This week, Citrix Systems Inc. announced the completion of its acquisition of XenSource Inc., a privately held company in the hardware virtualization and virtual infrastructure space. Additionally, Citrix announced a line of products that completes an end-to-end virtualization offering from desktops to applications to servers. This news highlights the innovation driven by growing competition in the enterprise virtualization market, especially that resulting from the combination of XenSource's technology and Citrix's experience in the application space.

Other competitors include VMware, whose recent IPO was among the strongest offerings of the year, Microsoft, Sun, and SWSoft. The competitive landscape, however, is still heavily skewed towards VMware, which has translated its head start into a growing market share, and just reported 90% growth in sales last quarter, exceeding market expectations.

Citrix's announcement promises a complete virtualization offering by combining Citrix Presentation Server with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer virtualization products. Along with the strong partnership between Citrix and Microsoft, this further strengthens the positioning of Citrix and Xen, for both the server and desktop virtualization markets.

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