would you call continuous scanning as a real-time solution?

Rosen

Be interesting to see if they do buy Bladelogic…..interesting to see what Opsware do about it.

Realtime seems an interesting move by them though.

“There is a battle brewing out there: google versus citrix. Sounds absurd, its not. Google wants to become the place where people store thier data, run applications from and do all their computing. That is exactly what citrix does for the enterprise today.”

You didn’t call out Citrix Presentation Server/Metaframe in your post, you referred to the product by its company’s name. What I was trying to explain to your readers more than anything is that Citrix is more than just a one trick pony.

I didn’t claim that you said Citrix was a band company. In fact, I take your AT&T-Lucent example as a compliment. I was just trying to point out that hosted applications, even if over a 56k line can always benefit from an optimized, secure delivery mechanism. It’s not that we don’t have competition, it’s just that our core focus is unique in that nobody else does everything we do.

I think we are talking about different things here. Citrix is a great company and I have the utmost respect for several of the people there and its products. I was a co-founder of Teros which was acquired by Citrix a year or so back!

My point is different — can the legacy Citrix metaframe application and its new variants scale to support a consumer like infrastructure. Does that architecture work?

Also your point about bandwidth is not necessarily accurate forward looking, it might be accurate backward looking. I have seen demos of stuff work over modem lines and its coming.

Lastly with products like go-to-meeting & go-to-my-pc Citrix is not strictly a product company. It has an ASP infrastructure which competes with people like Webex and from then on its just a question of which apps you decide to put. If google offers video-conferencing tomorrow or Ebay does with skype — would they compete with Citrix?

Yes all these companies use NetScaler and thats good, but all of AT&T’s customers used Lucent equipment also.

Rosen

My name is Tal Klein and I’m a Citrix engineer in the Application Networking Group. I don’t think it’s quite that simple. How would you feel if I told you that Google was actually a prominent Citrix customer? But I’ll get to that later.

To address the first part of your story, you state that apps have to be either distributed or virtualized, and that’s not necessarily the case. To make you forward looking prediction stick you’d have to assume that all application users have good, fast internet access. One of the untold facts about the net is that there will be a point in the future where net congestion will reach critical mass and “private networks” (think internet2, xbox live, that sort of thing) . Further, there’s no regulation of security over the net (rightfully so, might I add), not is there an overall SLA on internet latency. So if a company is going to run apps with sensitive data over a network they’re most likely going to build a WAN with some use of the internet to allow remote users to VPN into that WAN but not to access the apps over the internet. That’s an important point that I think a lot of people miss. As long as an application is being access over the public internet, regardless of encryption and authentication safeguards, the application provider can never guarantee absolute performance or security levels.

That said, Citrix is not just a virtualiztion company. We’re an application delivery company. We’re in the business of accelerating, securing, and optimizing application delivery regardless of the application infrastructure. You post refers to virtualization, which is certainly one of the mechanisms we provide to enhance and secure client-server based apps with our Presentation Server product. However, we also have the NetScaler product line for the optimization, acceleration, and security of web-based applications. All the companies you mentioned, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, all of them are Citrix customers. We’re interested in improving application delivery regardless of the delivery method. We also have SSL VPN solutions (Access Gateway), WAN acceleration solution (WANScaler), as well as solutions for web meetings (GoToMeeting), and so many other things which have nothing to do with virtualization.

I invite you to take a tour of citrix.com and see what we’re really all about. But please keep in mind, our goal is never to compete with application providers, it’s to enhance their applications’ delivery to the end users.

-Tal

I’d say the new philosophy is “enable customer outcomes.”