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Technology Stocks : Citrix Systems (CTXS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (8036)	5/11/2000 9:20:00 PM
From: Heeren Pathak	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9068

Mike, I thought I had discussed this in a previous post. This concern is a valid one if you believe that everyone is going to write all new apps using web technology and rewrite all existing apps using web technology. The fact is that people are not going to rewrite existing applications that work. Therefore, a lot of the existing internal corporate apps will remain as is and will require Citrix to deploy over a thin-client. As for the newly written apps. I suspect that many apps will be deployed using web technology. However, IMHO existing web-technology is inappropriate for some types of apps and requires more skill to build. I will expand on each of these points later on. For these reasons, I see believe the Citrix will continue to see growth. Additionally, I do see huge advantages in deploying Citrix inside of embedded devices, which is why I am excited about the Psion relationship. The reason the embedded story makes sense is that these devices are difficult to update. Like all Internet technologies, Internet application development technologies are rapidly changing. So how would an embedded device accessing the Internet keep up with the newest software. One approach is to use Java. However, this approach requires some real overhead and Sun still hasn't convinced people to widely use Java in anything but high-end back-end systems. I believe Citrix provides another approach. By embedding an ICA client in my device, I can have that device work with any application as long as that app is running on an ICA-enabled server. The app can run securely on my server and still allow the user to access local resources if needed (another challenge with Java). Now back to the two points I delayed discussing comparing web-based development vs. traditional development. First, application type: One of the challenges with developing web-sites is that they only provide a limited form of interactivity. The more interactive your application is, the more difficult it is to build using existing web-stuff. For these type of applications, Citrix remains a powerful choice. Second, difficulty of development: Citrix allows one to develop an application using Visual Basic or other RAD (rapid appliction development) tool. There are tons of VB developers out there and it is relatively easy for even a marginally competitent developer to develop VB apps. Moving to the Internet introduces a significant level of complexity. Even with technologies like ASP, EJB, etc., Internet applications force the developer to deal with issues like state management (or stateless design), client-server debugging (which can be very difficult), security, etc. I would guess that web-development is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than VB development. This statement is based on the skills required by your development team, the increased cost of design, development, and testing, the relative lack of maturity of the tools, etc. Heeren