Citrix Systems, the provider of virtualisation, networking and software as a service technologies, has opened a new office in Cambridge Science Park to house its growing R&D team, and provide a base for doing business in the local area.

The company has moved its Cambridge team from their previous location in the town centre, to new, larger, more modern premises, where about 60 Citrix staff will be based. The new offices will allow more space for the continued expansion of the team, and are better suited to the needs of the business. The company will be able to build a bigger test laboratory thanks to greater availability of power and more lab space at the new site.

“We’re very excited about the move and see it as a great opportunity for the business,” said Mark Heath, vice-president, engineering, XenServer,Citrix Systems, Inc. “It was really important to us that we remained within Cambridge, so that we can continue to benefit from our long relationship with the University Computer Lab. Being able to tap into the highly skilled local workforce is also a big advantage for us.”

Citrix has had a Research and Development group in the town centre since its acquisition of server virtualisation provider XenSource in 2007. XenSource itself had strong links with the University, with the open source Xen hypervisor having been originally created by XenSource founders in the University Computer Lab. Since then, the Cambridge premises have been devoted to the development of Citrix’s leading XenServer and XenClient products. Citrix has had an R&D presence in the Cambridge area since 1998. There is a 90 strong R&D team in Cambourne Business Park that continues to work on the XenApp and XenDesktop products, along with other research.

Virtualisation is recognised as the most transformational IT technology of the next decade, breaking the hard link between computer hardware and software, allowing computers to be dynamically combined and reassembled whilst running to provide maximum efficiency and agility. The Xen virtualisation ‘engine’ is now developed collaboratively by an active open source community of senior engineers at many of the industry’s most innovative infrastructure companies

, including leading hardware vendors like Intel, IBM, HP and AMD. XenServer and Xen Client products are built on open source Xen and are the core business of the Virtualisation & Management Division of Citrix.