The presence of hundreds of millions of PCs on (or, more commonly, underneath) desktops across the globe is testament to the failure of the thin client revolution. But the company that championed much of that reform, Citrix, believes its instincts were not so wrong: the corporate appetite for a different way of delivering applications – other than to install them on every desktop – is still there, and is growing.

While businesses may not be poised to throw out their PCs, in which they have invested substantially and which are popular with users, Citrix believes its technologies resonate with managers struggling to control their distributed infrastructure.

Moreover, despite failing to win the PC war, Citrix’s finances are still in reasonably good shape. In 2002 – a lean year for the IT industry – CEO Mark Templeton made the bold claim that his company would be generating revenues of $1 billion within four years, twice what it was pulling in at the time. His prediction proved to be correct, and in 2006 it became one of only 20 software companies to cross the billion-dollar annual revenue threshold.

Citrix’s staying power stems from its ability to ease the burden of application delivery, which can otherwise absorb funds without creating bottom-line improvements. By allowing companies to develop an application delivery model that suits their business, not the shortcomings of the network, Citrix hopes to offer “a world in which anyone can work from anywhere,” says vice president Mick Hollison.

Examples include Credit Suisse, which uses Citrix technology to give workers in its Indian offshore centre access to applications located in data centres in the UK, and Boeing, which grants third-party plane part manufacturers remote access to its computer- aided design applications without actually sending the data over the network.

One blot on the landscape for Citrix has been its relationship with software giant Microsoft. It is simultaneously Citrix’s biggest partner, and, since its 2006 acquisition of application virtualisation and streaming technology maker Softricity, its biggest competitor.

To minimise the threat from Microsoft, Citrix has developed its own application streaming technology, which allows users to effectively ‘download’ Windows applications onto a device where it runs in memory cache. To the user this application behaves as if it were installed on the client.

This technology, and its virtualisation software, will allow older, unsupported applications to run on Microsoft’s latest Vista operating system, or even to switch to virtualised Vista desktops running virtualised XP applications.  For the near future, Citrix’s prospects continue to be tied to that paragon of ‘fat-client’ computing: Windows.