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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Templeton admits he hopes the company's association purely with thin clients will “die off completely”, but expects it will be some time before the access platform strategy pays off. “Platform strategies take years to play out. Right now the platform means a one-stop shop for everything you need to deliver applications in a controlled, highly secure, managed way and have a collaborative experience.”
Gartner's Margevicius says that the access message is failing to get through, however. “They've had [it] for over two years, and it hasn't made any noise and it's had zero impact with customers. It's a way in which they can put together all their products on a single page, but there's no real underlying integrated technology or architectural differences about what they're doing. It's just one message that doesn't resonate very strongly with customers that I speak to.”
Citrix's financials suggest that even if the overall message isn't getting through, customers are dealing with the new Citrix at a more pragmatic level by buying the products they want. Despite near saturation penetration of the market, Citrix's growth in software revenues continues at the same rate as ever thanks to the additional revenues from its SSL and web accelerator divisions (Citrix classes its appliances not as hardware but as software delivered through a different delivery mechanism.). Its online services division is growing even faster, echoing its former existence as ExpertCity where its revenues grew year on year at 75%.
Citrix is slowly making the transition from a tactical to a strategic supplier and from a server-based computing company to a network and applications management company. It will be some time before the move is complete and it won't be without its risks. But although its change in image is failing to get through to customers' minds, their wallets seem to be buying the new Citrix.
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