Presentation is part of the recipe - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, Dec, 2000 by Bart Taylor, Dan Taylor

Last month, we described the "alphabet soup" of application performance management (APM). Important developments in the presentation-layer products offered by Citrix provide an important piece of this story. Developments, such as those Citrix nFuse, VPN and Project Vertigo offer, bring a needed counterpoint to the familiar set of Web application server approaches. Citrix provides our example, but we should mention SurfControl (formerly JSB) and Tarantella (formerly SCO) here, to be fair.

Service providers mostly name HTML-based application deployments as preferred means. This includes ASPs, management service providers (MSP) and their hosting-centered cousins, the applications infrastructure providers (AIP). All speak glowingly of the ability to deploy, scale and manage distributed Web applications, given the importance of the requirements for "organic" growth, including considerations like load balancing on networks and APM.

But many aren't aware of presentation-layer technologies like Citrix independent computing architecture (ICA). The company is evolving its longstanding product line into a service-oriented framework, with channel programs to support new service models for ASP and enterprise applications management. As MetaFrame--and competitors, such as SurfControl and Tarantella--evolve to support Web architectures for computing, they are naturally becoming one option for centralized administration.

"MetaFrame has always provided a central point for administration and management of applications performance," says Richard Whitehead, senior product manager at Citrix Systems. "As we have seen with integration to network-based edge switching from third parties, this capability provides a basis for performance management. Within our own product line, there's also room to evolve to meet these requirements."

Edge switch products from companies like Cisco and Packeteer offer flavors of application-aware prioritization coordinating from the network up to the user level. Presentation-layer technologies naturally complement these, where performance issues affect the user. Traditional advantages from enterprise-based MetaFrame deployments focus on the "middleware" capability to front-end a client/server application:

* eliminates client overhead and administration costs using "thin" software client;

* manages bandwidth utilization on a per-connection basis; and

* centralizes authentication and system load balancing through a single point.

Performance issues in presentation are important, because they are what users see. Third-party network gear integration was a key step toward abstracting service quality management from the actual physical resources underneath them. In addition to adding Unix compatibility and new features to enrich graphical presentation (including video), newer developments in performance management include more thoroughly defined service-creation management of latency, application-based caching and load balancing.

Despite some ideological bias against "client-server" approaches, 2000 saw Citrix enter the Web application server market with nFuse, its own "portal" platform. Another term for this is "three-tier" application deployment that requires a MetaFrame server, a Web server and an ICA client--a "thin" client software installation. The nFuse portal software is offered free from the company site, with license upgrade capability at additional cost. NFuse offers hosting companies, service providers and ISVs a coherent set of features:

* client plug-ins for browser-based access and single-point authentication;

* support for heterogeneous servers, clients and Web applications;

* extranetVPN software for public-private key cross-platform security; and

* scripted service development and real-time deployment tools.

These features, including scripting tools, make the presentation-layer approach more relevant than ever to publicly available, networked services. A growing list of service providers and "enterprise application portal" developers are using Citrix to deploy new applications as the logical point of user administration and management. What is most exciting about these new services is that they offer "portal" customization to consolidate the deployment of applications over a network, regardless of whether they are client-server or Web-based. This reflects real-world requirements.

Integration and development tools are a strategic part of the Web applications story. The Project Vertigo offering, quietly announced during 2000, shows promise. Vertigo provides a real-time delivery interface that allows presentation-layer integration of data to multiple client types. Last spring, Giotto watched a live demonstration that wowed us, showing on-the-fly creation of portal information, delivering application data to multiple client types. Today, we are finally beginning to see "desktop anywhere" approaches deployed within enterprises, and via new service providers.

Next month, we'll continue the ASP infrastructure tour, with a look at networking gear companies, including Packeteer, Sitara Networks, Cisco and Nortel Networks.