Citrix Delivers NetScaler VPX Virtual Appliance and Unveils Citrix Ready Open Networking Program

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) today announced the general availability of the Citrix® NetScaler® VPX™ virtual appliance (see separate news release titled, "Citrix NetScaler Goes Virtual”) and unveiled a new Citrix Ready™ Open Networking Program to support it. The new program establishes a powerful partner ecosystem to support Citrix NetScaler VPX, the industry’s only leading application delivery and load balancing solution that is available as a virtual appliance. With the introduction of the Open Networking Program, Citrix is making it easier for ISVs, enterprise customers and cloud infrastructure providers to create powerful virtual networking solutions they can confidently integrate with a broad range of partner solutions already verified to work with NetScaler VPX.

"The availability of the NetScaler VPX virtual appliance will put complete web application delivery functionality within the reach of any organization adopting Oracle Applications,” said Tom Herrmann, vice president, global ISV management and programs at Oracle. "Through our Application Integration Architecture for Partners initiative, Citrix and Oracle have worked closely to validate and document how NetScaler appliances enhance the delivery of Oracle Applications. By making NetScaler available as a virtual appliance, Citrix is making it easy for Oracle Applications customers of all sizes to obtain these same benefits.”

Open Networking Program

The Citrix Ready Open Networking Program establishes a broad partner ecosystem to support the deployment of virtualized NetScaler services into nearly any environment. By leveraging the program, Citrix customers can confidently build comprehensive application delivery infrastructures using NetScaler VPX and integrate with a multitude of partner solutions:

• Platform Partners - Provide a broad array of deployment options for NetScaler VPX software.
• Application Partners - Validate interoperability with NetScaler VPX and deliver turnkey solutions with tightly-integrated NetScaler load balancing and application delivery.
• Cloud and Hosting Providers - Offer on-demand application networking to customers in both shared and dedicated service models.
• Solution Partners - Complement NetScaler VPX functionality to provide holistic and comprehensive solutions, including cloud-based messaging security and flexible identity management products.

"SoftLayer Technologies is proud to add the Citrix NetScaler VPX virtual appliance to our portfolio of cloud-based services,” said Nathan Day, chief technology officer and co-founder of SoftLayer. "With NetScaler VPX, SoftLayer can now provide our customers with the industry’s best load balancing and application optimization as an on-demand, cloud-based service.”

"Joyent is excited to offer NetScaler VPX virtual appliances on demand,” said David Young, CEO and Founder of Joyent. "Joyent customers with applications running in the Joyent Public Cloud can now benefit from world-class load balancing, application acceleration and security functionality of NetScaler.”

Charter members of the new Citrix Ready Open Networking Program partners include Ankeena, Apere, Arista, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Joyent, Oracle, SoftLayer, Trend Micro and Vyatta. A complete list of certified partners and solutions can be found at http://www.citrix.com/ready/list/products?family=netscaler%20VPX.

NetScaler VPX Virtual Appliance

Since its May 2009 debut as a publicly available tech preview release, NetScaler VPX has been downloaded and evaluated by thousands of enterprise customers and cloud infrastructure providers eager to bring needed flexibility and efficiency to their datacenters. Now available for general purchase, NetScaler VPX is poised to expand the market for advanced web application delivery technology.

"Availability of software-based application delivery controllers (ADCs), especially those offering advanced feature sets, will drive a significant expansion of the overall ADC market,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. "Soft ADCs will emerge as a strategic platform for enterprise architects to optimize the delivery of mission-critical applications.”

NetScaler VPX makes it simple and cost effective for organizations of all sizes to deploy market-leading application delivery capabilities for every web application. By combining broad platform support, affordable licensing and gigabit performance, NetScaler VPX brings advanced application delivery technology to both common and emerging customer scenarios not addressed by appliance-only deployments:

• Making Shared Services Work in Cloud and Enterprise Datacenters - NetScaler VPX enables next generation multi-tenancy architectures, bringing application-specific and tenant-specific acceleration, security and traffic management close to the application in a flexible software tier. This complements NetScaler MPX hardware appliances at the data center edge that are handling large-scale services common to all tenants.
• On-demand Load Balancing and Application Delivery - For the first time, industry-leading application delivery and load balancing can be provisioned as an on-demand service by cloud and hosting providers seeking to enhance the elasticity and profitability of their offerings. Datacenter architectures are freed from the inherent rigidity of appliance-only solutions.
• Moving NetScaler Upstream in the Application Lifecycle - NetScaler VPX makes critical application optimization, security and management technology capabilities readily accessible to development teams so that application delivery can be "baked” into the application. Additionally, it addresses thorny configuration support and change management issues by allowing evaluation of application delivery policies in test and stage environments, before promoting into production environments.

