Softricity Earns Premier Citrix Business Alliance Membership

Softricity Citrix Systems

"To earn Premier membership, we needed to get certified in Citrix's compatibility labs," said David Greschler, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and strategy at Softricity, Boston.

For Citrix solution provider partners, adding Softricity's SoftGrid platform to Citrix environments can help reduce the costs of administrating Citrix MetaFrame server farms and expand the types of applications deployed across them, said Greschler.

"This is a way for [Citrix solution providers to go back to accounts and offer a solution that will supplement what they've already sold them," said Greschler.

GTC Systems, a Citrix Platinum partner, has several Softricity pilots under way at large enterprise Citrix accounts, said Jim Little, general manager of GTC, San Diego.

"They love it," Little said. "Add it to the existing [Citrix environment and it makes it more stable, easier to manage and allows it to scale up more quickly," he said.

Launched last October, SoftGrid delivers applications to client devices on demand in bits and pieces from a central server.

As they are delivered, the application pieces are cloaked in a protective "wrapper" called SystemGuard that keeps the pieces from altering the operating system and eliminates conflict between applications that can often crash the OS.

When SoftGrid is used in conjunction with Citrix MetaFrame, applications are installed once on a SoftGrid server, which sits behind the MetaFrame server farm, rather than on individual servers within the farm. Since application conflict is eliminated, a solution provider no longer needs to install separate, application-specific farms, Greschler said.

In addition, graphics-intensive applications not recommended for delivery via Citrix's server-based delivery model can be centrally delivered using SoftGrid since it executes the application on the client and uses the client's computing power, he said.