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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Presentation Server has not been without its problems over the years. Latency remains an issue, with clients receiving back the results of their interactions far more slowly than is tolerable in certain situations. Citrix has been working continuously over the years to reduce latency, but certain graphics-intensive programs can still face this issue over large distances. Boeing had to work extremely closely with Citrix's engineers to make its CAD systems work at an acceptable speed for its Australian users and it is still continuing with efforts to improve performance.
Yet at closer distances, even GIS software can be made to work with acceptable performance. Hampshire County Council provides services to 14,000 users via Presentation Server, with roughly 80 of those using ESRI's ArcView GIS software. According to senior IT consultant David Brown, the council tried a client/server approach at first. “We tried to deliver GIS over the WAN, but even over 2Mbps that gave us an unworkable response time – up to 15 minutes for a screen. But over a thin client, it was more or less the same as if you were there.”
Unlike ArcView, however, some applications installed on a Citrix server sometimes need to be adapted to work with the server-based environment. Says systems integrator Dimension Data's business development director, Simon Ratcliffe, “What normally happens is a bunch of consultants will sit there and say. Okay, what we'll do it take every app you're going to run, build a test environment, then spend 100 days testing these apps at £1,000 a day. We have a list of apps. We know how to make them work and most applications go in cleanly.”
Michael McCullen, MD of project management software developer Asta Development, has deployed his programs in a number of Citrix environments, including housing developer George Wimpey. “They use it to allow the business units to access the software. They don't have to administer the software in these units, which are all around the country. The IT guys are excited because the software's all in one room.” To make the software compatible with Citrix took one minor change. But printing, a bugbear for the system for some time, continues to prove an issue. “Bandwidth can be a problem if you're printing from a remote terminal and you're trying to suck the data down from the server so you can print locally.”
Despite these enduring considerations, Citrix offers the most mature of all the server-based computing products and dominates the market. Senior regional marketing manager David Angwin at thin client-manufacturer Wyse reports that the majority of his company's sales involve Citrix software at the server end. But that situation has been changing, “particularly at the lower end. People are using Terminal services more. We're also seeing more people that need just straight web apps.” Citrix this year launched its own low-cost competitor to Terminal Services, Citrix Access Essentials, its first product aimed specifically at SMEs which should see it win back some share of that market. The acquisition of the NetScaler web accelerator software should help it work its way into the web apps market.
At the high end, Citrix has been mainly unchallenged. Its main competitor was Tarantella, but Gartner analyst David Friedlander says that the financial problems of Tarantella caused many organisations to avoid that company's products. Having been bought by Sun this year, the Tarantella product range no longer faces this problem, making it more of a threat to Citrix. However, Sun is liable to deploy its acquisition as a bundle with its Sun Ray terminals and its own servers, rather than on Citrix's mainstay, Windows Server 2003. Friedlander predicts that Sun will almost certainly discontinue the Windows version of Tarantella altogether, making the clashes between Sun and Citrix less infrequent than they may have been.
Looming on the horizon is Microsoft, which threatens an upgrade to Terminal Services, codenamed RAIL (remote application integrated locally), in Longhorn Server. Ironically, many of the improvements will be likely to have come from Citrix, via the recent five-year licensing agreement it agreed with Microsoft. This has the potential to undercut Citrix even further at the low end and to make encroachments into larger enterprises.
When Citrix was a one-product company, this would have been disastrous. It stills remains a significant threat. But CEO Mark Templeton decided in 2002 to diversify Citrix. Citrix was no longer to be purely about server-based computing. Instead it was to be about “access infrastructure” – ways for employees to gain access to resources and people wherever they are, whatever device they're using. It's a market Citrix can quite justifiably claim to lead, since essentially it's the only company in this whole market – although Cisco and Juniper are circling.
Through a series of acquisitions, Citrix now has in its product portfolio Net6's SSL VPN appliance, the NetScaler web performance accelerator and ExpertCity's online collaboration services.
The web accelerator appliance highlights Citrix's growing acceptance that server-based computing isn't suitable for all organisations. “We're moving away from the all-the-time connection model to the intermittently connected model,” says Templeton. Citrix is also developing Project Tarpon, an “application streaming” technology for installing applications from a server for later use offline.
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