Citrix rebrands its XenSource spoils

Six months after spending $500m (£250m) to buy virtualisation specialists XenSource, Citrix has finished a rebranding exercise to pull together products from both companies under a single identity.

In an announcement on Monday to clarify how it will integrate XenSource into its product range, Citrix has clarified that it is taking the emphasis off pure virtualisation. Instead, the company is keen to position itself as being able to offer tools to manage physical and virtual servers.

"We expect the virtualisation market to continue to grow, but understand that our customers want solutions that address 100 percent of the servers in their data centre today — both physical and virtual," said Citrix senior director Phil Montgomery.

Although it was only made public officially on Monday, the news was revealed in information sent out by Cirix last week and picked up on by ZDNet.com in a blog comment by Dana Blankenhord. "Citrix officials have indicated that they will use the hot XenSource branding, but de-emphasise its identity as a virtualisation company," he wrote.

Citrix's director of virtualisation sales, John Glendenning, admitted the company was taking the emphasis off virtualisation as a standalone service.

"Virtualisation is in the headlines and companies see that and think they just install it and instantly save money and resources, but it is not as easy as that," he told ZDNet.co.uk on Monday.  "Data centres will not be 100 percent virtualised."

According to Glendenning, high-performance databases were the typical applications that would not be suitable for full virtualisation, along with "highly centralised applications," he said. As a result, Citrix is keeping its broad lines of products for dealing with application handling, regardless of whether those products are virtualised.

There are four main offerings from the company now: Citrix XenServer, Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix NetScaler and Citrix XenApp (what was Citrix Presentation Server). Then there is Citrix Workflow Studio, the enabling software, which Glendenning said would help companies make the most of the capabilities of the new Citrix Delivery Center by "orchestrating communications across multiple Citrix products as well as third-party solutions".

The aim is to allow flexible use of real and virtual assets, Glendenning said. Citrix Delivery Center brand reflects "the growing need for IT organisations to transform static data centres into dynamic delivery centers", the company said in a statement.

XenServer has a new version number, 4.1, is now available at four different prices depending on specification. The low-end Express is free, while Standard, Enterprise and the new high-end Platinum carry a charge. Standard Edition will be $900 and the Enterprise Edition will be $3,000. (The company said it was currently working out the charge in euros for each country.)