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With its most ambitious product—XenDestop 4—ready to ship from November, Citrix is preparing for a complete makeover of its marketing strategy. From being a company focused on virtualization products, it is repositioning itself as a desktop virtualization specialist.
“The XenDesktop 4 release marks a strategic shift for us. We are positioning Citrix as an end-to-end desktop virtualization company. With XenDesktop 4 we are combining our application virtualization platform XenApps to offer as a single license,” said Nabeel Youakim, Vice President, Partners & Alliances, Citrix Systems.
Citrix is touting two major advancements in the new release: FlexCast and HDX. “FlexCast is the most compelling technology as it supports all desktop virtualization options including offline desktops hosted in local virtual machines, desktops hosted on blade PCs, hosted desktops based in virtualized servers, and hosted shared desktops,” claimed Youakim. “HDX has been improved with support for flash multimedia, 3D graphics, webcams and VoIP, with optimized delivery to branch offices over WANs for 90 percent less bandwidth than competing technologies.”
The company is planning a major marketing initiative for its partners. “Starting next month, we will conduct road shows in major cities to share our product and partner strategy with our 50-odd certified partners,” said Youakim.
According to Citrix, there are roughly 900 million PCs used by businesses globally.
Of which nearly 40 percent will be virtualized over the next five years. “Presently, less than 100 million of the total installed bases of business PCs are virtualized. Hence, the opportunity is significant. In this, we believe, Windows 7 and the Windows Server 2008 R2 will act as catalyst for desktop virtualization,” he added. |