Mark Templeton’s keynote at Syn­ergy, the annual Cit­rix users’ con­fer­ence is usu­ally pretty inter­est­ing and this year was no excep­tion. Tem­ple­ton intro­duced the “Fourth Cloud” — the Per­sonal Cloud — to what has largely been a three cloud world (Pub­lic, Pri­vate and Hybrid). The Fourth Cloud is an impor­tant con­cept because it defines the place where cor­po­rate IT meets the work­force. If IT gets this right, they’ll be able to min­i­mize the foot­print of what IT has to own and what appli­ca­tions IT has to man­age. Templeton’s point is that it is in IT’s best inter­ests to make this hap­pen since they’ll ulti­mately ben­e­fit. He pointed out three essen­tial ingre­di­ents for the per­sonal cloud — 1) Con­text Switch­ing — any to any con­nec­tiv­ity, secure where nec­es­sary; 2) Self Ser­vice (includ­ing an apps store and of course things like Google Apps); and 3) Iden­tity and pref­er­ences — man­ag­ing the con­ver­gence of per­sonal and work use. Citrix’s view of the per­sonal cloud is that it has: A front door that orches­trates deliv­ery, Fol­low Me apps and data, Authen­ti­ca­tion /Security (Sin­gle Sign On, pass­word man­age­ment…), Cloud Con­nec­tors (for both busi­ness cloud and social cloud inter­ac­tions) and Man­age­ment (activ­ity, Access Con­trol, SLAs…). The Per­sonal Cloud is a great idea — rentable appli­ca­tions, dis­pos­able devices, auto­matic syn­chro­niza­tion, self ser­vice, and bridg­ing into con­sumer apps — offload­ing from IT func­tion­al­ity and cost that is bet­ter acquired as con­sumer prod­ucts. At pre­vi­ous Syn­ergy keynotes, Tem­ple­ton shined a light on the con­cept of BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC) which even­tu­ally has become a famil­iar phrase. The idea of a Per­sonal Cloud (and IT’s rela­tion­ship to it) fits in nicely and takes BYOPC to the next level.