50pc of software to be accessed via web – Citrix


23 Apr 2007

Within three years more than half of all software in the world will exist as a hosted web application, a senior executive with enterprise software company Citrix told siliconrepublic.com.

Richard Jackson, area vice-president for Citrix UK, Ireland and South Africa, said that Citrix’s embrace of the enterprise application delivery market has enabled the company to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25pc year on year.

In March Citrix broke through the billion-dollar revenue barrier with revenues of US$1.1bn. “This makes it one of 20 enterprise software companies in the world to do so.”

Jackson told siliconrepublic.com that Citrix, which was originally a pure thin-client-oriented player, moved into the application delivery market with the acquisition of NetSix, a player in the secure socket layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) market three years ago.

“This has changed the way Citrix has done everything. Since acquiring NetSix, the company has moved from No 26 in the world to No 2 in the world for application delivery products.”

Infonetics Research Inc ranked Citrix second in SSL VPN market share worldwide by revenue for 2006, positioning the company as a leader in secure application access.

“It is our firm belief that within three years, 50pc of all software applications will be delivered and accessed by businesses over the internet,” said Jackson.

He said that Citrix’s core desktop delivery product Desktop Server 1.0 and its NetScaler 8.0 application delivery product are winning considerable traction and the company counts internet giants Google, Amazon and MSN as customers.

The company counts 100pc of the Fortune 100 and 98pc of the Fortune Global 500 as well as thousands of small companies as customers.

“Our application delivery technology allows laptop users, for example, to travel the world secure in the knowledge that if their laptop was lost or stolen the information can be back on a replacement desktop within hours. Our technology basically caches information in a server and load balances the latest information and changes.

“This means that users don’t even need to be connected to the internet to carry on working because the latest corporate information is within their reach. And when they do go online the information is updated. One way of describing it would be to think about it as thin-client for the web.

“The security aspects of this are compelling as effectively a mirror image of the laptop can live on the server back at HQ. If the laptop is lost or stolen, once you have passed the security checks you can be up and running again,” Jackson said.

By John Kennedy