Citrix rebrands its XenSource spoils

Six months after spending $500 million to buy virtualization specialist XenSource, Citrix has finished a rebranding exercise to pull together products from both companies under a single identity.

In an announcement on Monday to clarify how it will integrate XenSource into its product range, Citrix said that it is taking the emphasis off pure virtualization. Instead, the company is keen to position itself as being able to offer tools to manage physical and virtual servers.

"We expect the virtualization market to continue to grow, but understand that our customers want solutions that address 100 percent of the servers in their data center today--both physical and virtual," said Citrix senior director Phil Montgomery.

Although it was only made public officially on Monday, the news was revealed in information sent out by Citrix last week and picked up on by CNET News.com sister site ZDNet in a blog comment. "Citrix officials have indicated that they will use the hot XenSource branding, but de-emphasize its identity as a virtualization company," according to the posting.

Citrix's director of virtualization sales, John Glendenning, admitted the company was taking the emphasis off virtualization as a standalone service.

"Virtualization is in the headlines and companies see that and think they just install it and instantly save money and resources, but it is not as easy as that," he told ZDNet UK on Monday. "Data centers will not be 100 percent virtualized."

According to Glendenning, high-performance databases were the typical applications that would not be suitable for full virtualization, along with "highly centralized applications," he said. As a result, Citrix is keeping its broad lines of products for dealing with application handling, regardless of whether those products are virtualized.

There are four main offerings from the company now: Citrix XenServer, Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix NetScaler, and Citrix XenApp (what was Citrix Presentation Server). Then there is Citrix Workflow Studio, the enabling software, which Glendenning said would help companies make the most of the capabilities of the new Citrix Delivery Center by "orchestrating communications across multiple Citrix products as well as third-party solutions."

The aim is to allow flexible use of real and virtual assets, Glendenning said. Citrix Delivery Center brand reflects "the growing need for IT organizations to transform static data centers into dynamic delivery centers," the company said in a statement.

XenServer has a new version number, 4.1, is now available at four different prices depending on specification. The low-end Express is free, while Standard, Enterprise, and the new high-end Platinum carry a charge. Standard Edition will be $900 and the Enterprise Edition will be $3,000.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.