Citrix Unveils Next Phase of Citrix Delivery Center Product Strategy at Synergy 2008 Conference

Today at Citrix Synergy™, the event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS) announced the expansion of its Citrix Delivery Center™ product family with three important new additions. Taking its inspiration from the world of digital media services where highly optimized delivery networks give subscribers in any location fast easy access to on-demand content, Citrix unveiled innovative new "repeaters” and "receivers” that help corporate IT organizations provide a similar level of service when delivering desktops and applications to end users around the world. These new additions further extend the value of Citrix Delivery Center, using advanced virtualization and networking technologies to help customers transform static datacenters into dynamic "delivery centers” for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility. Just as digital television repeaters amplify and retransmit media signals to homes in a given neighborhood, the new Citrix Branch Repeater™ is an easy-to-deploy appliance that sits between corporate datacenters and branch offices, amplifying and retransmitting applications to branch office users (see separate joint announcement today with Microsoft). Similarly, the new Citrix Desktop Receiver™ and Citrix App Receiver™ are lightweight software clients that run on end user devices and are responsible for receiving the delivery of centralized desktops and applications with an unparalleled user experience. Both receivers offer an extensible architecture that will support plug-ins from existing Citrix delivery infrastructure systems as well as third-parties. Combined with the rest of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, these three new components provide an end-to-end application delivery infrastructure that stands in stark contrast to the traditional distributed computing model. Instead of requiring the installation and management of applications on every desktop which results in complexity across an increasingly diverse user base, Citrix Delivery Center allows companies to centralize their applications and desktops closer to headquarters and deliver them to users in any location as a highly efficient on-demand service. This proven approach can dramatically reduce costs, improve security and enhance end user experience. "Citrix is executing on its application delivery strategy with Citrix Delivery Center,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Its end-to-end architectural approach to IT virtualization and shift toward a service delivery model creates a unique opportunity for IT to improve its service level within the business. Citrix Delivery Center encompasses endpoints, data center servers and the network that bridges a common framework together that can be tuned to rapidly respond to change and workload demand. With these options, organizations can move toward a dynamic delivery center model and customize their virtualization strategy based upon their physical assets, user locations, security requirements and operational objectives.” Citrix Desktop Receiver – Enhancing the Delivery of Virtual Desktops Citrix Desktop Receiver is a lightweight software client designed to work with Citrix XenDesktop™ (available today – see related announcement) to give office workers fast, easy, secure access to their virtual desktops from any location. In addition to ensuring full security and maximum bandwidth efficiency for virtual desktops accessed over the network, Desktop Receiver features an innovative Instant On technology that allows virtual desktops to start up in a fraction of the time it takes to boot PCs running a traditional installed desktop. Desktop Receiver also incorporates high-speed virtual delivery technology that makes day-to-day desktop usage feel as responsive and snappy as a locally installed desktop, regardless of how far away the user is from the datacenter where the virtual desktop is actually running. Desktop Receiver will serve three primary use cases within a typical company. In the most common scenario, it will come pre-installed on a new class of devices called "desktop appliances” that are fully optimized for virtual desktop delivery and purchased by customers from leading hardware vendors as part of an overall desktop refresh program (see related announcements this week from Citrix Ready™ hardware vendors joining the new Citrix Desktop Appliance Program™). IT organizations transitioning to a virtual desktop model can also install Desktop Receivers on older PCs, breathing new life into them by allowing them to use virtual desktops running on modern, high performance servers in the datacenter. Finally, end users can download and install Desktop Receiver on their home PCs to securely access their virtual office desktop from home, just as they might download Adobe Acrobat Reader or Flash Player to access PDF files or Flash-enabled websites. Citrix App Receiver – Enhancing the Delivery of All Applications to All Users Citrix App Receiver is a lightweight, auto-updating software client designed to work with Citrix XenApp™ and Citrix® NetScaler® to give any user fast, easy, secure access to any application from any location. It features a highly extensible framework with plug-ins designed to communicate with each of the core components of the Citrix Delivery Center product family to enhance performance, security, monitoring and end user experience. Existing Citrix software clients will be redesigned as service controlled plug-ins that snap into App Receiver. This extensible