Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS) gave a sneak peek at its Citrix XenDesktop™ product line this week and revealed that it will officially begin shipping to customers worldwide at the upcoming Citrix Synergy™ 2008 event on May 20.
XenDesktop, which will be co-marketed with Microsoft is a groundbreaking new desktop delivery solution that allows companies to virtualize Windows desktops in the datacenter and deliver them on-demand to office workers in any location. Unlike first-generation virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies, XenDesktop is a comprehensive end-to-end desktop delivery system that simplifies desktop management and reduces the cost of traditional desktop computing by up to 40 percent1.
Deploying and managing traditional desktops across thousands of PCs in a typical distributed enterprise represents one of the most time consuming and expensive operations supported by IT organizations today. According to industry estimates, managing a typical end-user desktop can now cost over $5,000 a year per employee, an investment level that is coming under increasing scrutiny in many companies around the world. Unfortunately, this extraordinarily high level of investment still cannot keep pace with the rapid increase in application conflicts and corruptions that degrade user performance, reduce employee productivity and increase the risk of data loss and security exposure.
Desktop virtualization, as a technology, provides an important first step by centralizing desktops and hosting them on a virtual machine infrastructure in the datacenter, then delivering them to end users over the network using a virtual delivery protocol. This centralization makes it far easier to secure user data and control desktop access for thousands of users across a distributed enterprise.
By managing desktops and applications separately and combining them only at runtime, XenDesktop also allows IT to maintain a single master Windows desktop OS image for all users rather than trying to maintain separate fully-loaded desktop VMs in the datacenter for each employee with applications hard coded into each one. This approach reduces storage costs and dramatically simplifies desktop lifecycle management for IT administrators.
Download the public beta of XenDesktop. It will be generally available at Citrix Synergy 2008 beginning May 20. Suggested retail pricing will begin at $75 per concurrent user.