Citrix announced Citrix Delivery Center, a new overarching product family brand for its market-leading application delivery infrastructure solutions. The Citrix Delivery Center product family features four primary product lines: Citrix XenServer, Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix NetScaler and Citrix XenApp – the new name for Citrix Presentation Server. Citrix also unveiled a new tool called Citrix Workflow Studio designed to help customers unlock the full power of Citrix Delivery Center by orchestrating communications across multiple Citrix products as well as third-party solutions.

The new Citrix Delivery Center brand reflects the growing need for IT organizations to transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers.” By definition, datacenters have historically been static warehouses of applications and data, oriented more toward long-term production projects than highly-responsive, on-demand service delivery. Unfortunately, this outdated model makes it extremely difficult to keep pace with today’s fast-paced business environment where companies must contend with a constant barrage of new applications, new devices, new competitive pressures and an increasingly mobile workforce. In an era where businesses run on applications, the ability to deliver applications and desktops to any user, anytime, anywhere from a secure central location is rapidly becoming a core focus for most IT organizations. By providing an end-to-end infrastructure for application delivery, Citrix Delivery Center is the first solution on the market to address this challenge across all applications, all networks, and all users.

“In today’s volatile business environment, the traditional deployment of applications leaves a lot to be desired by enterprise organizations,” said Michael Rose, Research Analyst with IDC. “With the increasing number of mobile workers, computing locations, applications and user scenarios, an application delivery infrastructure enables a dynamic and flexible way of providing applications to users. Citrix Delivery Center presents a unique way to help orchestrate the critical pieces of the infrastructure required for true application delivery.”

Introducing Citrix Delivery Center
The Citrix Delivery Center product family ties together the company’s four key application delivery infrastructure systems. Customers will continue to have full flexibility and choice to buy individual products or combined solutions within the family or take advantage of them as an end-to-end application delivery solution. The Citrix Delivery Center product family includes:

Citrix XenServer - The XenServer product line is an enterprise-class solution for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. With the new Platinum Edition, XenServer also becomes the first and only solution on the market to address both virtual and physical servers, making the entire datacenter more dynamic (see today’s separate press release on the latest edition of this product).

Citrix NetScaler – The NetScaler product line is a purpose-built web application delivery solution that accelerates application performance up to five times while improving security and reducing web infrastructure costs. In addition to delivering web applications for thousands of corporate customers, NetScaler is also the delivery infrastructure of choice for most of the world’s largest consumer websites, touching an estimated 75 percent of all Internet users each day.

Citrix XenApp – The company’s flagship application virtualization product line, previously known as Presentation Server, is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. With more than 70 million users and 99 percent of the Fortune Global 500 as customers, the XenApp product line uses state-of-the-art client and server side virtualization to deliver applications to office and mobile workers from a single centralized location. The new XenApp name was chosen to better reflect the product’s core focus on application virtualization, and to underscore the importance of providing customers with an end-to-end virtualization system that incorporates servers (XenServer), applications (XenApp) and desktops (XenDesktop).

Citrix XenDesktop - XenDesktop is the industry’s first comprehensive Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) system – moving beyond the limitations of existing products to ensure the simple, secure and cost effective delivery of Windows desktops to any office worker with an unparalleled user experience.

The Citrix Delivery Center product family also includes all Citrix solutions that go to market as part of the above four product lines, including Citrix Access Gateway, Citrix EdgeSight, Citrix Password Manager, Citrix Provisioning Server and Citrix WANScaler. These products, which enhance the value of application delivery for all applications and desktops and serve as key differentiators to the four primary Citrix Delivery Center product lines, will continue to be available both as standalone solutions.

“This shift in thinking about the traditional datacenter as more of a dynamic delivery center makes perfect sense for organizations’ evolving IT environment, where technologies such as virtualization make infrastructure much more complex than in the past,” said Davood Ghods, Agency Information Officer for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “The promise of a product such as Citrix Delivery Center is that it provides a complete set of application delivery technologies that work seamlessly together, something that any IT organization would love to have.”

Workflow Studio Enables a Truly Dynamic Delivery Platform
Tying it all together, the new Citrix Workflow Studio provides an orchestration tool that wraps commands from virtually any product and presents them as graphical objects that can be easily linked together on a visual workflow canvas. Using Workflow Studio, administrators will be able to integrate previously disconnected processes far more easily across multiple Citrix Delivery Center products, allowing them to work together as a single cohesive system. This also makes it much easier for customers to integrate Citrix solutions with third-party products to automate end-to-end application delivery processes.

Highly extensible and open, Workflow Studio is built on Microsoft .NET, PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies. This extensible design also makes it easier for customers to link Citrix products into broader systems management solutions from partners like HP, IBM and Microsoft to ensure that all of the Citrix Delivery Center products function seamlessly within large enterprise environments.

“In the early 1990s, Citrix inspired an entire industry to think differently about how a new generation of applications should be delivered.  Over the years, we have continued to raise the bar on application delivery with innovative new products that help customers keep pace with new application types, user scenarios and business challenges,” said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Citrix Systems. “Today, Citrix offers the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of application delivery infrastructure solutions, featuring a broad range of world-class products that extend from the datacenter to the desktop. We are excited about Citrix Delivery Center and its potential for transforming datacenters into delivery centers for customers around the world.”

Pricing and Availability
The individual products in the Citrix Delivery Center family can be purchased today in any quantity and combination to fit the exact requirements of each unique customer. A tech preview of  the new Workflow Studio solution will be available in Q2 2008.  

Citrix XenApp will be the new product line name for all versions of Presentation Server going forward. The Citrix Presentation Server name will remain on all existing product, documentation, support and marketing tools specific to the 4.5 and earlier releases of the product.