Many IT industry observers have backed software-as-a-service (SaaS) as the natural successor to the current generation of software installed on servers. Companies like Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite deliver their applications over the Internet and users need little more than a browser to go about their HR, financials and customer relationship management tasks. Which means users can do without a high-spec PC.

The process of liberating users from the shackles of a desktop will redefine the IT department, says Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix, a provider of what it calls ‘access infrastructure’ tools to deliver applications. “Our goal is to allow every IT organisation to define themselves as a software-as-a-service provider,” he told delegates at his company’s iForum user conference in Edinburgh in July 2006.

With its “GoTo” family of products, which provide remote access to PCs and online meetings and webinars as services, Citrix has built up sufficient SaaS credibility to take to the stage at a recent Stanford University conference, alongside the other pioneers listed above. But can it succeed in its latest attempt to displace the corporate desktop?

Certainly, Templeton is running a healthy business at the moment, with its most recent quarterly results, for the period ending 30 June 2006, showing revenue increasing to $275 million, a 30% increase on its revenues of $211 million in the year-before quarter. New licence sales were up 28%; significantly online services – which make up 13% of overall revenue – increased by 47%.

The thin client market – where Citrix holds around a 58% share – is currently growing around 11% according to analyst group Gartner. That growth could accelerate further in the next few years as PCs are repurposed as thin clients using server-based computing, in many cases to enhance security, says Gartner.

But Citrix-based applications have always lacked appeal because of performance issues. Users of Salesforce, Hotmail or Google Maps have become accustomed to instant responses to web applications. The company acknowledges that to users, Citrix can seem slow – even if the problem is at the client end rather than in the data centre.

In response, Citrix has launched EdgeSight, which provides IT administrators visibility into application performance and the quality of the users’ experience. Assisting in a SaaS-style delivery of applications to the desktop is another new product now available for beta testing, codenamed Project Tarpon. This provides application streaming, an area where Microsoft – simultaneously Citrix’s best partner and biggest threat – has recently invested with its acquisition of Softricity.

While EdgeSight will not initially be sold as part of the core Presentation Server product, it should expand the range of applications which can be delivered via a Citrix infrastructure, to include niche products whose code is not so well suited to traditional forms of server-based computing.

However, Templeton has no intention of taking on the SaaS vendors: “There’s a big vacuum between where [Salesforce.com] is and where the enterprise is. We want to be in between.”