The finalists for the 2009 Citrix Innovation Award were announced today by Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS): Emory Healthcare, HDFC Bank and Tesco. These finalists were chosen for their innovative use of Citrix® virtualization and networking solutions to simplify their IT businesses. The three finalists will be recognized at the upcoming Citrix Synergy™ 2009 conference, to be held at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas from May 4 to May 7, for the powerful way they used Citrix technology to simplify IT, transform their businesses and better serve users.

2009 Innovation Award Finalist: Emory Healthcare

Emory Healthcare leveraged tightly-integrated Citrix solutions to build an extremely agile IT environment that delivers a comprehensive electronic patient medical record to doctors and nurses, while optimizing IT staff and minimizing expenses. Implementing the Citrix Delivery Center™ has enabled Emory Healthcare to cut server and application administration costs in half, deliver applications anywhere with great performance, reduce server count by 60 percent, and offer a personalized desktop to its 10,000 users in medical facilities nationwide. Emory implemented Citrix® XenDesktop™ for virtualized desktop delivery and streamlined administration across the organization. The server provisioning capability of Citrix® XenServer™ allowed the team to quickly stream a consistent workload image to hundreds of Citrix® XenApp™ servers in minutes, rather than building each new server individually, which significantly reduced server hardware and power consumption costs.

2009 Innovation Award Finalist: HDFC Bank

HDFC Bank is India’s second largest private bank with more than 37,000 employees, 1,400 branches throughout India and approximately $3 billion in revenue. HDFC Bank has set itself apart by using Citrix solutions to cut system installation time at new branch locations to three working days from 10 working days, enabling more rapid branch expansion and a 30 percent reduction in IT expenditures. Using XenApp and Citrix® NetScaler®, key components of the Citrix Delivery Center, HDFC Bank is continuing to expand delivery of much needed commercial banking services to India’s underserved geographical areas that lack traditional communications infrastructure. Specifically, the company used XenApp to deliver 45 core banking, treasury and cash management applications to branch employees. To load balance Web servers for high availability, and to optimize delivery of its Web applications, including the key Internet banking solution for customers, HDFC Bank installed NetScaler appliances. NetScaler was chosen for its ability to provide a high level of security and protection against Internet threats, a vital feature for customers sharing financial information.

2009 Innovation Award Finalist: Tesco

Tesco is Britain’s leading supermarket chain and the world’s third largest grocer with nearly 4,000 stores and 440,000 employees worldwide. In an industry known for razor-thin profit margins, Tesco needed to increase operational efficiency, and drive growth and expansion, while maintaining competitive pricing for shoppers already cash-strapped due to current economic conditions. To achieve this goal, Tesco instituted updates to its mission-critical Real Time Sales (RTS) systems, virtualizing key business applications with XenServer. With infrastructure from Citrix in place, Tesco has increased its RTS capacity by 75 percent, handling 1,500 sales-related messages per second, supporting the business-critical nature of the RTS systems and creating room for growth. After the success of the initial project to virtualize RTS, Tesco has continued to leverage XenServer for a major server consolidation project. Citrix is working closely with Tesco to virtualize 1,500 physical servers on XenServer, including 80 XenApp servers. Tesco is aiming for a conservative 10:1 consolidation ratio for physical to virtual servers and is hitting 70 percent CPU utilization on its virtualized servers, a vast improvement over the previous six percent. While adding physical servers would require an increase in power and cooling, virtualization has better equipped Tesco to hit its target of reducing carbon emissions from its UK datacenters by 20 percent. This added benefit allowed Tesco to begin the virtualization technology upgrade earlier than expected by leveraging budget set aside for a corporate environmental project.

Emory Healthcare, HDFC Bank and Tesco were chosen for their proven ability to be thought leaders in their respective industries and for their use of virtualization and networking technologies as a way to gain competitive advantage, expand their businesses into new markets utilizing state-of-the-art IT architectures. These finalists were chosen by a panel of IT industry experts, including industry analysts, Citrix executives and a previous Innovation Award winner. The 2009 Innovation Award winner will be announced live at Citrix Synergy 2009, the conference where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet. This year’s event combines four events into one:

• Virtualization Congress is sponsored by virtualization.info, the largest and most popular virtualization news and analysis site in the industry. This event brings together an all-star cast of customers, vendors and industry experts from across the virtualization community to share best practices for planning, designing, implementing and managing virtualization in the real world.
• Network World Live is an exciting new event from Network World Magazine that focuses on the increasingly important role of networking in the application delivery arena, from the business case to the core technologies involved.
• At Geek Speak Live! – the ultimate “unconference” – tech experts, industry analysts and bloggers will take the reins, choosing their own discussion topics and facilitating all the sessions.
• Citrix iForum will offer an impressive lineup of in-depth sessions on Citrix products and solutions.

How to Vote

Everyone is invited to vote for their favorite story of business innovation and IT simplicity, beginning today. The winner will be determined by online votes cast by visitors to www.citrix.com and registered Synergy attendees, and will be announced on May 6 at the event. To view video profiles of the finalists and to cast your vote, go to www.citrixsynergy.com/innovation.