Citrix Partners Await NFuse Elite

With the release of NFuse Elite, the product unveiled last October under the code name South Beach, solution providers said they now have a portal offering suited to a broader market than just enterprise clients.

"We really like [NFuse Elite's prospects in the SMB market," said Alan Smith, CEO of ThinApse, a solution provider based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Solution providers said NFuse Elite's low cost and ease of implementation make it an attractive alternative to other enterprise portal solutions.

"Portals have been very pricey and difficult to deploy, with a time to market of six or nine months up to a year. This is a plug-and-play portal we can have operational within 30 days," said Paul Kunze, director of sales at IntraSystems, a solution provider based in Randolph, Mass.

NFuse Elite is priced at $67 per user, including Citrix's Software Advantage application upgrade contract. Other portals can cost $250,000 to $500,000, solution providers said.

NFuse Elite provides secure, customized, Web-based access to Internet applications, legacy applications, corporate information and syndicated content feeds such as weather reports and stock tickers, according to Citrix.

Solution providers said they expect initial opportunities to come from existing Citrix clients seeking to use NFuse Elite in combination with the Citrix MetaFrame platform for server-based application delivery and NFuse Classic, which provides Web-based access to applications running on MetaFrame.

Mark Templeton, president and CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix, has said the company is counting heavily on solution providers to push its portal sales. "Our goals in 2002 for [NFuse Elite are very straightforward: to release it on time to a trained channel and to get revenue traction to begin to benefit us in the second half of the year," he said earlier this year.