* Gartner's take on Citrix and Microsoft teaming on branch office appliances
Citrix Systems and Microsoft last week announced that they would team to develop branch office appliances that would combine parts of the vendors’ respective technologies.
The partnership would put Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration Server with Citrix’s planned WANScaler network acceleration technology, which the company picked up in its announced acquisition of Orbital Data last month. According to the companies, the first appliance of their joint development should ship by the end of 2007 and include Windows Server 2003, ISA Server and Citrix network optimization and remote management technologies.
Industry analyst firm Gartner issued a report around the news last week that suggests that Microsoft is working to ward of Cisco’s play for dominance in the branch office.
“Cisco and Microsoft have avoided direct competition until recently, but the merging of networking, security, storage and applications made this confrontation inevitable,” reads the research report authored by Gartner analysts Joe Skorupa, Mark Fabbi, David Willis and Mark Margevicius. “Microsoft is launching new networking capabilities within Vista and the ‘Longhorn’ version of Windows Server, and is pursuing partners in the voice arena (for example, Nortel).”
With potential competition between the two heavyweights heating up for branch office and application acceleration dollars, Gartner says that Microsoft is seeking partnerships with vendors that compete with Cisco. This Microsoft/Citrix teaming could still face challenges and potentially not deliver the results Microsoft hopes, the report states.
“WANScaler is unproven beyond very small deployments, and it lacks features such as bandwidth management, quality-of-service and voice-over-IP optimizations,” the report says. “In addition, porting the WANScaler code to Windows Server and integrating ISA server will be very challenging.”
The analysts predict Microsoft will continue seeking partnerships with vendors that will increase the software vendor’s chances at competing against Cisco in the market for branch office boxes.