Free NetScaler VPX Express Edition

For easy evaluation and limited production deployments, Citrix is offering NetScaler VPX Express Edition, which can be downloaded and activated at no cost. NetScaler VPX Express provides all IT professionals - including networking managers and application development and test teams - a simple, risk-free option to evaluate advanced web application delivery technology. It also provides an affordable option for inserting NetScaler technology into non-production test and development environments, allowing policy and configuration changes to be tested before they are promoted into a live environment.

"The overwhelming customer response to our NetScaler VPX solution validates our strategy to expand the overall market for NetScaler technology by making it available as a virtual appliance,” said Klaus Oestermann, vice president and general manager of the NetScaler Product Group, Citrix Systems. "The Open Networking Program is a powerful ecosystem around which customers can confidently build integrated, efficient application delivery infrastructures using leading technologies and products.”

Pricing and Availability

NetScaler VPX is available today from Citrix Solution Advisors worldwide. In addition to being available with Standard, Enterprise and Platinum Edition feature sets, NetScaler VPX Express Edition can be downloaded for free from http://www.citrix.com/netscalervpxexpress. NetScaler VPX is also available as an on-demand, cloud-based service from cloud vendors such as SoftLayer.

About the Citrix Ready Program

The Citrix Ready program identifies verified solutions that are trusted to enhance the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, the company’s end-to-end infrastructure for application delivery. The Delivery Center includes Citrix® XenApp™, Citrix® XenDesktop™, Citrix® XenServer™ and Citrix® NetScaler®. The Citrix Ready designation is awarded to third party products that have successfully met verification criteria set by Citrix, and gives customers an added confidence in the compatibility of the joint solution offering. Citrix Ready leverages industry-leading alliances and the partner eco-system, to create solutions designed to meet various customer needs. The program incorporates over 2800 partners who have demonstrated more than 9600 product verifications. Citrix earned industry recognition for the program earlier this year with its win of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) 2009 Alliance Excellence Award because of its ability to create a strong community of alliances through implementation of new, innovative best practices. More information about the Citrix Ready program can be found on the Citrix website at www.citrix.com/citrixready.

About Citrix Systems, Inc.

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leading provider of virtualization, networking and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. Its Citrix Delivery Center, Citrix Cloud Center (C3) and Citrix Online Services product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world’s largest Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2008 was $1.6 billion.

For Citrix Investors

This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with products, their development, integration and distribution, product demand and pipeline, customer acceptance of new products, economic and competitive factors, Citrix’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in Citrix’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein.

Citrix®, Citrix Ready™, Citrix Delivery Center™, Citrix® XenApp™, Citrix® XenDesktop™, Citrix® XenServer™ and Citrix® NetScaler®. are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.

Supporting Partner Quotes for the Citrix Ready Open Networking Program:

"The combination of Ankeena’s Media Flow Director and Citrix NetScaler VPX is an ideal solution for the unique availability, performance and integration requirements for today’s new media infrastructure,” said Rajan Raghavan CEO and co-founder, Ankeena Networks. "This joint solution leverages these best of breed systems to enable delivery of rich media applications at a massive scale and the reliability expected by the customers, while providing a great quality of experience to end users.”

"NetScaler VPX is an ideal platform to deliver web applications from cloud and enterprise data centers, and provides tight integration with Apere’s SaaS SSO solution for cloud and enterprise authentication to ensure trusted access to applications,” said Ram Jayam, president and CEO of Apere. "Apere is proud to join the Citrix Ready Open Networking Program, and is excited to be teaming with the industry leader in web application delivery.”

"The new Citrix NetScaler VPX virtual appliance is a landmark achievement in the industry,” said Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO, Arista. "As a Citrix Ready Open Networking Program partner, we have integrated this powerful NetScaler technology into the Arista 7000 series switch to provide our joint customers with high-density, high-performance switching tightly coupled with L4-7 application delivery services.”

"Virtualization is revolutionizing IT infrastructure for businesses of all sizes,” said Ned Thanhouser, Director, Intel Enabled Server Acceleration Alliance. "NetScaler VPX shows how Intel-based virtual appliances enable IT to dynamically adapt to changing application requirements while cutting datacenter and network costs.”

"Trend Micro is pleased to validate that Citrix NetScaler VPX, in conjunction with Trend Micro Interscan Web Security and Interscan Messaging Security solutions, provides an effective, highly scalable and optimized solution against today’s challenging web and email-borne threats,” said John Maddison, vice president, Trend Micro. "The Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, with its innovative cloud-client deployment model, is a part of all our solutions and drives our ability to deliver better protection with less complexity.”

"In today’s modern datacenter, traditional networking services are being virtualized to make the infrastructure more efficient, more agile and easier to manage,” said Dave Roberts, vice president, strategy and marketing, Vyatta. "Vyatta is thrilled to join with Citrix to offer the industry’s first L2-L7 virtual networking stack offering routing, network firewall protection, VPN, load balancing, application acceleration and security.”