Citrix Unveils 'Pearl' and New Gems

Citrix officials gave conference attendees a sneak peak at a new collaboration tool, dubbed Project Pearl, as well as new upgrades for its flagship MetaFrame product line and the new NFuse Elite portal server at the company's annual iForum conference in Orlando, Fla., recently. Citrix president and CEO Mark Templeton said the company is focused on building solutions that offer pervasive access to data and applications within the enterprise. "We love building insanely great software," Templeton said during his general session keynote. "We're focused on extending our access capabilities way beyond MetaFrame."

The newest development, Project Pearl, is an add-on solution for Citrix's MetaFrame XP application delivery and management platform that offers a collaborative interface designed to allow disparate users to share real-time access on any application published by MetaFrame. Citrix plans to position Project Pearl--slated for release in the first half of 2003--as a collaboration solution to help remote users and enterprise workgroups maximize resources and increase productivity.

"Virtually any application published by MetaFrame can be shared as a real-time collaborative solution," said Bob Kruger, CTO and senior vice president of products at Citrix, said of Project Pearl.

Similar to other Citrix products, Project Pearl leverages the server-based computing model. Therefore, the collaboration tool itself is just a simple, easily configured interface that accesses applications on the server without having to download the applications on each user's desktop.

Citrix also previewed upgrades and new versions of current products, such as Feature Release 3 of MetaFrame XP for Microsoft's Windows operating system. Feature Release 3, codenamed "Amazon," will offer users a single universal print driver for every system running MetaFrame XP in the server farm and the ability to print in color at up to 600 dots-per-inch. Feature Release 3 will also include SpeedScreen browser, which speeds up the loading of Jpeg and GIF image files within Web pages. The new version, scheduled for release in the first half of 2003, will also support the soon to be released Windows .Net Server 2003.

NFuse Elite, which is tightly integrated with Feature Release 3 of MetaFrame XP, is also getting an upgrade. Citrix is planning a Feature Release 1 of the NFuse Elite portal server, launched last June, that will add improved security features by integrating the product with Citrix's new Secure Gateway 2.0, which supports SSL encryption between MetaFrame servers and client devices. In addition, Citrix announced Service Pack One for NFuse Elite, which adds support for new Content Delivery Agents that integrate data into the portal.

Templeton said his company will up its investment in the channel in the coming year, offering the Fast Track training program that was used to drive adoption of NFuse Elite earlier this year to select partners interested in early adoption of Project Pearl. Templeton acknowledged that channel adoption for NFuse Elite has been slow but he is confident new partner initiatives, such as rebates on NFuse Elite start kits, as well as new technology like Project Pearl, will spark interest in Citrix server and portal solutions.

"We not where we want to be yet," Templeton said, "but we're confident [the channel is going to see the value of ad hoc collaboration solutions and the power of moving applications to the server for distributed computing."