Simon Bramfitt

Letting ICA out of the bag - Part III

A couple of months ago I wrote about how the Reznick Group had selected Expand Networks over Citrix to provide WAN Optimization Controllers to manage and accelerate their HDX traffic, suggesting that if Citrix have difficulties selling their Branch Office Repeater to an existing XenApp customer then maybe they ought to consider licensing the tech to other WAN Optimization Controller vendors in a bid to get revenue from the Branch Office Repeater sales that they are not making. 

I ran a poll seeking your opinion on the idea and left it open for 8 weeks to gather responses closing it last week. The results showed that 65% of respondents indicated that they were interested in optimizing their ICA/HDX traffic but did not consider Citrix a potential vendor in this space. 20% claimed to either be current or potential Citrix Branch Office Repeater customers and a further 13 % felt that they had no requirement for a WAN Optimization Controller here. I can't say I have a lot of confidence in the numbers, it would require more resources than I have to do a fully effective poll, but I'd offer that there is at least a small indication that I'm not alone in thinking the idea has some merit. 

Letting ICA out of the bag - Part II

In my previous post I closed by asking the question “… if Citrix were willing to uncouple ICA HDX (got to get used to these new names) from Xen[Product] would they be willing to license it to companies such as Riverbed and Juniper to allow them to manage ICA HDX traffic more effectively?” 

Why should Citrix consider such a move? Consider the following report

Reznick Group chose Expand Networks over Cisco, Juniper and Riverbed to provide WAN Optimization Controllers to manage its HDX traffic. Reznick Group is a little out of the ordinary in that 95% of their WAN Traffic is HDX so selection of a WAN Optimization Controller that is able to deliver best possible performance in this space is of particular importance to them. I can’t say anything about Reznick’s decision to choose Expland Network’s, but considering Reznick’s reliance of ICA traffic it’s difficult to understand why they didn’t even consider shortlisting Citrix’s Branch Repeater (WANscaler).  If Citrix can’t get a foot in the door at a shop where 95% of the WAN traffic is HDX they are going to have to find a different way to leverage their ability to manage HDX traffic.  

So with this in mind I thought I would run a poll to assess opinion on the value of Citrix licensing their code to other WAN Optimization Controller vendors.