Citrix Discounts MetaFrame Access Suite

The limited-time promotion, which ends Dec. 31, was unveiled at Citrix iForum 2004 in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday, is designed to pump up channel sales of the suite.

MetaFrame Access Suite 3.0 bundles the company's flagship MetaFrame Presentation Server with three newer products: Password Manager, Secure Access Manager and Conferencing Manager.

Citrix is a key Microsoft ISV whose MetaFrame Presentation Server has been widely deployed as the de facto standard for thin-client, server-based computing needs at large corporate sites.

Last fall, Citrix said the Step Up Edition was aimed at moving existing MetaFrame XP Presentation Server users to the rest of the suite's components at a cost of $299 per concurrent user.

With the new discount, customers can expect to pay roughly $200 per user for all four servers.

"Unless there is a specific need for some of the features in the suite, people that have successful Presentation Server implementations with [Citrix Secure Gateway] are pretty happy. The new Citrix potential clients are pretty easy to sell on the suite," said Lesley Taufer, president and CEO of Boulder, a Boulder-Colo.-based Citrix Platinum partner. "The discount is helping us with a number of customers like the City [of Boulder] and the County of Denver. They are very interested in the meeting product, in addition to the even more secure version of CSG that comes with the suite."

In addition to the promotion, Citrix unveiled expanded alliances with longtime partners IBM and SAP. The company highlighted alliances with IBM and SAP at last year's Citrix iForum as well.

The expanded alliance between Citrix and IBM calls for jointly marketing an end-to-end, on-demand computing solution that bundles Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite, IBM WebSphere, IBM Tivoli and IBM eServer BladeCenter systems in one solution, Citrix said.

The two companies plan to launch a worldwide marketing campaign, reseller channel training and other channel resources to promote the integrated offering. Citrix unveiled the integration of MetaFrame Presentation Server with WebSphere Portal v5 and an updated WebSphere portlet at last year's conference.

As part of the expanded alliance with SAP, the MetaFrame Presentation Server for SAP solution upgrades in North America will enable customers to download SAP upgrades much faster, both companies said. At last year's conference, Citrix unveiled the integration of Citrix's MetaFrame Presentation Server with SAP's Enterprise Portal.