Leading Application Vendors and Integrators Encourage Customers to Adopt Strategic Approach to Application Delivery

Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today joined with leading software application vendors, application platform providers and application integrators to raise customer awareness regarding the importance of a strategic approach to application delivery. “Application Delivery Infrastructure” refers to the distributed infrastructure components companies deploy along the line-of-sight between datacenters and end users to ensure the successful, reliable delivery of any application, to any user in any location. IT organizations with an application delivery infrastructure in place can be far more responsive to rapidly changing business requirements, an increasingly important necessity in today’s highly dynamic business environment. By encouraging a more strategic approach to application delivery, industry leaders such as HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are seeking to help their collective customers respond more quickly to change in a world where business success is increasingly dependent on the success of mission-critical applications.

Today’s enterprise customers rely on a wide range of commercial and custom applications to run their businesses. As trends such as user mobility, globalization, offshoring, e-commerce and datacenter consolidation increase the distance and complexity between users and apps, these enterprises are constantly seeking ways to ensure the best performance, security, and availability for end users while reducing ongoing delivery costs for IT. Industry analysts agree these changing market dynamics require a far more strategic approach to application delivery – an approach that goes beyond traditional networking, security and management solutions to incorporate advanced technologies like application virtualization, optimization and streaming that actually improve the efficiency of applications as they travel over the network.

“Many top-down IT priorities are driving application growth, which in turn increases the frequency of performance woes,” writes Rob Whiteley, senior analyst, Forrester Research(1). “In fact, in a recent Forrester survey, IT decision-makers listed application upgrades, disaster recovery, and IT consolidation as three of the top four IT priorities in 2007. How do these relate to application delivery? 1) Applications are being upgraded to Web-based versions for easy distribution to remote workers, customers, and partners; 2) disaster recovery is spurred on by the maturation of IP-based storage and backup software that alleviate archiving concerns for branch offices; and 3) IT consolidation allows for massive centralization of file and app servers into a reduced number of global datacenters. These are just a sample of trends that are driving an increased network load, which has many companies contemplating major WAN or app infrastructure upgrades to avoid bottlenecks.”

Leading Application Vendor Support
“Application delivery is rapidly becoming one of the top strategic imperatives for mid-to-large sized enterprises across every industry sector,” said Wes Wasson, vice president, worldwide marketing for Citrix Systems. “Citrix is pleased to join with so many leading application and application platform vendors to help educate our mutual customers on the importance of this critical business issue.”

“Educational institutions around the world have come to rely upon Blackboard software to meet their increasingly mission-critical needs in eLearning and campus life. I have been an advocate of Citrix application delivery infrastructure solutions for quite some time since they enable our clients to have greater confidence in their technology solutions, as well as provide them the opportunity to focus on what’s most important to them - educating students.” Steve Feldman, Director, Software Performance Engineering and Architecture, Blackboard

“Business Objects helps organizations of all sizes create a trusted foundation for decision making, gain better insight into their business, and optimize performance. As the leader in Business Intelligence, we also recognize that our customers have a need for an end-to-end delivery infrastructure that ensures applications get to end users with performance and security enhancements as well as cost savings. Business Objects is pleased to partner with Citrix to ensure business success for our joint customers.” Wyatt Mullin, Vice President Global ISV Channels, Business Objects

“Healthcare organizations around the world depend on Cerner Millennium® for Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) solutions that optimize their clinical and financial outcomes. Cerner Corporation partners closely with Citrix to provide an application delivery solution, allowing us the capability to meet our clients’ business goals, while providing improved application performance, streamlining application delivery and lowering total cost of ownership.” Scott Porter, Director, Advanced Technology, Cerner Corporation

“ESRI designs and develops the world’s leading geographic information system (GIS) technology and companies around the world run their businesses on ESRI. To ensure business success in a rapidly changing world, we strongly recommend that customers spend as much time choosing the right application delivery infrastructure as they do choosing the applications themselves. Citrix currently supports some of our most aggressive GIS workflow environments. Our joint customers are supporting hundreds of remote and local clients executing sophisticated GIS applications over low-bandwidth connections with excellent user productivity, performance, and security.” Shelli Stockton, Sr. Corporate Alliance Representative, ESRI

