Today at Citrix Synergy, the event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, Citrix Systems, Inc., announced a new cloud solution called Citrix C3 Lab that will allow companies of all sizes to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of their standard technology infrastructure. This announcement comes in response to the growing demand by organizations to use virtualization technologies to deploy, maintain and access business applications and desktops in more flexible and efficient ways through the Internet. Based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Citrix Cloud Center (Citrix C3) technologies, this new cloud-based lab environment will allow IT professionals to easily prototype future cloud projects today. The Citrix C3 Lab is the first of several planned uses of Amazon Web Services which are expected to cover a wide range of SMB and enterprise user scenarios from testing and modeling, to full production deployments in AWS.

“Cloud computing has the potential to completely transform the economics and agility of enterprise IT, enabling customers to deliver applications, desktops and computing resources as an on-demand service,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix. “As with any emerging computing model, customers need easy and economical ways to test new ideas in a production environment that’s familiar, accessible and safe. Citrix will offer what we believe is an intensely pragmatic approach to cloud computing that accomplishes exactly that.”

“Amazon Web Services is committed to providing a comprehensive set of infrastructure services that meet the high demands of our customers,” said Terry Wise, Director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services. “Citrix, along with AWS, provides our mutual customers with a flexible and scalable way to deliver relevant solutions such as desktop and application delivery from the cloud.”

The Citrix C3 Lab is designed to provide an inexpensive, preconfigured environment for IT professionals to prototype solutions using their existing applications and includes technical components required to create a robust application delivery center in the cloud. Initially, lab users will have access to Citrix® XenApp™ alongside key Citrix C3 technologies such as Citrix Access Gateway™ and Citrix Repeater™ in the AWS cloud environment, allowing them to securely test application compatibility, application staging and gain overall experience in the AWS cloud environment. Additional Citrix C3 products and scenarios will be added over time. To enable customers and partners to fully take advantage of the Citrix C3 Lab, Citrix is also providing Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints (see today’s separate announcement).

Pricing, Availability and Support

Amazon EC2 is an on demand, utility priced service, with charges based on the size and capacity of the virtual server. The Citrix C3 Lab is available immediately and there is no additional charge for running Citrix C3 Lab instances in Amazon EC2 – all a Citrix customer needs to do to get started is create an AWS account. The Citrix C3 Lab will also be made available for public use as a set of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) within Amazon EC2.

To get started visit, http://community.citrix.com/display/cdn/Citrix+C3+Lab. More information about the pricing for Amazon EC2 is available at: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.