Johannesburg, 10 Jan 2007
Citrix Systems, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced the completed acquisition of privately held Ardence Inc, a leading provider of solutions that enable IT administrators to provision PCs, servers, and Web services on-demand from a centrally managed source.
Ardence software can support a dynamic desktop infrastructure, in which both the operating system (OS) and applications are delivered to a bare metal machine from virtual disks on a centralised server.
This acquisition strengthens Citrix's application delivery offering with more robust streaming and provisioning technologies that improve IT agility; increase security and reliability, and offer new options for how businesses deliver applications and desktops over the network to end-users.
Citrix will continue selling Ardence's product line under the existing brand names and expects to maintain Ardence's existing partnership and reseller alliances.
The Ardence technology will initially be applied to the area of desktop delivery, giving customers new, cost-effective ways to deliver desktops over the network to end-users. With the Ardence technology, a single disk image file can be instantaneously delivered from a central file server to hundreds of desktops (physical, virtual, or blades) further advancing Citrix's Dynamic Desktop Initiative, announced in October 2006. The Ardence technology will also be used to complement the Citrix NetScaler line of Web application delivery solutions by enabling the on-demand provisioning of Web applications based on usage spikes or to provision web services as customers adopt services-oriented architectures. In addition, the Ardence provisioning technology can also be used to more quickly add new servers to a Citrix Presentation Server farm and allow the servers to be configured dynamically according to shifts in demand.
"With this acquisition, Citrix takes a leap forward in the on demand provisioning of desktops, server images and service-oriented architecture objects," said Nick Keene, country manager, Citrix Systems Southern Africa.
"Citrix has a proven track record making successful acquisitions and bringing products to market as part of its overall application delivery strategy. The Ardence technology can be used to bring immediate flexibility, management and deployment benefits to Presentation Server customers by centralising the management of the server software images. A combination of Ardence technology and existing Citrix technologies could bring similar benefits to customers in the areas of desktop delivery and instant provisioning of Web applications."
Ardence has two product groups: one focused on on-demand provisioning, the other focused on real-time operating systems. Both groups will continue to be based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and report into the Management Systems Group, also based in the Boston area, under Shipley.
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