More to the point, with more acquisitions and a partnership with Dell to announce, the $7bn marketcap firm, which employs more than 80 people at its Dublin customer service centre, Citrix wanted to drive home the point that its technology is increasingly essential to make all those devices work together.

Citrix connects all the recognisable technology: mobile phones, office work stations and data centres using "virtualisation", allowing users to access their personal desktop from any device, anywhere. It does this by investing all software applications on a central store in a data centre, then delivering them on demand to end users via its virtualisation technology, creating a virtual image of your office desktop, for example, on your home PC or even your mobile phone without installing any software.

With the completion of its $500m acquisition of Resource last week, the latest in a $1.8bn string of highprofile buyouts including Ardence in January, Citrix chief executive Mark Templeton spelled out the firm's strategy at the monster meeting.

Although to some extent he was preaching to the converted, Templeton said virtualisation was key to the future of the technology industry as a method for corporate IT buyers to cut costs, improve security, "go green", and simplify data management in an era of increasingly complex compliance costs.

"Over the next decade the defining issue of IT will become delivery of applications to people, " said Templeton, who repeatedly stressed virtualisation as a solution to universal business problems, whether technical or cultural. He estimated the value of the virtualisation market to grow to $5bn in the next four years.

Several speakers at Citrix's tenth annual iForum conference made reference to the younger generation entering the office . . . the "echo boom" offspring of baby boomers . . . who demand access to corporate systems on their own devices.

Another key theme was the environmental impact of information technology. PCs use 150W-250W of electricity, yet a thin client desktop application (including power consumed by the server) uses only 20W, according to Chris Fleck of Citrix. He claimed secure remote access to the office can lead to zero commute times and therefore zero petrol consumption.

He said diskless desktop computers, so-called thin clients, an 80% reduction in web servers, more telecommuting and new power management technology from Citrix and its competitors would drastically drive down energy consumption for businesses, particularly as oil approaches $100 a barrel.

Citrix unveiled a new a partnership with Dell at the conference and it was telling that a list of the five largest server manufacturers was projected onto the conference screen as the announcement was made. The message was clear that the company intends to get into bed with all the major 'metal' manufacturers. Templeton told the Sunday Tribune he envisaged data centre customers requesting Citrix products to be "sprayed on" to server boxes when ordered from manufacturers.

The buzz on the conference room floor was that if Templeton achieves this goal, then the next logical step will be for him to bring virtualisation technology out of the office server rack and into household devices, allowing remote access to personalised TV, phone systems and video games from any location. That at least will make the dinner party question easier to answer.