Citrix: out with the portal, in with secure access

Analyst Sector Report date Christopher Rose Networks & Media Fri, 21 Mar 2003

Citrix has removed the word 'portal' from its vocabulary as part of a revamped branding strategy that places a new emphasis on the company's ability to provide secure access to enterprise applications. At the same time, it is refining its existing products and readying new ones, all of which will fall under the new Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite umbrella. New support for secure Webbased access to applications takes the company straight into the territory of the SSL VPN vendors. Impact assessment The message Citrix says it will drive company growth by pushing into the "burgeoning access infrastructure market," and that a comprehensive revamp of the naming and positioning of its products will make their value more obvious to potential customers. The company estimates that the market it's going after is worth between $8-10bn over the next four or five years.

Competitive landscape The company says that it is not trying to displace IPSec VPNs, but the SSL VPN vendors, such as Aventail, Neoteris, Netilla, Whale, SafeWeb and uRoam, should be wary of the move. Meanwhile, Citrix continues to face its traditional competition at the low end from Microsoft's bundled Terminal Services.

The451 assessment There have been suspicions for a while that the Citrix portal push is struggling. The new focus on providing a secure access point for enterprise applications is much more CFO-friendly, plays to the company's strengths and looks more coherent.

Products The new top-level brand for Citrix products is the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite. This will eventually incorporate four products. The centerpiece of the new strategy is the MetaFrame Secure Access Manager, which combines new versions of the existing Secure Gateway and the NFuse Elite portal product. The most important enhancements include support for SSL/TSL connections via a Web browser, alongside the traditional support for the ICA protocol. Pricing is set initially at $109 per concurrent user. The second item is MetaFrame Presentation Server Feature Release 3. The latest version of the core MetaFrame product gets a new name and is due to be released in the second quarter - around the

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same time that Microsoft will release its Windows 2003 Server. The new MetaFrame product is not wedded to the new Microsoft product, but capitalizes on the new server's features, Citrix says. Pricing has yet to be confirmed, but is expected to be similar to the existing price level of $290-400 per concurrent user. Particular improvements are expected in the areas of printing and software license management. MetaFrame Presentation Server 1.2 for Unix also forms part of the product line. MetaFrame Conferencing Manager, previously code-named Pearl, is the third piece of the jigsaw. This builds upon MetaFrame's ability to let administrators take control of a user's desktop, and extends it into a peer-to-peer offering. Multiple users will be able to work on open documents concurrently, wresting control away from one another. A degree of integration with Microsoft Outlook is promised, with the ability to pre-schedule 'application conferences.' Finally, MetaFrame Password Manager is designed to provide a single login to MetaFrame hosted applications. Also not due until the second quarter, the product is based on technology from singlesign-on specialist Passlogix. Strategy In April 2001, Citrix finalized its purchase of portal software provider Sequoia Software for roughly $187.1m. The idea was to push into a rich new area while exploiting the existing Citrix strengths. Unfortunately, the word portal, once so alluring, quickly became a liability. Not only was the concept less attractive to cash-strapped and skeptical CFOs, but the portal projects also took the company into territory where its traditional boosters didn't rule - Citrix normally sells to the mainstream IT and network managers, but portal projects were often handled by the Web team or the CIO directly. At the same time, NFuse Elite set it apart from the companies with mainstream products - the result? Disappointing sales and today's change in tack. The new focus on secure access management pulls the portal technology back into Citrix's familiar domain. Secure Access Manager is positioned as a single point of access to applications, offering the ability to provide each user with a 'role-based dashboard.' This pits the company against the SSL VPN vendors, but executives that we spoke with seemed bemused by the idea that the product has the potential to displace traditional IPSec VPNs from its existing accounts. This may be a lucrative opportunity if a significant proportion of the company's customers use their VPNs solely for application delivery, as opposed to, say, VOIP. No figures were immediately at hand on what proportion of the Citrix customer base uses IPSec in this way. Competition Citrix is bailing out of one competitive area - the enterprise portal market - and jumping into another, as it will find itself competing with SSL VPN vendors such as Aventail, Neoteris, Netilla, Whale, SafeWeb and uRoam. These companies may find themselves pitted against a strong competitor, though, as Citrix claims 95% of the Fortune 500 and FT Euro 100 among its 120,000 customers. Most companies in this space package their products as appliances - complete hardware/software bundles - and have experience with the quirks of the specific markets. Citrix leaves customers to specify their own Wintel hardware, making it less of a plug-and-play offering. Citrix asserts that one consequence of this is that the number of supported concurrent users is essentially unlimited, given a powerful enough host. The previous Secure Gateway software was claimed to support up to 2,000 typical Microsoft Office users on a 1GHz CPU system with 512MB RAM. The company claims that several customers are supporting more than 5,000 concurrent users. Meanwhile, at the low end, Citrix continues to face competition from Microsoft's bundled Terminal Services - a threat that may increase with the launch of Windows 2003 Server. However, Citrix claims that sales of its small-user 'shrink-wrap' offering is holding up well, and that its strategy of adding value can keep it ahead. Indeed, the company drafted Microsoft executives to the Access Suite launch to extol the value that Citrix adds. SWOT analysis Strengths Weaknesses

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The company has a formidable installed base and proven technology. Opportunities The company estimates that the market it's going after is worth between $8-10bn over the next four or five years.

A major swerve in positioning may unsettle some customers initially. Threats The SSL VPN vendors are nimble and experienced in the market specifics.

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