Access the Future

Access your enterprise, access the world, access the future, claimed the

invite for Citrix i-Forum 2002–the fifth annual knowledge exchange event of

the company. The welcome letter from the company president and CEO Mark B

Templeton also promised to showcase innovative solutions that help solve the

dilemma of providing remote and mobile information access in today’s

fast-paced, global business environment. And last but not the least, it promised

to provide real-world success stories.

Sure, it did. In fact, it offered more much than what was promised. The

prowess of Citrix technology was reflected everywhere–from registration to

management of conference schedules, the various labs and the media center.

The keynote



Taking off from the prevailing global economic climate and its impact on

Citrix and its partner companies, Templeton remarked that the slowdown of the IT

industry has to be viewed in the context of overspending on IT during the last

three years. "From that perspective, its just a correction," he said

adding that while the IT spend between 1981 and 1999 grew at a CAGR of 12%, it

registered an abnormal growth of 24% during the period 1999-2001. This also led

to the industry overspending to an extent of $240–triggered by the Y2K bug

issue, the dotcom fever, R&D and implementations that really did not have a

business case.

Templeton also suggested that the industry should prepare itself to face this

below the normal 4% growth of IT expenditure for the next four years. According

to him, at the end of the period, by 2004, the IT spend curve would be back to

12% or the normal growth rate. Templeton also released details of the survey

done by market research company Edge Research to ascertain the technology issues

and IT spending trends amongst the 120,000 Citrix customers across the world.

The survey result showed that 80% of respondents believed that their companies’

IT spending would either increase or be the same in 2003. On an average,

respondents anticipate the global IT market to increase by 13% within the next

14 months, with more than 50% citing market recovery by the end of the third

quarter of 2003.

Products, agreements, tieups



Attendees gathered in Orlando during the three-day event also learned about

Citrix’s vision of unlimited information access and how the company will

continue to help customers gain the most value from their IT deployments through

its application serving and access portal server products. Talking about the

trends of the e-business environment, Templeton said that the industry is moving

towards pervasive access that involves appliances with broader Web capabilities

supported by voice and biometric authentication. "The corporates today are

looking for solutions that address the business challenges including application

deployment, remote office connectivity, workforce mobility and business

continuity," he said. Despite the sluggish tech spends, Templeton said that

several clients embraced Citrix’s server-based computing solutions that

deliver digital office capability. This essentially stores all the corporate

applications in a central server and therefore facilitates the employees to

access information over any network, anywhere, anytime.

No wonder then the company also announced that it is collaborating with

software vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and BEA to widen the usability of

its virtual workplace software.

The company also announced that it would soon be coming out with a new

real-time collaboration product that would enable meetings to have real-time

view and edit access to documents. The product, code-named "project

pearl", was also showcased at the technology lab during the company’s

recently held annual event at Orlando. Announcing this Templeton said that the

new product would allow dispersed employees or workgroups using Citrix MetaFrame

XP for Windows application server software to share access to any published

application, enabling secure, real-time collaboration on documents. The product

will be formally launched in H1 2003.

The iForum also saw Citrix announce the first service pack for its NFuse

Elite access portal server software besides its licensing agreement with BEA

Systems and Oracle Corporation. The company also announced it is working with

IBM and VMware Inc to deliver an interoperable and manageable server and client

consolidation solution that helps remote offices simplify their IT environments

and reduce desktop administration tasks by centralizing application delivery.

The solution encompasses Citrix MetaFrame XP application serving and management

software and VMware ESX Server virtual machine software, which runs on the IBM

eServer xSeries 440 Intel-processor based system.

Beside the keynotes from Templeton and senior vice president, products

organization and CTO Bob Kruger, the conference highlights also included

presentations by Merrill Lynch, National Semiconductor and Sprint on their

experiences of Citrix implementation. Not to forget the special reception dinner

hosted for the media and the analysts at the Disney’s Animal Kingdom and

closing party at the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

SHUBHENDU PARTH in Orlando, Florida

The Back-end Man

If managing 2,500 attendees was not an easy task, managing the entire IT

infrastructure required to run the demo room, tech labs, developers room–across

the huge Swan and Dolphin property–that would gel with the ‘pervasive access’

theme of the event was tougher. But Citrix Systems’ six-member technical

marketing department team managed to pull this act smoothly in 4 days, without a

single glitch. Talking to Dataquest, Ray Mohammed, manager of the company’s

technical marketing department and the man who handles IT infrastructure for the

company at all such events across the globe, reveled that more than manpower it

took six months’ intricate planning for him to pull off this 4-day wonder.

l IT

infrastructure used at the iForum …



We had four NFuse Elite servers, four agent servers, one blade server and

one database server–SQL 2000–running on Windows 2000 Advanced Servers. The

system also used four agent servers that ran in parallel on different machines

to solve cooperatively a placement-routing problem. They were implemented as a

distributed system using a client/server model. A distributed computer system

contained software programs and data resources dispersed across independent

computers connected through a communication network.

l Major

challenges faced …



One of the biggest challenges was the planning for the whole project. It has
been such a huge conference with the attendees increasing almost every year; the

entire project was broken into sub-projects. This time we divided the project on

the basis of the rooms that we had–demo room, tech lab, developers’ room,

media room and test room. The entire media room was a project in itself, as the

press required their own portal, their own applications for activities such as

downloading and sharing of data, sending pictures and posting latest stories.

l Connectivity

and wireless protocol used …



We demonstrated wireless technologies on the exhibit floor. Since we were

exhibiting technologies of future, using wireless protocol for this floor was

just the right way of doing this. It had an entire wireless pavilion set up.

There we showcased a combination of WLAN, CDMA, and GPRS technologies.

l Bandwidth

used …



We had 3 T1 lines. One of the reasons we got three dedicated lines was the
keynote address. The session was web-enabled; we also used videoconferencing and

a lot of other heavy creative media for graphics, which require heavy bandwidth.

Also, between the remaining of the conference area, we split the 2 T1 lines. We

also had fiber optic cables laid in the two hotels.

l Citrix

technologies used …



The entire conference was managed on server-based computing model. We used

our load balancing technologies, primarily because we had 10 MetaFrame servers

within the farms. We were also prepared for an instance where if one of the

servers goes down the others would reconnect automatically to the servers in the

farm. This was one of our Rack servers.