News

Citrix Updates MetaFrame Access Suite

• By Scott Bekker
• April 27, 2004

Citrix bills MetaFrame Access Suite as "software for providing a single, secure and well-managed point of access to enterprise applications and information on demand."

The anchor of the suite is the Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, the 3.0 version of which also became generally available on Tuesday. MetaFrame Presentation Server is the foundation of Citrix' traditional server-based computing model, where multiple users log on to a server to access their applications. In that model, all processing occurs on the server, with Citrix limiting the desktop's involvement to presenting the user interface and taking keyboard and mouse input.

The suite, which also carries the 3.0 version number of the Presentation Server, includes three additional MetaFrame products. Secure Access Manager 2.2 is for secure mobile and roaming access, Conferencing Manager 3.0 is for collaboration, and Password Manager 2.5 is for single sign-on and password security.

While Citrix engineered technical integration of the products into the suite, company officials also positioned the suite as part of a sales and marketing effort to leverage existing Presentation Server customers or to reach new customers by aiming higher in an IT organization to target individuals with more strategic than tactical concerns.

Most of Citrix' large deals are built on sales of Presentation Server. For example, in Citrix' first quarter earnings report earlier this month, all of the major customer wins the company cited involved multi-thousand-seat deployments of Presentation Server.

During a Citrix event for analysts and media on Tuesday, Tony Marzulli, Citrix' senior vice president of product and demand marketing, positioned many of the Presentation Server deals as tactical purchases designed to solve tactical problems in the enterprise. He said Citrix sales people and channel partners are being trained on ways to sell the company's broader solution set. "We're trying to go up the stack to the CIO," Marzulli said.

The suite is priced at $599 per concurrent user. Citrix is offering a Step-up Edition and a Migration Edition for customers who currently have MetaFrame Presentation Server. The Step-up Edition costs $299 per concurrent user, and the Migration Edition costs $399 per concurrent user.

The stand-alone version of MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0 starts at $5,800 with a 20-user concurrent license. New features of Presentation Server 3.0 include integration with Windows through the use of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), SpeedScreen Acceleration technology to improve performance of multi-media applications, SmoothRoaming technology for mobile professionals moving sessions from one device to another, and support for larger server farms.