Citrix

Overview

Citrix executed a strategic acquisition of XenSource in 2007 that allowed it to challenge for leadership in virtualization. And while one of it's main rivals, VMware, holds sway in the enterprise business market, Citrix leads the way with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud vendors since Xen is the hypervisor of choice in that market (e.g. Amazon EC2 uses Xen).

Since the acquisition, Citrix has released XenServer for enterprise-class virtualization, moved aggressively into desktop virtualization, created a solution for service providers that gets them cloud-ready and, most recently, announced their support of the Xen Cloud Platform.

Combined with their relationship to open source community and their own partner ecosystem, Citrix is well positioned to challenge for a leadership position in the transformation of the traditional data center to one that is services-driven and delivered on-demand.

Value Proposition

Citrix Delivery Center is designed to bring greater efficiency, flexibility and control to the data center. It enables the transformation of data center resources into on-demand services by integrating its virtualization and network optimization solutions. Citrix says it can reduce desktop and data center management costs by 50%, reduce Web server needs by 60% and improve security and compliance.

Citrix Cloud Center (C3) is a solution-in-a-box, complete with a reference architecture, to help service providers build out and scale a cloud-based infrastructure to support the delivery on on-demand services to their end-user customers. Providers save time and money, via usage-based pricing and support, to more rapidly get spin up their own infrastructure and application services.

Products & Services

• Citrix Delivery Center is targeted at enterprise customers looking to transform the traditional data center. Consisting of XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer and NetScaler it not only brings virtualization to the enterprise - from the desktop to the data center - but it also "centralizes them in the data center and broadcasts them as an on-demand service" using special controllers to deliver and manage applications and resources in real-time, across devices and desktops.
• Citrix Cloud Center (C3) is designed to enable service providers to deliver cloud-based services, such as, on-demand compute and storage capacity and SaaS-based applications. It combines the Citrix Delivery Center together with additional components and a reference architecture to give providers "a complete set of service delivery infrastructure building blocks for hosting, managing and delivering cloud-based computing services." It's delivered on a monthly, usage-based pricing model through the Citrix Service Provider Program.
• Project Kensho is a tool that lets users import and export groups of virtual machines and workloads between hypervisors from different providers and clouds.
• Xen Cloud Platform is a community-driven project with the Xen hypervisor at its core. It's big news because it seeks to solve the issue of interoperability between private clouds (i.e. internal) within the enterprise and public clouds (i.e. external) like those of Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace.