Citrix Makes Portal Bid

Citrix Systems

"It addresses barriers our customers have faced in the past as we have worked with them to improve their organizational effectiveness," said Rich Schroeder, vice president of consulting services at Vector ESP, a solution provider based in Austin, Texas, during a launch Webcast. "To date, best-of-breed portal products have imposed implementation complexities and pricing models which impeded our recommended approach: that is, start small, gain incremental value, then accelerate," he said.

NFuse Elite provides secure, customized, Web-based access to Internet applications, legacy applications, corporate information and syndicated content feeds such as weather reports and stock tickers.

On any Web-enabled device, customers can deliver content to their employees that is customized based on their role within the organization, secured through authentication on Windows NT and Active Directory groups and centrally managed, said Bob Kruger, senior vice president of product development and CTO of Citrix, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"With NFuse Elite, Citrix is offering a powerful access portal solution that delivers personalized access to applications and content in a single location, boosting productivity and increasing profitability," Kruger said.

With the launch of NFuse Elite, unveiled last October under the code name South Beach, solution providers said they now have a portal offering suited to a broader market than just enterprise clients.

"We really like its prospects in the SMB market," said Alan Smith, CEO of ThinApse, a solution provider based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Solution providers said NFuse Elite's low cost and ease of implementation make it an attractive alternative to traditional enterprise portal solutions.

"Portals have been very pricey and difficult to deploy, with a time-to-market of six or nine months up to a year. This is a plug-and-play portal we can have operational within 30 days," said Paul Kunze, director of sales at IntraSystems, a solution provider based in Randolph, Mass.

NFuse Elite is priced at $67 per user, including Citrix's Software Advantage application upgrade contract.

Traditional portals can often cost $250,000 to $500,000, solution providers said.

While it is a stand-alone product, solution providers said they expect initial sales opportunities to come from existing Citrix clients seeking to use NFuse Elite in combination with the Citrix MetaFrame platform for server-based application delivery and with NFuse Classic, which provides Web-based access to applications running on MetaFrame.

"Our application development business will grow also as a result of this," said Myron Bari, president and CEO of IPM, a New York-based solution provider.

Bari said he expects to use Content Delivery Agents, the mechanism through which content enters the NFuse portal, for customers' custom-built applications and databases.

Mark Templeton, president and CEO of Citrix, has said the company is counting heavily on solution providers to push sales of the new portal.

"Our goals in 2002 for [NFuse Elite are very straightforward: to release it on time to a trained channel and to get revenue traction to begin to benefit us in the second half of the year," said Templeton earlier this year.

To help meet those goals, Citrix began training a select group of solution providers on NFuse Elite in March under a program dubbed Fast Track 500.