Citrix buys Caymas NAC assets

Buy extends Citrix security portfolio

Citrix is buying the assets of NAC vendor Caymas Systems, which is out of business and whose products have some overlap with the Citrix’s SSL VPN products.

A spokesman for Caymas says the company’s assets have been bought by Citrix, but did not reveal the price. Citrix spokespeople could not be reached this morning for comment.

But according to outgoing Caymas’s former CEO Sanjay Uppal, Citrix will no longer develop or support Caymas devices.

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Citrix is buying the assets of NAC vendor Caymas Systems, which is out of business and whose products have some overlap with the Citrix’s SSL VPN products.

A spokesman for Caymas says the company’s assets have been bought by Citrix, but did not reveal the price. Citrix spokespeople could not be reached this morning for comment.

But according to outgoing Caymas’s former CEO Sanjay Uppal, Citrix will no longer develop or support Caymas devices.

Citrix already has some technology similar to Caymas', and seems to want its employees’ expertise, Uppal says. “They wanted to see how they could add a great team with our capabilities to help their application delivery infrastructure out of their Application Networking product group here in Santa Clara,” he says.

Caymas was based in San Jose and Citrix is based in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., but has a division in Santa Clara.

Citrix makes a range of devices from its thin-client Presentation Server, to application acceleration, WAN optimization, Web application firewall, SSL VPN and user application-performance monitoring platforms.

The addition of Caymas gateways that support SSL VPN remote access as well as network-access control (NAC) -- including endpoint security -- and the fact that Citrix is canceling support for Caymas gear, suggests that Citrix is interested in the NAC component.

Citrix has expanded its product range greatly over the past two years with significant investments in new technologies:

* Orbital Data, $50 million, announced August 2006. The acquisition gave Citrix the ability to tinker with how data is sent over WAN connections so it is transferred more efficiently, giving users the feel that the link is faster.

*Reflectant, $16.7 million, May 2006. This buy added application performance monitoring, management and control for businesses to make better decisions about network capacity and performance.

* NetScaler, $300 million, June 2005. The NetScaler appliances provide a Web front end that speeds access to Web servers.

* Teros, $27.4 million, November 2005. With Teros’ application firewall capabilities and deep packet inspection, Citrix provides protection against Web server attacks.

* Net6, $50 million, November 2004. This enabled broader access to Citrix Presentation Server and most other application platforms via SSL VPN.

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