Framehawk

About Framehawk

Framehawk, founded in 2008 by CEO Peter Badger and CTO Stephen Vilke, operated as a provider of application virtualization solutions from its base in San Francisco. The company successfully raised $16.5 million over two funding rounds, securing investments from firms such as Alsop Louie Partners, Correlation Ventures, Matrix, and Triangle Peak Partners. A significant milestone in its history was its acquisition by Citrix Systems on January 8, 2014, for an undisclosed amount, which saw Framehawk's engineering and leadership teams integrated into Citrix's Enterprise and Service Provider division.

The core of Framehawk's business was a specialized software platform designed to enhance the delivery of virtual desktops and applications to mobile devices, particularly over unreliable wireless networks. The technology was engineered to address the challenges of mobile connectivity, such as high latency and packet loss, which are common on Wi-Fi and cellular (4G/LTE) networks. It served enterprises that needed to provide their mobile workforce with a smooth and responsive user experience, equivalent to what they would have in an office environment, when accessing corporate resources remotely.

Framehawk's product was a display remoting technology that utilized a UDP-based protocol, which they called the Lightweight Framebuffer Protocol (LFP). Unlike traditional TCP-based solutions that can struggle with poor network conditions due to the need to retransmit lost packets, Framehawk's approach prioritized a fluid user experience over a perfect bytestream. The technology focused on delivering the end result of a user's action quickly, rather than ensuring every single data packet arrived in perfect sequence, thereby maintaining interactivity even on choppy connections. Following the acquisition, Citrix integrated this technology into its own HDX protocol within the XenApp and XenDesktop products to bolster their performance on mobile devices. While the Framehawk technology was eventually deprecated in later versions of Citrix products in favor of an evolved adaptive transport layer, its development addressed a critical need for robust remote access in the growing mobile enterprise market.