Citrix Airs Pricing For Three MetaFrame Access Suites

The company, which is accelerating its push into the enterprise, kicked off its annual customer conference, held in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., on Tuesday by announcing availability of its long-awaited bundle of products, MetaFrame Access Suite, priced at $599 per concurrent user.

The suite--which was first discussed in March--incorporates the MetaFrame Presentation Server for Windows, MetaFrame Secure Access Manager, MetaFrame Password Manager and Conferencing Manager.

The next suite, the Step-Up Edition, is a bundle for existing MetaFrame Presentation Server customers that wish to buy the other three MetaFrame components in bulk at a cost of $299 per concurrent user. The final suite, the Migration Edition, enables users of the company's older MetaFrame 1.8 Presentation Server to migrate to the entire suite for a cost of $399 per concurrent user.

Along with the availability of its three suites and future plans for MetaFrame, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix also announced deals with SAP and HP to more tightly integrate its secure access infrastructure products with those vendors' enterprise application and management platforms, respectively.

The expanded, joint development work with Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, announced on Tuesday, aims to seamlessly integrate Citrix's MetaFrame Presentation Server with SAP's forthcoming Enterprise Portal without the need for rewriting applications or custom programming, according to Citrix.

The new Business Package for Citrix, for example, will offer an iView that will provide customers with single-point access to any Web, Windows, Unix, SAP solution or customer application deployed on MetaFrame through SAP's Enterprise Portal.

In addition to its integration deals with IBM and SAP, Citrix announced with Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP the availability of the HP OpenView Probe for Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, which will monitor the end-user experience from OpenView.

From the exhibit floor on Monday night, one HP OpenView executive said the probe will enable administrators to manage the increasing instances of MetaFrame at the enterprise level.

"We had a MetaFrame spy for two years that gives server-based information, but what we're releasing in two weeks is a probe builder that that gives you top-down information [on] the end-user experience," said Ben Brauer, a product manager in HP's Management Software Organization in Roseville, Calif. "It monitors what the client would see and gives the administrator or service provider what the end user sees and a tool for service level agreements."

Citrix also maintains a tight-knit relationship with longtime ally Microsoft, which licensed the vendor's terminal services software. Last week, Citrix was named Microsoft's ISV of the year.

But the enterprise deals with SAP, HP and IBM announced this week demonstrates Citrix's enhanced credibility and maturing in the enterprise space and will benefit the company's resellers and consulting allies, partners on the exhibit floor said.

Emergent Online, a systems integrator specializing in security and server-based computing, has seen its Citrix business grow 50 percent over the past year, said executives at the Reston, Va.-based company.

Other partners see their Citrix enterprise business increasing as well.

"Citrix is much more ubiquitous now and has expanded in all the Fortune companies," said Mitchell Northcutt, president and CEO of Chicago-based RapidApp, a Citrix and Softricity consulting partner. "All large organizations we have are growing their Citrix environments."

However, Citrix's decision to rename and repackage its line of secure, remote-access software was met with mixed favor from partners and customers.

One the positive side, the availability of the application deployment platform along with a security gateway, Web interface and Web conferencing offering in a single bundle offers customers cost advantages over buying the products in stand-alone fashion, observers said.

Citrix's strong base of resellers and consulting partners, in particular, stand to benefit from the bundled approach because they can construct value-added solutions on top of the suite at lower costs.

"There's a lot of opportunity for consultants," said Les Yetton, executive vice president of field operations at Softricity, a Boston-based Citrix ISV. Softricity's application virtualization software enables Citrix MetaFrame customers to run multiple versions of the same application software on a single server farm with no conflict. "Citrix can't do a surround-sound of services for all server-based computing."

One partner at the conference, however, questioned Citrix's suite strategy, given the emergence of other technologies and ongoing concerns about Microsoft's next-generation terminal services.

The partner, who requested anonymity, said Citrix should focus on developing--or acquiring--technologies such as Softricity's application virtualization technology to eliminate the need for customers to build separate server farms to eliminate application conflicts.

And some claim that Microsoft's next generation terminal services for the Windows server--currently code-named Bearpaw--will introduce application publishing, a feature that could threaten Citrix's core presentation server product.

On the exhibit floor, executives from both Microsoft and Citrix, standing side by side, said they are working together closely on Bearpaw plans and dismissed the oft-floated rumor that Microsoft is out to eat up Citrix's business.

Jeffrey Leeds, director of ISV Ecosystems at Microsoft, said on the show floor that the final feature set for Bearpaw is not yet finalized, but the company isn't going to crush Citrix.

For its part, Citrix will continue developing new technologies to keep its MetaFrame Access Suite on top, company executives said. On Tuesday, Citrix plans to air details about its next-generation MetaFrame Access Suite, code-named Hudson. And sources close to the company say application virtualization is under consideration for inclusion in future products.