Access management
- Article 73 of 77
- Information Age, February 2006
Can Citrix's thin-client technology help it push further into the enterprise to become a mainstay of access infrastructure?
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Budgets drop yet IT requirements are on the increase. Management of desktop PCs is becoming harder and more expensive. Security considerations underpin every new project. Providing mobile and home workers with access to corporate IT assets is becoming almost mandatory. Commerce is moving to the web and the infrastructure and bandwidth need to be in place to support that shift. One company claims to be able to offer the solutions to all these problems. Despite forever being associated with an almost unrelated product, Citrix is that company.
Citrix is best known for Metaframe, a product that enables organisations to run desktop applications on their servers instead of on their client systems. That is more or less where most people's knowledge of Citrix stops. In fact, Citrix hasn't sold a product called Metaframe in over a year – it re-branded it as “Presentation Server” in 2003. And that isn't the only place where Citrix's marketing message is failing to get through.
Citrix has a relatively long history. Launched in 1989, it was founded by a group of former IBM employees. It initially developed a product for OS/2, using technology licensed from Microsoft, that allowed IBM's home-grown PC operating system to support multiple users.
A switch in strategy in 1993 saw the company develop the idea of using PCs as terminals for server-based computing. The company continued to grow slowly, taking in net revenues of just $44.5 million in 1996. But after broadening its product range, launching a channel network and partnering with Microsoft, growth rates rapidly increased, with net revenue leaping to $248.6 million by 1998. Revenue is now on course to hit $1 billion within 2006.
The Microsoft partnership remains the most important of Citrix's 3,000 or more relationships. The company's 1997 deal saw some of Citrix's technology make its way into Windows 2000 Server, giving Citrix royalties and in-roads into organisations that liked what they saw in “Terminal Services” but knew they wanted more. Citrix went on to agree another five-year technology partnership with Microsoft in December 2004.
The Microsoft-Citrix relationship isn't without some tensions, but these are less problematic than many observers believe. Mark Margevicius, vice president and research director at Gartner, says “There is a belief that Citrix and Microsoft are at odds with each other, but I don't think that's anything to do with what Citrix and Microsoft have done to each other. It's because of the way Microsoft treats its other partners.” Citrix and Microsoft have an “interesting” relationship because of their different licensing agreements, argues Margevicius. Unlike Citrix, which allows organisations to buy licences for only the maximum concurrent number of users, Microsoft requires licences for all the users that will ever access the server. As a result, “for every dollar generated in revenue for licensing by Citrix, it generates an additional 75c that goes directly to Microsoft. Last year, in excess of $300 million was generated by Citrix for Microsoft without Microsoft lifting a single finger.” Little wonder Citrix has won Microsoft's Global ISV award two out of the three times it has been awarded, coming runner-up in 2004.
Citrix now has an enviable deployment record, with Presentation Server being used in all 100 of the Fortune 100 companies. The range of applications of its technology is large, but the majority involve thin-client work, usually with PCs and Unix workstations rather than thin client hardware; global consolidation of IT systems; and outsourcing, where data and applications can be in one country and the workers in another to save on labour costs, while potentially circumventing data protection laws.
One customer, law firm Clifford Chance, has 27 offices around the world. The company adopted Presentation Server in late 1999 as a remote access solution, but the software now provides a range of services to 7,000 employees. The majority of users run Microsoft Office on the server, leave their documents there as well, and then work on them remotely from their offices, from home or when they're visiting other offices. Since the data is on the server and never downloaded, it stays secure.
Says John McKeown, director of enterprise architecture for Clifford Chance, “Over the last 18 months, we've consolidated infrastructure, with some of the smaller offices using Citrix as a thin client to get access to the larger hub sites. Part of that is managing costs, since we don't want the same size and level of infrastructure. Part is business continuity and disaster recovery, since we can't have disaster recovery sites for 27 offices.”
Among the other benefits is a reduced level of IT support staff, says McKeown, although training and a different way of thinking is needed to work with Presentation Server. “Lots of people are either server or desktop people. It's a different type of mindset. You need to bring them together.”
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