John Katsaros

BYOPC

With all of the fuss from Microsoft's big virtualization coming out party and the VMworld users conference, Citrix wasn't sitting around idle. Citrix announced its XenServer 5 edition, its partnership with Marathon and its cloud computing strategy -- Citrix Cloud Center (C3). At its analyst conference earlier this month, Citrix demoed its desktop virtualization product portfolio -- probably the most comprehensive suite of desktop virtualization products. Their "guiding light" is that ultimately CIOs will want to get out of the business of owning and managing desktops and instead will adopt the "Bring Your Own PC" for the modern workforce that wants the benefits of consumerism in order to use their own laptops and iPhones instead of clunky corporate issued devices. Two concepts -- BYOPC and "follow me desktops" form the foundations of the virtual desktop initiatives.

Cross Roads

At Vision, Symantec announced its Veritas Virtual Infrastructure which basically combines storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with the Citrix XenServer virtualization technology from Citrix Systems. It's an interesting idea -- to extend a server virtualization platform with its own built in storage management functionality, but it does raise the question of whether Symantec should partner with VMware as it has successfully done with its award winning NetBackup for VMware products (also including PureDisk) and with similar partnerships as it moves its security products into the virtualization world? Or is it better in the long term to compete head on in the virtualization arena directly against products like VMware's ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V? Perhaps co-opetition is to the point where you can do both. WE always love a good fight -- we're looking forward to see how these battles shape up.

Operating on All Cylinders

You can calibrate the success of a company by how simply the CEO articulates how the company provides value and Citrix's Mark Templeton got an A at last week's Analyst Conference at the Fairmont in San Francisco.  He explained how Citrix's key value propositions -- performance, security and ROI -- are amplified in value by where Citrix sits in the IT infrastructure next to the applications servers.  From this position Citrix has great insight into the goals and values of the application (compared for example to a traditional WAN device).  Judging from Citrix's continuing revenue growth rate and their 180,000 customers the market likes what they are doing.  Citrix's aggressive acquisition strategy seems to be working: Expertcity (3/04), Net6 (12/04), NetScaler (8/05), Teros (12/07), Reflectent (5/06) and Orbital Data (8/06).  They say they are first or second in most of their markets including being the market leader in the SSL VPN market (ahead of Juniper's Neoteris product) with their Citrix Access Gateway which was acquired from the Net6 acquisition.  What's more, the management teams from most of these acquisitions have stayed on at Citrix.  It's an impressive infrastructure success story that's still being written.

How many Gartner analysts does it take?

A recent Networld article, Analysts caution Microsoft/Citrix pact, discussed Gartner's take on the Microsoft/Citrix partnership to develop branch office appliances referring to a Gartner report authored by four of their analysts.  Those English majors from Connecticut are at it again, this time warning that Microsoft is working hard to decrease Cisco's intent to dominate the branch office.  Talking about a potential Cisco/Microsoft battle may be a good topic if you're used to writing about Macbeth, the noble warrior caught up in a struggle for power.  But the Cisco/Microsoft branch office motivations aren't like that at all and if they'd look a little deeper (and maybe actually do some research) maybe they'd realize that the goals of these companies, while different, aren't necessarily mutually exclusive thanks in large part to enterprise customers that want these two to work together.  And it's not Microsoft that will be nibbling away at Cisco's networking share of the branch office market.  It's Microsoft's development partners that are the ones Cisco needs to watch.  This sort of reminds us of last year's misguided missive from these same New Englanders praising Juniper for its Peribit and Redline acquisitions making Juniper a "functionally superior alternative."  Huh?  In answer to our question, one reader wrote in "Four, three to hold the client down while the forth grabs his wallet."