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Citrix Branch Repeater Accelerates Delivery of Virtualized Applications to the Branch User While Slashing IT Costs

Monday 09. February 2009 - Branch Repeater 5 Delivers "High-Definition Experience" for Citrix XenApp Users with HDX IntelliCache and HDX Broadcast Technologies

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today introduced Citrix Branch Repeater 5, a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, adding significant enhancements that accelerate the delivery of virtualized applications to users in branch offices. Many businesses have realized significant cost savings by centralizing their applications and desktops in datacenters using virtualization. Now companies want to move on to the next phase of IT optimization — consolidating the servers that provide essential services in the branch office. Branch Repeater 5 enables this consolidation without compromising the “high-definition experience” users expect through the addition of new HDX IntelliCache and HDX Broadcast technologies for Citrix XenApp (see today’s related announcement).

Multi-User Optimization with HDX IntelliCache and HDX Broadcast
By accelerating application delivery to the branch, Branch Repeater provides the benefits of a high-definition user experience for branch users. It accelerates application launch, printing and file transfers by compressing, de-duplicating, staging and prioritizing traffic across all branch users and applications, including those delivered by XenApp. With the HDX IntelliCache technology for XenApp, Branch Repeater provides branch staging for streamed virtual applications and branch caching for hosted virtual applications. And with the new HDX Broadcast technology, Branch Repeater delivers groundbreaking new adaptive orchestration capabilities for XenApp, sensing real-time network and traffic conditions, and dynamically optimizing delivery across multiple sessions within the Citrix ICA virtual delivery protocol. Only Branch Repeater optimizes the delivery of native, hosted and streamed applications, thereby helping customers accelerate their IT consolidation initiatives while delivering a high-definition user experience.

Deliver XenApp to 4X More Branch Users on Existing Network Bandwidth
In providing HDX IntelliCache and HDX Broadcast for XenApp, Branch Repeater also unveiled significant enhancements that allow customers to reduce both operating expenses as well capital expenditures, while delivering a high-definition experience to branch users. Branch Repeater 5 delivers these benefits by reducing XenApp traffic by up to 95 percent, increasing file transfer throughput by up to 20 times and increasing print traffic throughput by up to 33 times . Together these enhancements allow customers to serve up to 4x more XenApp users in each branch without upgrading bandwidth.

Extend Server Consolidation to the Branch
Version 5 also adds new enhancements that enable further branch consolidation. Citrix Branch Repeater with Microsoft Windows Server, which consolidates multiple Microsoft branch services on a single appliance, now allows customers to host Microsoft Systems Management Server secondary sites as well, thereby eliminating the need for an additional dedicated server in the branch office. This helps customers extend server consolidation from the datacenter to branch offices, harvesting the benefits of simplification and consolidation across all locations, all while delivering a high-definition experience to branch users.

“In responding to the recent global economic upheaval, businesses are seeking to extend their IT consolidation initiatives from the data center to the branches but they face the conflicting demands of branch user experience and IT efficiencies. To optimize application delivery and enhance remote user experience, enterprises need to look at optimizing every element of the delivery chain, from the datacenter to the network to the branch to the end-point device. Enterprises can address branch optimization with a range of choices to deliver applications and desktops over different networks – native, hosted or streamed applications and desktops,” says Joe Skorupa of Gartner, Inc.

Neogen, a leading global provider and one-stop shop for food and animal safety solutions, is realizing the benefits of consolidation and high-definition user experience. “Neogen’s rapid growth has required us to quickly provide high-performance system access to users all over the world,” said Kevin Denney, corporate IT manager at Neogen. “This put tremendous pressure on our network infrastructure and applications. With Branch Repeater and XenApp, Neogen employees in remote locations can access critical business applications up to four times faster, which has significantly improved our customer support and increased sales. At the same time, the Branch Repeater has allowed us to increase network throughput by up to six times, which has helped us avoid an expensive bandwidth upgrade—saving us up to 35 percent in annual network operating costs.”

“Globalization and increasing user mobility require enterprises of all sizes to securely deliver high-performance application access to users in any location, while controlling IT sprawl and costs,” said Troy Trenchard, group president and general manager of the Access and Acceleration Group at Citrix. “With the right branch optimization solutions, customers can deliver great user experience anywhere, while realizing the cost benefits of server and application consolidation. Branch Repeater delivers innovations that help customers reduce both operating and capital expenditures of applications delivery infrastructure—augmenting our world-class solutions for application delivery, application and desktop virtualization, high-definition experience, and branch optimization.”