Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 10/10/06

In recent discussions with IT executives and investors about branch office products, one major vendor continues to surface with intrigue - and for good reason. It’s not a “traditional” optimization vendor, such as Packeteer or Blue Coat, nor is it a traditional networking vendor with integrated optimization capabilities, such as Cisco or Juniper.

It’s a $909 million-dollar company whose products are used by 100% of Fortune 100 companies for application access. Figure it out yet? It’s Citrix.

Citrix has made a few key moves to position itself for a compelling branch office solution. Last year, it acquired application acceleration vendor NetScaler. At the end of August, it finalized its acquisition of Orbital Data, which makes WAN optimization gear. Shortly thereafter, it announced an alliance with Microsoft to jointly develop a branch office strategy.

These developments, in addition to Citrix’s extensive channel network, has piqued the interest of many high-level IT executives as to how Citrix’s approach will differ from the plethora of options available for branch office optimization and overall performance. Further, the mere size and scope of Citrix and Microsoft alone is reason enough to be interested.

At issue is the fact that Citrix won’t have its branch office appliance available for about another year. That may be too late for many organizations who are making their branch office decisions now. In the interim, companies can buy the separate NetScaler and WANScaler products. Like Juniper, for example, Citrix has products to address both application acceleration and WAN optimization. Of course, the details of those products vary.

But when the appliance is available, it likely would consolidate WAN optimization, application acceleration, potentially DHCP and print services - all managed centrally from headquarters or the data center. And, it will be based on Microsoft’s Windows Server operating system and the Internet Security and Acceleration Server.

The key benefit of what Citrix envisions is that it can perform different functions because its appliance would reside closer to the applications. For example, it could perform end-to-end encryption and compression on the load level (so headers aren’t affected) and other features (such as signing) enabled via Microsoft Vista.

Still, the specifics of what this appliance will include remain quiet, though Citrix plans to announce more of its overall branch office networking strategy later this month.

Basically, Citrix will view branch office networking and acceleration from the application out to the network; networking vendors view branch office networking from the network to the application. In fact, there may be room for both types of products in some organizations, depending on what they’re trying to achieve and at what cost.

Perhaps one type of device addresses VPN, routing, switching, and WAN optimization; another addresses wide-area file services, QoS, encryption, and application acceleration. And ideally, they have software keys that enable features to be turned on and off.

Citrix is uniquely positioned to provide an interesting branch office solution if it can execute in a timely manner, successfully change the mind-set of customers who are accustomed to Citrix only being the application delivery company, and, of course, articulate a strategy that compels decision-makers to buy!