Last week’s Citrix Synergy Barcelona 2012 saw many cool announcements, but two in particular piqued my interest: the Cisco-Citrix alliance and the convergence of XenApp and XenDesktop.

First things first. Cisco and Citrix are expanding their partnership, and since Cisco announced that it will no longer develop ACE, it’s pushing Citrix NetScaler as an alternative. This is interesting in light of speculation that Cisco would buy Citrix, or at least the networking division of Citrix. Instead, the two are expanding their partnership. At first blush this seems to squash acquisition rumors, but if you really think about it, why would Cisco choose to go with Citrix NetScaler, which owns 25% of the market, over F5, which owns more than half of the market? Even more to the point, most Cisco customers use F5 gear, so that would have been a natural and expected choice–unless something else is brewing. Keep that in mind as we look at other announcements.

Cisco and Citrix also announced an expanded partnership on the Citrix CloudPlatform. This is interesting considering Cisco’s newScale acquisition and some recent Cisco blogs discussing integration of features based on OpenStack, as well as the fact that Cisco’s prime partner, VMware, has a competing product in the vCloud Suite (vCloud Director and DynamicOps).
Network Computing