Citrix Systems Claims 24 Million users for Its ICA - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, May 24, 2000

Citrix Systems Inc. touted the momentum of its flavor of application server-based computing with an announcement that 24 million users adopted its Independent Computing Architecture (ICA).

Citrix (www.citrix.com) holds a wide lead in market share in the server-based computing area, which is gaining importance as the application service provider (ASP) business model gathers steam.

The company is facing increasing pressure in the growing market from competitors such as The Santa Cruz Operation Inc. (SCO), GraphOn Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., and Microsoft Corp. But each company takes a different enough approach to the problems of thin-, legacy- or diverse-client access to server-based applications, so direct competition on accounts is relatively infrequent.

ICA is the technology behind MetaFrame, the Citrix software that allows different types of clients to access applications on a server, where most of the application processing takes place.

The Citrix technology includes a server software component, a protocol component, and a client component. On the server, ICA separates application logic from the user interface and performs all application processing on the server. The ICA network protocol transports keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screen updates to the client. Users see the application's interface on the client.

Citrix introduced ICA in 1995. An earlier version of the software using ICA was called Citrix WinFrame, which connected client machines to Windows NT 3.51 servers. Citrix MetaFrame came out in 1998 with connectivity to Windows NT Server 4.0. Earlier this year, Citrix added support in MetaFrame for applications hosted on Sun Solaris servers. The company says it will port to other flavors of Unix, as well.

According to Citrix, more than 130 companies own 6 million concurrent ICA client licenses and are using the software to deliver applications to more than 200 different types of client devices.

In a prepared statement, Edward Iacobucci, Citrix chairman and CTO called the figures "a testament to the ongoing acceptance of our enabling technology." He said, "With 24 million users, ICA has surpassed the user count of the most popular online information services, reinforcing Citrix's leadership position in application server markets."