“Regardless of business application, HP’s goal is the same: to optimize the business outcome. Together with Citrix, we provide market-leading application delivery infrastructure linking datacenters to end users with the best performance, security, availability and cost efficiency.” Ron Eller, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Solution Alliances, HP

“Our 12,000+ customers depend on Hyperion’s Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Performance Management (BPM) solutions to help run and manage critical parts of their global businesses. As the global leader in BPM, Hyperion has developed partnerships with key companies like Citrix to ensure that our customers have proper application delivery infrastructure to ensure their business success.” John Kopcke, CTO, Hyperion Solutions

“Customers need an end-to-end delivery infrastructure that ensures applications and desktops get to end users with the best performance, security and cost. Citrix is a leader in the application delivery infrastructure space, and IBM Global Services is pleased to partner with them to help ensure business success for our joint customers through Virtual Infrastructure Access (VIA) Services and Citrix support of the VIA open architecture.” John Visentin, Vice President, End User Services, IBM

“Healthcare IT is undergoing an astonishing transformation driven by the need to provide healthcare professionals with vital clinical information whenever and wherever they need it. iSOFT’s healthcare applications are crucial in enabling this transformation. These changes also demand that healthcare enterprises have a robust yet flexible infrastructure as part of the strategic approach to application delivery. Technologies, such as those provided by Citrix, help ensure iSOFT’s customers can deliver applications to the clinicians and support staff that depend on them, in an effective, scalable and secure manner.” Ravi Kumar, Chief Technology Officer, iSOFT Group plc.

“The Microsoft and Citrix solution ensures that our customers have an application delivery infrastructure that can fully leverage applications like Office 2007, SharePoint, Exchange, and Dynamics. Microsoft is excited about being able to support Citrix for its thought leadership in application delivery and providing the best user experience for our customers.” Chris Capossela, Corporate VP, Microsoft Office, Microsoft

“Customers need an end-to-end delivery infrastructure that ensures applications get to end users with the best performance, security and cost savings. We’ve worked with Citrix for many years to make this a reality for our joint customers.” Ed Abbo, Senior Vice President, Applications Development, Oracle

“Companies all across North America run their businesses on applications like Sage MAS 500 and Sage Accpac. To ensure business success in a rapidly changing world, we recommend that customers take care in choosing the right application delivery infrastructure, as well. Citrix understands the importance of application delivery and provides businesses with strong solutions in this increasingly competitive market.” Himanshu Palsule, Senior Vice President & General Manager Mid-Market Accounting Solutions, Sage Software

“Application delivery is an increasingly important business issue, and SAP is pleased to have worked with Citrix for years to support many mutual customers. The SAP Center of Excellence relies on Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure products to help deliver SAP Solutions in Lab environments to customers and partners, ensuring them a reliable user experience with a high level of performance and security.” Ralf Lindenlaub, Director SAP NetWeaver Platforms, SAP

“As a diverse end-to-end IT solutions provider, Satyam offers a range of expertise around ‘Advanced Infrastructure Solutions’ helping customers re-engineer and re-invent their businesses to compete successfully in an ever-changing marketplace. To ensure business success in a rapidly changing world, we strongly encourage our customers to take a strategic approach to application delivery, ensuring they have a robust and flexible infrastructure in place so that all their mission-critical applications are delivered with the best performance, security and availability to the end users. Citrix is a clear leader in the application delivery infrastructure space and Satyam is pleased to partner with them to ensure business success for our customers.” Nick Sharma, senior vice president, Infrastructure Management Services, Satyam Computer Services Ltd.

“Taleo enables leading global companies and small and medium businesses to assess, acquire, develop, and align their talent to drive improved business performance. We offer our customers the leading on demand talent management platform built on a flexible infrastructure. With Citrix application delivery solutions, our 24x7 software as a service is delivered with optimal performance, security, and 99.9 percent availability.” Dave Burlington, Group Vice President, Applications and Technology, Taleo