Citrix Accelerates Path to the Cloud at Citrix Synergy Barcelona

BARCELONA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today at Citrix Synergy, the conference where mobile workstyles and cloud services meet, Citrix unveiled the next stage of its strategy to help enterprises and service providers of all sizes deliver business-ready cloud services. With the advent of the mobile-cloud era, companies everywhere are looking for effective strategies to harness the benefits of cloud computing, without disrupting their current business models. Today’s announcements give customers a simple, pragmatic Path to the Cloud, making it easier for them to transform Windows apps and desktops into cloud services, build new clouds with Amazon-style economics and elasticity, bridge to low-cost capacity in third-party clouds, and deliver a wide range of apps, data and video services over any network with the best performance, reliability and security.

Taking Windows to the Cloud with Project Avalon

The vast majority of organizations today run their business on Windows. Most existing Windows apps and desktops, however, were never designed for a world dominated by millions of new consumer devices, and dynamic, self-service clouds. This makes it difficult for companies to leverage the economics and elasticity of the cloud, while keeping pace with growing user expectations for more mobile workstyles.

For most customers, the first step in the Path to the Cloud is to transform their existing Windows apps and desktops into flexible cloud services that can be delivered to any device with a rich, high-definition user experience. Citrix Project Avalon, originally announced at Synergy San Francisco in May, is a powerful new solution designed to do just that.

Today at Synergy Barcelona, Citrix revealed that Project Avalon will be delivered in two releases - code named Excalibur and Merlin. The Excalibur release, available this quarter as a tech preview, will feature groundbreaking advancements in simplicity, scalability and rich multi-media services needed to deliver Windows apps and desktops to millions of new consumer style mobile devices. Excalibur will dramatically simplify the management of virtual apps and desktops, giving Citrix XenApp® and Citrix XenDesktop® customers a single unified way to design and deliver any mix of virtual applications and desktops from a common management console, and deliver them to end users with any mix of virtual delivery technologies. Excalibur also features the most significant enhancement to the Citrix HDX high-definition experience technology in company history, with new breakthroughs that raise the bar on video, graphics and rich media for mobile devices, and new HDX EdgeSight® technology for real-time analytics and service visibility to ensure a great experience for mobile workers.

The Merlin release, available as a tech preview in the first half of next year, will bring cloud-style orchestration, self-service and deployment flexibility to XenApp and XenDesktop by integrating proven technology from products like Citrix CloudPlatform™ and Cloud Portal™. As a result, customers will be able to rapidly deploy personalized Windows apps and desktops in a flexible, private cloud environment across single or multiple sites, and utilize public clouds in a “capacity on demand” fashion to support fluctuating business needs. By delivering Windows as a true cloud service, Merlin also makes it easy for customers to adopt new upgrades and features at whatever pace they like, allowing them to “mix-and-match” different versions of Windows Server, XenDesktop and XenApp in a single hybrid cloud that spans across any mix of public and private cloud environments.

Building New Clouds

The second major component of the Citrix “Path to the Cloud” strategy is focused on making it easy for customers of any size to build true, Amazon-style clouds. To accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing, Citrix today announced broad new support and momentum for Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack. CloudStack continues to see significant acceleration in traction in the open source world. With more than 30,000 community members, CloudStack has become one of the fastest growing and most active open source community projects of any kind in the market.

CloudPlatform and CloudStack also continue to enjoy growing commercial success. Major new strategic technology partners announced today include Alcatel-Lucent, CA Technologies, Cisco and NetApp. Some of the leading telecom companies also announced today that they are standardizing on Citrix CloudPlatform as the foundation for their next-generation cloud offerings, including BT, China Telecom, EVRY, IDC Frontier, KDDI, KT, NTT Communications and Slovak Telecom.

