporations are immense, and to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius requires businesses and governments to act swiftly with an all-encompassing response. Our software provides a unique opportunity to not only enable business efficiency on a vast scale, but also help our customers meet their own carbon reduction goals, and Citrix solutions can help them transition away from more energy-intensive practices.

What are the objectives and goals of Citrix’s sustainability efforts?
In terms of our direct environmental impact, we are constantly improving how we measure, track, and reduce carbon emissions, and we have recently set an ambitious new target — to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Ultimately, we see an even greater opportunity to better quantify our customers’ carbon emissions that Citrix solutions help to avoid, and we are starting to improve our measurement and reporting sophistication in this area.

How have sustainability efforts added value to Citrix?
In many ways! At a high level, our sustainability efforts help us focus on the evolving risks and opportunities to our business. For example, as governments and businesses around the world continue to pivot toward advancing a low-carbon economy, Citrix’s value proposition becomes more apparent and the opportunities for the company to contribute to such shared objectives increases. Day to day, our efforts help us to meaningfully engage with our employees, customers, investors, and other stakeholders on key issues. Our sustainability programs also help us advance more efficient practices across the company, from real estate and facilities to product engineering.

How are we helping our customers on their sustainability journey?
As companies around the world re-evaluate long-term work models, and the shift toward asynchronous, flexible work continues, Citrix can fulfill its customers’ evolving needs while simultaneously helping advance sustainability goals. These are not competing priorities. They’re interlinked, hugely important trends that can significantly reduce carbon emissions at scale. At the employee level, the power of remote work solutions goes further still, expanding what it means to be productive and opening doors to wider societal and health benefits, in addition to the environmental sustainability advantages.


Learn more about sustainability at Citrix and how we help to power a better way to work.