Citrix shifts gears; users wary

Citrix Systems customers are welcoming the most recent release of the company's software products, but generally not for the reasons Citrix executives would like.

The company has been working to create a new market for its flagship MetaFrame Presentation Server, a program that displays applications on an array of computing devices while the applications run on server farms under Windows Terminal Services. Presentation Server is now one part of a package of four separate products, called the MetaFrame Access Suite. The idea is to use the suite to create a set of client/server programs that let end users connect to their applications from any device, over any network. Citrix calls this an "access management infrastructure."

Last fall, Citrix launched a $14 million advertising campaign to promote its new message. In April, it shipped the latest release, 3.0, of both its core Presentation Server and the Access Suite, which also includes applications for working collaboratively on documents and applications, a secure Web portal and a single sign-on capability.

The user view

But judging from some customers' comments, systems integrators and analysts, Citrix is going to have to spend a lot more to get that message to sink in. For these people, Release 3.0 is simply a way to improve traditional Citrix deployments.

"We're finalizing our testing on the new features in [Presentation Server] 3.0, and we're very excited by the performance improvements and other enhancements," says long-time Citrix customer J.B. Dunn, manager of desktop technology for Roadway Express, a transportation services company in Akron, Ohio.

Several enhancements promise to boost MetaFrame's performance with multimedia and Web content over wide-area links, a critical issue for this company that has more than 6,000 users, most on thin-client Wyse Windows terminals, in nearly 400 offices. The terminals access a suite of PC applications loaded on a MetaFrame-controlled server farm running Windows 2000 Server. "This is critically important to us," Dunn says. "We serve everything over the WAN. We have to have performance that can run our business."

The original reasons for this deployment are familiar: centralize desktop applications on servers to reduce support costs, and improve performance over the WAN when accessing Unix and mainframe line-of-business applications. These kinds of benefits have let Citrix build a $600-million-per-year business, counting among its client list most of the Fortune 500. These benefits are still the main drivers for many Citrix customers. The "access management infrastructure" for now is an idea whose time has not come.

"We want to understand more fully the evolution of the products they're bringing to market and understand how they fit into our plans for this computing model," Dunn says.