New Citrix NetScaler 8.0 Gives Customers Unprecedented Ability to Manage the Experience of Enterprise Application Users

Business Wire, April 9, 2007

Latest NetScaler Release is First in Industry to Integrate Market-Leading Application Firewall, SSL VPN and End User Experience Monitoring to Support Increasingly Complex Web Applications

AppExpert Visual Policy Builder Sets New Ease-of-use Standard for Configuring Powerful Application and User Specific Policies

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced the newest version of its NetScaler product line, extending its ability to deliver web-based applications with the fastest performance, best security and lowest total cost of ownership. This newest release enables companies to keep pace with growing application complexity and rapidly rising user expectations by making it dramatically easier to set precise policies to match any application and user scenario. With significant new capabilities such as easy graphical policy configuration, full transaction-level application intelligence, integrated SSL VPN and web application firewall, as well as built-in end user experience monitoring, Citrix[R] NetScaler[R] 8.0 redefines the state-of-the-art in application delivery, making it far easier and more cost effective to deliver web-based applications to any user, on any device, in any location.

With the emergence of new technology trends such as Web 2.0, enterprise mash-ups and services oriented architectures (SOA), enterprise application environments are growing increasingly diverse and complex. At the same time, the growing popularity of highly interactive consumer web environments such as MySpace, You Tube and Google are dramatically resetting user expectations for what an enterprise web application experience should be like. With an estimated 75 percent of all Internet users going through a Citrix NetScaler system on any given day, Citrix has long been the leader in application delivery infrastructure for the world's most demanding consumer web applications. The new NetScaler 8.0 release brings much of that experience to the world of enterprise web applications, giving IT administrators unprecedented ability to improve the experience of corporate application users.

To achieve these goals, the new NetScaler 8.0 release offers two significant areas of innovation. First, it sets a new standard in controlling application and user specific policies with its AppExpert Policy Framework and makes those policies far easier to configure with its groundbreaking AppExpert Visual Policy Builder. Second, it tightly integrates adjacent Citrix infrastructure technologies that are frequently deployed along the line-of-sight between web applications and users, becoming the first application delivery controller on the market to offer fully integrated SSL VPN for intelligent application access security, web application firewall for application and data protection, and end user experience monitoring to measure application performance from the perspective of the end user. Each of these newly integrated capabilities plugs into the AppExpert Policy Framework giving administrators unprecedented control over the entire web application delivery process.

According to Gartner, Inc.1, "The application acceleration market addresses one of the most important problems facing IT organizations today -- the reliable, dependable delivery of new and existing applications across LANs and WANs. Application acceleration appliances enable server/data center consolidation and deployment of browser-based application interfaces while lowering total cost of ownership."

"We recognize trends in rich-web applications growing in complexity and cost, and as the web expands and users begin engaging these rich services for more time each day, we don't see it getting easier anytime soon," said Michael Jones, CEO of Userplane, an AOL company. "NetScaler allowed us to substantially lower cost and expand our network to support this growing demand."

New Features Change the Game in Web Application Delivery

These new capabilities make Citrix NetScaler 8.0 the most strategic infrastructure for delivering any web application to any user in any location. Highlights include:

* AppExpert Policy Framework: As applications become increasingly complex, applying the best acceleration, security and availability policies requires far deeper transaction-level intelligence than most application delivery controllers are capable of providing. This problem gets worse in a Web 2.0 world where many of the important details of a transaction are often wrapped inside web services or expressed deep inside the application payload where most networking systems have no visibility. NetScaler's new AppExpert Policy Framework solves these problems by allowing administrators and developers to set policy for any NetScaler feature based on bi-directional visibility into the entire application stream, including the full application transaction, AJAX payload or XML message body. As a result, NetScaler administrators can now easily set policies that customize optimization settings for specific applications and automatically set higher levels of service or more stringent security inspections based on the dollar value or urgency of a user-initiated transaction. Unlike alternative products that have visibility only into basic header-level content, this powerful new capability allows NetScaler to apply the best delivery policy for each specific application and user scenario.