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

To: still learning who wrote (8991)	6/12/2003 1:34:56 AM
From: David Lawrence	Respond to of 9068

First, let me correct a typo from my earlier response: 100% of Fortune 100 companies use Citrix, not 10% as I originally typed. That's important, as it means Citrix is already in the door. In fact, that reminds me of another Citrix anecdote which I'll cover in another post. Okay. I have to tell you that I've been out of the loop for quite some time, and I'm really not up to speed on portals. But Presentation Server is an entirely different animal. It actually coordinates the partitioning of server resources into separate users areas, thus providing the ability for each user to have what appears to be their own dedicated "virtual" windows machine. It manages this not only at individual server level, but also within large server farms. It handles all of the variables of printing (which is a major deal), and server load balancing. But I digress. I think the main difference between the portal and Presentation Server is that that latter delivers the apps through the browser, even if the application is not web-enabled. It can do that for any portal, not just nFuse. Portals require the application to be web-enabled, and as you know, the vast majority of enterprise legacy applications are not, and would require complete rewrite to become so. Presentation Server negates the need to do rewrites. I'm not really sure about your licensing cost question. MetaFrame is licensed on a concurrent-user seat basis. You may have 5,000 users, but if only 3000 might me logged on concurrently, you only need to license 3000 seats. I don't really know the specifics of license vs. support vs. upgrade costs. Also, it's not a way to beat the application vendors... if you have 3,000 concurrent users of Office, you'd need 3,000 Office licenses from Microsoft, even if they were all executed on the same server. TCO - the obvious is that it let's IT departments support Windows users from centralized servers instead of at the remote desktop box. Let's take a simple case of Microsoft Office, and assume the ability to support 50 users per server, and 3000 users. That would be 60 [centralized] servers requiring software installation and maintenance, versus 3000 individual copies installed on 3,000 remote workstations. It's transparent to the user; it looks and feels just like the processes are running on their local machine. MetaFrame handles all of the screen, keyboard, mouse, and other peripheral device I/O back and forth between the client and server; all processing occurs on the server, and all data remains there. In that scenario, there is no need for remote workstations to be anything more than a cheap thin client. An old 386 PC could do it, but it would still seem like it's a local 2ghz machine. Obviously, it gets much more complex than that. An enterprise with thousands of applications can publish which applications a user has access to, and since it's all managed at the server level, the user sees their applications and data no matter where they log in from. They might be running applications on multiple servers in multiple locations, but it's all presented as if they were all running locally in their PC. They see the same desktop from their office, home, a customer or vendor site, or from the branch office overseas. Just give 'em a browser and Internet connection; wherever they go, their desktop follows them. Require encryption, authentication, VPNs? No problem. It's all supported. I'm babbling now...not even sure if I answered your questions!

To: still learning who wrote (8991)	6/12/2003 1:46:49 AM
From: David Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9068

I'm doing this from memory of a conference call 3-4 quarters ago where this story was relayed. One of the Citrix Board members asked another Board member if his company (Ford Motor) was a Citrix customer. Embarrassed, he said that he didn't know, but he would find out. Later, he reported back that Ford was indeed a Citrix customer, but they had purchased it from and were supported by 10 different VARs, NONE of whom this guy had even heard of. Oh, he was the Ford CIO! What a revelation. If that doesn't validate their refocus on embracing the enterprise, I don't know what does. I mentioned earlier their realignment of their sales force. Citrix is also sold and supported by IBM and Computer Sciences. They also recently signed up two major systems integrators... Grumman amd Schlumberger. Plus, government is a big customer, and will continue to be a major source of growth. After all, there is no bigger enterprise than the G!