Today at Citrix Synergy, the event where virtualization, networking and cloud computing meet, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced Citrix OpenCloud Access and Citrix OpenCloud Bridge. These new additions to the Citrix OpenCloud platform extend the trust, performance and security of the enterprise datacenter to any internal or external cloud environment, making it easy for enterprise customers to connect to any cloud service, regardless of hypervisor, network or application type. The new Citrix OpenCloud products give customers a pragmatic solution to the growing diversity of vendors offering competing proprietary cloud stacks. Instead of waiting to see who wins the “cloud wars,” customers using the new Citrix OpenCloud products can connect their users to the external cloud services that make sense to their business in a secure, transparent way, crossing the boundaries of hypervisors, security standards, SLAs, networks and locations. Today’s announcement further extends the company’s leadership position as the only provider of truly open virtualization and networking solutions for the cloud.

Meeting the Need for Freedom and Flexibility in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, enterprise customers can now choose from a growing array of applications and datacenter resources offered as on-demand cloud services. Unfortunately, connecting to those services often involves a host of security and incompatibility challenges, often made worse by vendors attempting to lock customers into their own proprietary cloud stacks. To take full advantage of these services, enterprise IT needs to give users universal secure access from any location on any device, without worrying about what hypervisor the services are running in, what network topologies are supported, or which vendor’s platform the cloud provider is using. Whether these workloads are deployed internally, in a hosted partner or in an external public cloud, the user experience must be a seamless extension of their own datacenter.

The new Citrix OpenCloud Access and Bridge product offerings provide much-needed choice and flexibility for enterprise IT organizations, making it easy for them to evolve to next-generation cloud architectures without having to rewrite applications, forcibly integrate networks into complex architectures, or manage ongoing configuration changes. The same security, compliance and identity management that is applied to internal assets can be easily extended to external assets – giving IT administrators the freedom to choose the optimal deployment model for each application. Each enterprise user leverages a single identity, with just one set of credentials, to access any supported cloud-based or SaaS delivered application and receive the same SLAs and security as if the applications were running in the enterprise data center.

Facts and Highlights

The latest additions to the Citrix OpenCloud platform bring unprecedented benefits to the enterprise:

• Single Identity for All Applications - Citrix OpenCloud Access leverages a network-based approach that coordinates credentials and makes a user’s identity borderless. It gives easy single sign-on access to all popular SaaS applications (such as GoToMeeting®, NetSuite, Salesforce, etc.), enterprise web applications on hosted IaaS or private cloud platforms, and internal web and Windows® applications – just as if they were any other enterprise application. Access and privilege management tasks for the IT administrator are greatly simplified by eliminating the need to individually manage multiple islands of identities spread across a growing number of external applications. The new OpenCloud Access solution is also integrated with Citrix Receiver™, giving Citrix desktop virtualization customers a single universal client to securely access any supported app or desktop resource, on any device.
• Transparent Extension of the Network - Citrix OpenCloud Bridge makes it easy for enterprise customers to connect to networks in external clouds, and to access and manage cloud-based resources as a seamless extension of their own network at high speed. By securely and transparently extending the enterprise demilitarized zone (DMZ) into the premise of the cloud, OpenCloud Bridge makes the service provider environment appear as part of a single secure network, eliminating the need to modify network, security and access configurations when applications migrate from the enterprise datacenter to an external cloud environment – or vice versa. It creates a logical overlay network topology on the customer’s existing network, and provides a secure, performance-optimized tunnel to enable applications and workloads to be moved into the cloud and operate as if they are still a part of the enterprise datacenter network.

Pricing and Availability

Both products will be available as optional modules for Citrix® NetScaler® product line. Citrix OpenCloud Access will be available in Q4 of 2010 with suggested list pricing starting at $50,000 per NetScaler appliance. The product supports an unlimited number of SaaS apps. For custom-built enterprise applications, additional app connectors will also be available. Citrix OpenCloud Bridge will be demonstrated to customers at Synergy this week and available in early 2011.