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Citrix' Future Booming Or Bleeding?

Tuesday, 16 January 2007 by Michel Roth

I've been thinking about Citrix a lot lately (outside what they make me do ;-) ) This was especially triggered by the acquisition of Ardence. Some people seem to think that Citrix will use Ardence to deploy Desktop operating systems to a device so that it can connect to a VDI hosted Desktop and then launch applications. This does not make a whole lot of sense though but of course this is just an example.

An even better idea would be to stream an OS using Ardence, use that on the local hardware and then have Citrix application streamed to you and also use them locally. This way you can take full advantage of local video power and thus take care of one of the major downsides to Citrix (or RDP or any other Server Based Computing "methodology" for that matter).

At time of the acquisition Citrix seemed to mention in it's press release that they are planning on using Ardence to speed up Server deployments ,not specifically Desktop OS deployments but I'm sure that Citrix is not blind enough to miss such an opportunity.

Actually if you think about it, I think Citrix really has gone down the right path in regards to the (near) future. In some 2 years or so Citrix will be able to provide in Application streaming and Virtualization (Citrix Streaming Server), VDI (Dynamic Desktop Initiative - PortICA), just plain old published applications and desktops (Presentation Server) and OS provisioning (Ardence). These technologies cover almost every kind of environment: be it Physical, Virtual or somewhere in between. Added to that they have their Edgesight product to enable end user experience (very important ) monitoring all around all environments and of course enable (remote) access via their (Advanced) Access Gateway product(s). And in the end there's the Netscaler and WANScaler productline to optimize the performance of users connecting (via WANs) to these environments.

This would make Citrix a one-stop shop for delivering applications �nd`(their accompanying) operating systems to users using that nastly Citrix slogan "from anywhere, at anytime, using any access device, over any network connection."

There may be other vendors who also offer (parts of) these technologies but the fact Citrix will probably have it all combined with the fact that they have a solid customer base (every Fortune 100 company) makes Citrix' future look bright in my book.