Citrix Systems is to
buy Orbital Data in a move that will
strengthen its hand in optimising WAN application connections for branch-office
staff and other users of remote services.
The $50m deal will see
California-based Orbital’s technology offered under the Citrix WANscaler brand
as a way to speed up web- and client/server-based applications delivered via
Citrix Presentation Server and NetScaler. Further integration with other Citrix
products will follow.
Citrix said that “problematic
applications such as file-sharing and large data transfers will be boosted by up
to a factor of 50. Quality of service for video and other services would also
benefit, Citrix said.
Citrix cited IDC data
suggesting the WAN optimisation sector will almost double to be worth $610m by
2009. That demand has attracted networking firms such as Cisco, Juniper and F5
to make their own acquisitions.
Citrix added that 55 percent of
enterprise staff access business applications remotely. Certainly, the sector
should be buoyed by rising costs of office space and traffic congestion in
cities, and increasingly liberal attitudes to remote working.
