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Citrix Buys Ardence

Thursday, 21 December 2006 by Michel Roth

Interesting! Citrix has agreed to buy Ardence, a software streaming technology developer whose products will help Citrix advance its position in the emerging application virtualization software market. Financial terms were not disclosed, although Citrix said it expects the deal to add at least $15 million in revenue to its books in its 2007 fiscal year.

Citrix plans to put Ardence's technology to work in conjunction with its flagship Citrix Presentation Server, which provides end users with access to server-based applications. The company was already working on a desktop application streaming product, Project Tarpon, which it expects to complement Ardence's offerings.

Citrix selected Ardence for its synergistic technology that, when combined with Citrix�s existing product portfolio, reinforces its overall application delivery strategy and positions the company as a strategic vendor for desktop delivery infrastructure. Several examples of how Ardence technologies will improve an enterprise�s application delivery infrastructure include:

Provisioning Desktops for Delivery Over a Network
Using Ardence�s innovative OS-provisioning and remote network boot technology, any x86-based computer can be provisioned with an entire physical or virtual desktop environment from bare metal to production in minutes. This capability could be used, for example, to deliver new versions of operating systems, service packs and hot fixes to a diverse range of end users in minutes, then quickly rolled back to previous versions if problems are detected.

Enhanced Management of Citrix Presentation Server Components
The provisioning capabilities of Ardence will allow IT administrators to more quickly add new servers to a Citrix Presentation Server farm and allow for the dynamic configuration of servers in a data center.

Provisioning Web Server Images as Load Changes
Ardence also complements the Citrix NetScaler line of web application delivery solutions, allowing IT administrators to dynamically change the amount of storage or CPU capacity available to web applications during peak load times. For high-volume e-commerce applications, the Ardence technology can even re-provision web servers from one application to another on the fly as demand fluctuates. As customers adopt services oriented architectures (SOA) for their web application environments, the Ardence technology could also be used to provide on-demand provisioning of these application components.

Read the breaking CRN article or read the Citrix press release here.

Brian Madden has written his opinion of this acquisition.