Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

Application infrastructure provider Citrix broadens its horizons

Never before have organisations had so many choices when it comes to application delivery technology.

Application virtualisation, desktop virtualisation, thin clients, software-asa- service, cloud computing; many of the emerging technologies of the moment provide novel ways to deliver application functionality to users.

What was once something of a niche for application infrastructure provider Citrix is therefore a crowded marketplace today. Of course, early movers have an advantage, and many corporations will have Citrix technology embedded in their architecture.

But the challenge now facing the company is to exploit that installed base in order become a strategic infrastructure partner to its customers, in the face of competition from younger rivals such as VMware. “We have more than 200,000 customers,” explains chief marketing officer Wes Wasson.

“The issue is how much of our equipment they use.” Citrix’s latest approach to this challenge, as presented to users at its recent iForum conference in Edinburgh, is to aid and abet the so-called ‘consumerisation’ of business IT. By this is meant the adoption of consumer web design patterns in order to ease end-user adoption.

“Consumerisation is about making things familiar to users, so there is no training required,” Citrix’s president and CEO, Mark Templeton, explained at iForum.

Citrix, a company more associated with internal infrastructure than user interface design, has two new components, both of which complement its existing application delivery technology, which it hopes will help to capitalise on that trend.

 The first is Citrix Receiver, a lightweight client for IT services, comparable to the Flash multimedia plug-in with which web users will be familiar. This allows the user to run ‘streamed’ applications irrespective of the underlying operating system. It is also available for the iPhone, allowing employees to use existing applications on that popular device.

The other is Dazzle, an analogue of Apple’s App Store, which offers users a menu of applications that can be deployed at the click of a button once Receiver is installed. It is, according to Citrix’s own description, ‘serviceoriented architecture meets iTunes’.

Both these tools, Templeton argues, give the user not only a familiar look and feel, but also a degree of autonomy that IT departments should encourage – even if it is against their nature.

“There is a mindset among IT departments that they need to control everything,” explains Templeton. But this is a dead idea, he says, a relic of the distributed PC model that is now giving way to what Templeton calls the ‘ondemand services era’.

 Not everyone agrees with this. Andrew Wood is director of Gilwood Computer Services, a consultancy specialising in virtualisation and application delivery. Although he believes that Citrix is doing some important and interesting things, Wood is not sold on Dazzle or the consumerisation angle.

“All the supposed benefits, such as realising investment sooner and faster deployment, will come from process change management, automation tools and workflow tools,” he says, “not from letting go altogether and putting it in the hands of users.”

Taking a leaf from the consumer web itself, Citrix is offering both Receiver and Dazzle for free. The idea is that demand among users will spread virally, inflating the strategic status of the Citrix infrastructure that sits behind them. These tools “will drive application adoption, and therefore demand for more Citrix infrastructure”, says Wasson.

That leaves the fate of this particular endeavour in the hands of its customers’ end-users, with whom Citrix today has only limited visibility. But, with revenues heading in the same downward direction as much of the IT industry, anything is worth a try.