The Apple effect is rubbing off on Citrix, with the desktop virtualisation specialist posting 16% year-over-year growth for the second quarter of 2012.

Sales of iPads and tablet computers have driven adoption of XenApps, said Citrix CEO Mark Templeton in its earnings call. 

"We're seeing the impact of mobile devices such as the iPad and other tablets to be really positive to XenApp and XenDesktop business," he said.

Tablets do not run traditional desktop applications, said Templeton, "so we see a lot of customers wanting to selectively deliver line-of-business-type Windows-based apps to that kind of platform".

The company reported that its product and licences revenue increased by 10%, and net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2012 was $92m.

Citrix chief financial officer David James Henshall said the company had made $20m+ deals. 

"We transacted with more than 3,000 different customers, including 144 deals for more than 1,000 seats of XenDesktop and 25 deals for more than 5,000 seats," he said. "We're doing really well with medium and large customers, and that's true across all geographies."

In May, the company unveiled Project Avalon, which is designed to enable businesses to deploy personalised Windows apps and desktops in a private cloud across single or multiple sites. 

At the time, Templeton said Avalon was all about multi-site, multi-tenancy, which means customers can mix multiple versions of Windows Server, XenApp and XenDesktop across a private or public cloud and manage it all through application programming interfaces.