Most important of all, CloudStack continues to gain rapid adoption with successful customer deployments around the world, both with enterprise and service provider customers. With new CloudStack clouds being deployed at a rate of more than 500 per month, CloudStack is now the most widely deployed open source cloud platform by a wide margin. Many customers have more than 1,000 servers in production, with the largest now running well over 30,000 physical servers and adding more monthly. Collectively, these customers are running a wide variety of proven businesses on CloudStack, generating over $1 billion in cloud revenue last year alone.

Bridging to Third-Party Clouds

The third element of the Citrix Path to the Cloud strategy is focused on making it easy for enterprises to connect their datacenters and private clouds to external, third-party cloud services. The centerpiece of the Citrix strategy in this area is Citrix CloudBridge™, an innovative solution that sits at the back door of corporate datacenters, giving them a secure, transparent, high-performance connection to third-party clouds. This approach allows customers to securely tap into the elastic, self-service capacity of public clouds as a seamless and secure extension of their existing datacenter management.

Today at Synergy, Citrix announced two strategic initiatives for CloudBridge. The new Citrix CloudBridge for Amazon Web Services, available in November, will allow companies to move production workloads securely and transparently between private datacenters and the Amazon cloud. They will also be able to consume CloudBridge as a cloud service from Amazon on a usage-based model, making it easy to set up short-term cloud projects with no infrastructure investment. The upcoming Citrix CloudBridge for Microsoft Windows Azure will extend this same value to customers of the Azure cloud. CloudBridge for Azure will be available for tech preview in December.

Delivering Cloud Services Over Next-Generation Networks

Regardless of whether services run in public or private clouds, delivering those services to end users on any device with the best performance, reliability, and security is essential. Creating a robust, cloud-ready network, optimized for mobile device support, is the fourth pillar of the Citrix Path to the Cloud strategy.

Today at Synergy, Citrix demonstrated the next generation of its upcoming NetScaler® SDX, the company’s consolidated service delivery networking platform. The groundbreaking NetScaler SDX platform was introduced last year to let customers run up to 40 virtual NetScaler instances on a single multi-tenant SDX hardware appliance with full isolation and independence. Citrix is now opening up the NetScaler SDX platform to support network services from third-party vendors as well. For the first time ever, customers will be able to unify a wide range of best-in-class L4-7 network services in a seamless application control layer to drive app intelligence into existing transport networks and emerging SDN solutions. With this next generation NetScaler SDX platform, customers will also be able to apply app-driven policies across the entire network, while consolidating the delivery and automating the deployment of network services. Partners announcing support for the new open NetScaler SDX platform include Aruba Networks, BlueCat Networks, CSE SecureMatrix, Palo Alto Networks, RSA, Splunk, Trend Micro, Venafi and Websense.

To round out the company’s cloud networking news, Citrix also announced a new UXI analytics technology for Citrix ByteMobile, the company’s recently acquired data and video optimization platform for mobile network operators. With the advent of the mobile-cloud era, mobile operators are experiencing explosive growth in network traffic, driven by the combination of new consumer devices, rich multimedia and video content, and high speed 3G, 4G and LTE networks.

The new ByteMobile UXI analytics technology detects mobile data performance on an operator’s network and provides insights into user experience. This data is then analyzed in real-time to generate a user experience index (UXI) score unique to each subscriber - enabling the ByteMobile system to adjust application and content level optimization techniques to ensure the best experience for each user. The new UXI technology will be made available as an add-on license to the more than 130 mobile network operators in 60 countries using Citrix ByteMobile today to serve more than 2 billion subscribers around the world.

Powering Cloud Services at Citrix Synergy

Customers will hear more about Project Avalon, CloudPlatform, CloudBridge, NetScaler, ByteMobile, and the entire Citrix Path to the Cloud strategy, throughout the week at Citrix Synergy, including live demos, breakouts, and hands-on workshops.

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Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) transforms how businesses and IT work and people collaborate in the cloud era. With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organizations. Citrix products touch 75 percent of Internet users each day and it partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2011 was $2.21 billion. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

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