Business News
Citrix Summit 2008: Deliver Together Kicks Off in Orlando
Wednesday 30. January 2008 - Attendance Sets New Records; Affirms Application Delivery Strategy and Strength of Virtualization Offerings
Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, kicked off its annual global partner conference with over 3,300 attendees, a 15 percent growth over the previous years event. Entitled “Deliver Together,” the conference highlighted the importance of a strong partner ecosystem in meeting the needs of Citrix customers around the world to attendees representing over 700 companies from 59 countries. The conference comes on the heels of Citrix reporting record revenue for 2007 and announcing a major new alliance with Microsoft in the virtualization market.
Summit 08 served as the official launch to the channel of Citrix XenServer, the newest member of the Citrix product portfolio. During his keynote, president and chief executive officer, Mark Templeton highlighted the continued momentum of XenServer, a dynamic infrastructure for both virtual and physical servers, recently added to the Citrix product family as a result of its XenSource acquisition announced in August 2007. In speaking to the record number of attendees, Templeton said the interest in Citrix application, desktop and server virtualization technologies has never been higher, and he believes it is because CIOs are beginning to see how virtualization is poised to “change the IT game.”
“Virtualization is revolutionizing the way IT conducts its mission to provide infrastructure services to the business,” said Templeton. “It enables IT to solve strategic business problems including the delivery of Windows and Web applications, Windows desktops and server workloads to a broad spectrum of users. The technology also facilitates the sharing of critical resources, as well as IT cost reduction, improved information security, and increased agility to rapidly meet dynamic business mandates. The traditional approach of binding software to a physical machine, one that created difficult-to-manage gaps between static architectural elements, is giving way to a vision where virtualization allows the elements to work in concert. Virtualization is a disruptive set of technologies that are turning this vision into a reality.”
At the conference, Citrix said today it has far exceeded its goal of recruiting channel partners to market, sell, and provide services for Citrix XenServer by 60 percent – having signed up over 1,600 partners in 2007 exceeding its goal of 1,000 partners. In addition, Citrix said there were 30,000 downloads of XenExpress, a free server virtualization trial package, in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Citrix is offering over 112 hours of advanced marketing, selling and technology education at Summit. The training is designed to dramatically accelerate partner knowledge of Citrixs virtualization offerings so its customer base of over 200,000 enterprises can call on its extensive partner network to establish and extend pilots and expand the technology into full implementations as quickly as possible. The conference closes on Wednesday.