In a very good, interesting interview, ZDNet spoke with Citrix vice president of special projects, Ian Pratt, to find out how the integration is going between Citrix and XenSource, and to find out where Citrix is headed with Xen-branded products.  You should check out the entire interview, but I found this piece of special interest. 

As vice president for advanced products, what are you looking at?
Pratt: Client virtualization is an area I'm spending time on. It's an area where Xen leads--despite some bluster from VMware. It's an area where we can make a difference, and it will be driven by application delivery.

There will be virtualized smartphones on the market in the not-too-distant future. ARM has built virtualization into its processors; they didn't put that in for fun.

Virtualization in the embedded market will follow a similar playbook to virtualization in the x86 market. Client virtualization is going to happen quite quickly. It won't go through the phase where users have to choose their virtualization solution, because virtualization won't exist as a category. It will be part of the device when you buy it.

My other main area of interest is cloud computing. Between client and cloud, I have quite enough to do. They are both areas where Xen is a leader, and historically any area that wins on the client, ends up winning on the server.

A Xen presence on clients will bolster what we are doing on the server. And the cloud will help Xen, because it makes it easier to move virtual machines into the cloud. It will be possible to bridge from the cloud to the enterprise, so resources can be added dynamically.

Why pay for machines in the server room, when you can push them out into the cloud? In particular, functions like test and development, and disaster recovery, can be in the cloud. And if that cloud and the server room are both Xen, then it is much easier to do.

Read the entire interview with Ian Pratt, here.