The new Citrix

So what did I make of Citrix and the iForum?

Well, you can get my full insight in a forthcoming issue of Information Age, but my general thought is that I'd lost track of what Citrix had been up to. One minute they're “the Metaframe company” (Metaframe now being called Presentation Server. What's Presentation Server? It's probably best known as “the magic software that makes it possible to use thin clients”). Now they're an “access platform” company. That's a market they've made up for themselves. At least they can justifiably call themselves market-leading, unlike just about every other tech company out there.

It's not clear how much this expansion into multiple products after years of being a single product company is going to change things, or how well they're going to pull it off, but they're doing quite well so far, even if the overall concept needs to be clarified. After all, if you asked most CIOs what an access platform might be, they'd really have to be thinking laterally to think you meant access to people as well as systems. Yet that's what you need to keep in mind with Citrix bringing managed services, GoToMeeting, etc into things.

I think it's all going to be in the execution.