Citrix Systems yesterday announced the formal completion of its $500 million acquisition of XenSource, and outlined plans to deliver an “end-to-end” strategy for virtualisation that will stretch from the data centre to the desktop.

The announcements set the tone for what is the company’s 10^th annual iForum user conference, but the first to be subtitled “the world’s largest application delivery conference” – a reference to the new strategic role that Citrix wishes to play at the heart of the next generation of virtualised enterprise IT infrastructures. 

Later today in Las Vegas Citrix’s CEO, Mark Templeton, is expected to fill out the detail of Citrix’s new “end-to-end virtualisation” vision in his keynote address. Templeton has already confirmed that Peter Levine, XenSource’s CEO, will remain in charge of his team, which will now be the core element in Citrix’s new Virtualisation and Management Division.

The Virtualisation and Management Division is expected to become a key revenue generator for Citrix, and is targeted with generating $50 million in new revenue in 2008, and $200 million in 2009. If the enterprise virtualisation software grows as quickly as some analysts predict, this may prove a conservative target, particularly if Citrix is successful in persuading a significant portion of its 200,000-strong corporate customer base to see it as a natural source of server-level, as well desktop-level, virtualisation products. 

By acquiring XenSource, Citrix claims it is the only company to offer “end-to-end virtualisation” stretching from the data centre to the desktop, and it yesterday introduced two new product lines designed to drive this point home: Citrix XenServer and Citrix XenDesktop.

Citrix XenServer will add depth and functionality to Citrix’s server virtualisation line which has previously be restricted to the virtual server provisioning capabilities of Ardence, which Citrix acquired earlier this year. It will now include a range of system management, deployment and configuration tools derived from XenSource’s XenServer product family, including the free to download XenServer Express, and the more comprehensive XenServer Enterprise Edition. 

XenSource technology will also begin to seep into Citrix’s desktop and  client software offerings during the first half of next year as it rounds out the capabilities of its desktop virtualisation offerings. With XenDesktop, Citrix says it aims to remove the complexity, cost and user experience compromises that have traditionally restricted adoption of centralised desktop application delivery to a a largely tactical role within most organisations.

Citrix claims it has technology in the pipeline that will permit companies to support the delivery of personalised desktop environments as sub-sets and super-sets of a single “golden’ corporate desktop image. This will allow companies to continue to meet user demand for self-defined desktop resources, whilst drastically reducing the requirement this normally creates for expensive individual SAN storage needs. 

Separately yesterday, Citrix made several other unrelated products announcements. In conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, which will be the first server vendor to support it in the market, Citrix unveiled a "PowerSmart" extension to its flagship Presentation Server application virtualisation product that will allow underlying physical resources to be powered up and down in line with application workloads.

Citrix also announced SmartAuditor, another extension to Presentation Server that will enable customers to record and replay application sessions and processes according to pre-defined governance policies – making it much easier and faster for organisations to collect and recover audit information needed to satisfy regulatory regimes such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and Basel-II.

Further reading

Citrix leans on Windows Still endebted to the fat client king.

The new virtual platform The virtualisation revolution has just begun. Expect the most radical benefits to appear at the processor level.

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