architecture will also allow third-parties to create plug-ins that snap into App Receiver to enhance other aspects of the end-to-end delivery process without cluttering up desktops with additional software clients. App Receiver will be transparent to end users and will dramatically simplify the application delivery process for IT administrators by giving them a single, easy-to-manage client footprint on each desktop. "Transforming datacenters into delivery centers requires an end-to-end approach to application delivery that extends all the way to the client,” said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Citrix Systems. "By extending the Citrix Delivery Center product family with repeaters and receivers, Citrix is taking the next logical step to make application and desktop delivery a truly on-demand service for millions of users worldwide.” Bringing it All Together With these new additions, the Citrix Delivery Center product family now includes four classes of infrastructure components deployed along the line-of-sight between applications and desktops in the datacenter, and end users in any location: controllers, gateways, repeaters and receivers. Citrix Delivery Center also includes tools that make it easy to orchestrate communications between each of these components and third-party systems (see illustrations of Citrix Delivery Center here – www.citrix.com/deliverycomponents). Each of these components plays a key role in making IT environments more secure, efficient and responsive to business changes. -- Controllers: The Citrix Delivery Center product family begins with four "delivery controllers" that allow customers to centralize applications and desktops in the datacenter and control their delivery over the network to end users: -- XenDesktop - virtualizes and delivers Windows desktops -- XenApp - virtualizes and delivers Windows applications -- XenServer - virtualizes and delivers application workloads on servers -- NetScaler - optimizes and delivers web applications   -- Gateways: Citrix Access Gateway(TM) sits at the edge of the corporate network and provides secure application access to authorized users.   -- Repeaters: Citrix Branch Repeater stages the delivery of applications closer to branch office employees, consolidates branch services and accelerates application traffic over the wide area network.   -- Receivers: Citrix Desktop Receiver and Citrix App Receiver enhance the performance, security and user experience of desktops and applications delivered to end users.   -- Orchestration: Citrix Workflow Studio(TM) orchestrates communications across the Citrix Delivery Center by taking commands from virtually any product and presenting them as graphical objects that can be easily linked together on a visual workflow canvas. This allows administrators to integrate previously disconnected processes far more easily across Citrix and third-party products, allowing them to work together as a single cohesive system. Pricing and Availability Citrix Branch Repeater is available today (see related announcement for pricing). Citrix Desktop Receiver is available today for free download and is included with both Citrix XenDesktop as well as Citrix Ready desktop appliances. Citrix App Receiver will be available for free download in the second half of 2008. About Citrix Synergy 2008 Born as a user conference more than 10 years ago, Citrix Synergy has been completely reconceived as the industry’s premier event for application delivery. Citrix Synergy is where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet in a three-day mega-conference with a broad industry focus. Attendees get the benefit of four events with one registration: a traditional user conference with the latest on Citrix products; an application delivery expo of breakout tracks, products and solutions; an IT 2.0 business symposium exclusively for C-level professionals; and Geek Speak Live, an un-conference where tech geeks, analysts and bloggers pick the topics and facilitate the sessions. Citrix Synergy will be at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, from May 20 to May 23, 2008. More information is available at http://www.citrixsynergy.com. About Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the global leader and the most trusted name in application delivery infrastructure. More than 215,000 organizations worldwide rely on Citrix to deliver any application to users anywhere with the best performance, highest security and lowest cost. Citrix customers include 100 percent of the Fortune 100 companies and 99 percent of the Fortune Global 500, as well as hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers. Citrix has approximately 8,000 partners in more than 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2007 was $1.4 billion. For Citrix Investors This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Investors are cautioned that statements in this press release, which are not strictly historical statements, involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with the uncertainty in the IT spending environment and the risk of a downturn in economic conditions generally, revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisitions and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein. Citrix®, NetScaler®, Citrix Synergy™, Citrix Branch Repeater™, Citrix Desktop Receiver™, Citrix XenServer™, Citrix App Receiver™, Citrix Delivery Center™, Citrix Access Gateway™, Citrix Workflow Studio™, Citrix Desktop Appliance Program™, Citrix XenDesktop™ and Citrix Ready™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.