Citrix Systems announced Citrix XenApp 5.. The new release of Citrix’s flagship product breaks through performance and operating-cost barriers, making application start times up to 10 times faster, improving end-user experience and lowering application management costs by more than 25 percent over previous versions. XenApp 5, when used alone or in conjunction with Citrix XenDesktop, now makes it even easier for customers to centralize applications in the datacenter and deliver them as an on-demand service to both physical or virtual desktops for either online or offline usage – an approach that improves security, enhances user productivity and can save millions of dollars over traditional methods of installing and managing applications.

“XenApp 5 broadens the horizon of the end-user experience and accessibility by delivering an end-to-end virtualization solution that addresses the needs of both local and hosted applications,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “In addition, XenApp 5 is giving new and existing customers a welcome boost in performance at an attractive price-point, two highly sought-after requirements for companies investing in strategic technologies in today’s economy.”

A key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, XenApp combined with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer, creates an end-to-end virtualization solution that spans servers, applications and desktops.

Application Virtualization Cuts Cost of Application Management in Half
Windows-based applications continue to represent the majority of applications managed by IT today. Unfortunately, traditional methods of installing, patching, updating, managing and removing these applications on every desktop can be extremely complex and costly with today’s rapidly changing business environment and user requirements. As a result, IT costs continue to climb, business needs are left unmet and user experience and productivity suffer.

To thrive in today’s volatile business environment, organizations need a better, more flexible approach for delivering these applications across a diverse and changing user base. For more than 200,000 customers and 100 million end users around the world, centralizing applications in the datacenter and delivering them as an on-demand service to end users via Citrix XenApp has proven to be the answer. In fact, in a recent study, Gartner found that the total cost of ownership of a server-based computing deployment used to deliver all applications to users is around 50 percent lower than that of an unmanaged desktop deployment.