Microsoft alliance targets Cisco

Citrix and Microsoft are joining forces to launch WAN optimisation appliances

Microsoft and Citrix have announced the expansion of their existing partnership which will result in a Citrix-branded branch office appliance designed to optimise and accelerate firms’ applications across wide area network (WAN) links.

The hardware will be Citrix’s recently announced WANScaler architecture, which it acquired through the takeover of WAN acceleration specialists Orbital Data in July. The new appliance will run Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server on top of Windows Server 2003 R2.

The new appliance could well be seen as the first shot in a war for the branch office that would involve taking on Cisco, Juniper and the rest of the WAN accelerator and optimiser vendors.

The application optimisation and acceleration market has seen many large firms taking over smaller firms specifically to add in the technology to their portfolio. As the number of branch office and remote workers continues to increase, enterprises see the need to consolidate branch office services to reduce costs and also address the lack of IT support in branch locations.

Matthias Machowinski of analyst firm Infonetics Research said, “WAN optimisation is still a relatively small market, but it’s poised for tremendous growth because it balances the desire to consolidate datacentres with the need to deliver applications to an ever more distributed workforce.”

As well driving branch office costs down, firms also need to think about compliance issues. “The limitations of the distributed computing approach are apparent with the arrival of global competition and more focus on controlling costs and complying with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II,” said Gartner research vice president Joe Skorupa. “As a result, companies are looking for ways to get the most out of their branch office WANs by removing most IT from their branch offices. This is driving the need for a new appliance called a branch office box, which represents the convergence of networking, storage and servers,” he added.