Citrix plans to promote its recently-acquired Ardence virtual desktop addition into the public sector locally.
Earlier this year, Citrix said it had acquired the privately-held Ardence, which provides solutions that enable IT administrators to provision PCs, servers and Web services on-demand from a centrally managed source.
GM and group VP of the management systems group Lou Shipley says, in the US, the Ardence product has been popular in the military and educational sectors as a result of its built-in security features.
Last year, several hard drives were removed from Department of Education computers just before the matric examinations.
"We expect the product to be very well received both in SA and the Europe, Middle East and African marketplace."
There is, he says, no risk of theft, because individual machines do not have individual hard drives. This also means information can be updated and software installed company-wide on all hard drive images from a central machine.
Shipley says, despite the product offering a virtual hard drive, degradation in speed and performance is not noticeable.
Route to market
The product has already been demonstrated locally, he notes, although no sales have been concluded yet. Citrix is still considering whether to sell the product through its local staff, or bring a partner on board.
"SA is a sophisticated market," he says of the country's self-sufficiency in the technology arena. As maintaining Ardence does not require specific skills other than those already available in the sector, SA's self-sufficiency makes it an ideal market, he adds.
Citrix will also target the financial services and healthcare industries, says Shipley.
The acquisition of Ardence, for an undisclosed amount, is expected to add $10 million to $15 million to Citrix's 2007 revenue line. It also allows the company to build it into three or four different products around virtual desktops.
Shipley says, in the future, the company will pitch the product at the original equipment PC manufacturers. While the virtual desktops will run on any operating system, the company has focused on Windows-based software.
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