Citrix talks up NetScaler telco-grade ADC platform

Enterprise software house Citrix has chosen the LTE World Summit 2014 event in Amsterdam to bring attention to the continued growth of its NetScaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) platform, especially among operators. To illustrate this point Citrix revealed Netscaler now powers over 100 million mobile subscribers.

NetScaler was acquired by Citrix in 2005 and falls within the mobile-focused division of Citrix that was formed from another acquisition, of ByteMobile, in 2012. Citrix has historically been focused on the Windows enterprise market and these acquisitions represent a corporate repositioning in the post-PC era.

Telecoms.com spoke to Mikko Disini, Director of Product Marketing at Citrix (pictured) at the show, and asked him why Citrix had chosen to make this announcement: “We’re announcing here at LTE World that Citrix NetScaler is now supporting over 100 million subscribers across some of the largest operators in the world,” he said. “What we’ve done is that we’re taking the telco cloud economics into mobile networks – that’s the significance of our announcement. Operators now are looking at the cloud as the model for their NFV strategies and making it carrier-grade.”

So what are the specific benefits operators get from NetScaler? “Number one is that we can bring on-demand scalability to operators, which allows them to match expense with demand,” said Disini. “Number two is that this product is ideal for virtualized networks and operators can begin with an appliance version and move to a virtual version at ease. The third is there are all these ADC smarts and capabilities that can be all be done natively in the platform.

Facing stiff competition from VMware and an increasingly cloud-centric Microsoft in the desktop virtualization space, Citrix is likely to become ever more reliant on growth from the Netscaler product and the whole division formed from ByteMobile. But given the increasingly mobile nature of the post-PC technology world, this may well be the best direction to go in regardless.