Citrix Outlines Gains for CloudStack

Citrix Synergy 2012 is in Barcelona Spain this week, focusing on the technology trends for the cloud era, unveiling new solutions, and promoting partner alliances and announcements. Citrix TV will stream many of the keynotes and moments from the event, and the conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #CitrixSynergy.

Carriers and CloudStack

Citrix said many telecommunication providers have selected Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack, as the foundation for their next generation cloud computing offerings, including: BT, China Telecom, EVRY, IDCFrontier, KDDI, KT, NTT Communications and Slovak Telecom.

Citrix CloudPlatform delivers a hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build Amazon-style clouds. The company said CloudStack has been deployed at over 140 customers worldwide, has more than 30,000 community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue.

"As the industry continues to move to Cloud-based solutions, we focused on developing offerings that help partners leverage the rapid growth taking place in this segment, while also bringing the benefits of Cloud to small and medium businesses," said Motoo Tanaka, Senior Vice President, Cloud Services at NTT Communications. "By partnering with Citrix around Apache CloudStack and utilizing the commercial Citrix CloudPlatform, we have launched flexible, scalable, and cost-effective global public cloud service called “Cloudⁿ” which can expedite time to market and develop highly reliable solutions to expand our partners’ business opportunities."

Project Avalon

Citrix (CTXS) unveiled the next phase of Project Avalon, a new solution designed to deliver Windows for the mobile-cloud era. Initially launched at Synergy San Francisco, project Avalon is a way to deliver Windows apps and desktops as a true cloud service to any device. It will be delivered in two major releases - Excalibur this quarter as a tech preview, and Merlin, which will be available as a tech preview in early 2013.

The Excalibur release includes FlexCast 2.0, which for the first time ever allows Windows administrators to have a single integrated place to design any mix of virtual applications and desktops from a common management console, and deliver them to end users with any mix of virtual delivery technologies. It also includes significant new upgrades to component technologies like HDX Broadcast, HDX RealTime and HDX MediaStream, delivering powerful H.264 “Super Codec” video compression, and advanced multicasting for video playback. Excalibur features new HDX EdgeSight technology that gives administrators real-time analytics on the experience of end users, helping them quickly diagnose and solve problems.

The Merlin release of Avalon will include service orchestration and cloud-style management to enterprise customers by integrating technology from Citrix CloudPortal and the Citrix XenApp Cloud Provider Pack. It will also transform Windows application and desktop delivery into a true cloud service, courtesy of Citrix CloudPlatform. Customers will be able to simultaneously run their environment on a diverse mix of different Windows Server and Client versions, and a mix of different versions of XenApp and XenDesktop.

Enterprise Mobility

Citrix unveiled the next phase of its strategy to enable the mobile enterprise. Citrix announced a new version of XenClient, providing virtual desktops to go for the millions of new lightweight Ultrabooks, using a client-side hypervisor that runs directly on the laptop, but is connected to the corporate datacenter for centralized synchronization and management.

To address the issue of securely sharing data in the cloud Citrix announced  Citrix ShareFile with StorageZones. This new solution gives employees the flexibility they want, while providing IT with the ability to choose where corporate data is stored, including on-premise within their own secure data centers. New StorageZone Connectors for ShareFile allow customers to securely connect a ShareFile StorageZone instance to data in existing network storage systems.

The final piece of a comprehensive mobile enterprise strategy for IT is an integrated solution that brings together the management of mobile apps, data and devices into a single, unified control point. New MDX features gives Citrix CloudGateway a set of mobile app management technologies that enable full security and control over native iOS, Android and HTML 5 apps.  Citrix also announced a new Me@Work mobile app family. @WorkWeb is a native mobile browser for iOS and Android devices that will enable secure access to confidential web apps, and @WorkMail is a secure native email, calendar and contacts solution.