Citrix, Microsoft Collaborate On Branch Office Appliance

Microsoft and Citrix are planning a new appliance to ease the deployment and management of branch office infrastructure.

The upcoming box, slated to ship in the second half of 2007, will combine Windows Server 2003 R2 and ISA server from Microsoft with WANScaler WAN optimization software. Citrix acquired WANScaler in its just-completed buyout of Orbital Data, said Wes Wasson, vice president of Citrix' Application Networking Group.

That appliance will knit together security, caching, data compression, remote print and file management, security from its component parts.

The appliance, to be built with common hardware, will be branded and sold by Citrix and its partners, said Wasson and Bala Kasiviswanathan, Microsoft group product manager for Windows Server Branch and Storage Solutions.

Pricing was not disclosed, but Wasson said the companies would likely come up with a family of products targeting branch offices of different sizes.The goal of the product is to be easy to plug in and run remotely. There is a large pool of partners with both Citrix and Microsoft expertise who could use this to enter branch office businesses and remotely manage them. Many of these offices are severely IT constrained, many with no IT staff at all, both exeuctives said.

Cisco, Juniper Networks, Riverbed Technology, Silverpeak and other vendors offer similar appliances, some running Linux. The Citrix and Microsoft executives said their upcoming box combines infrastructural capabilities not offered in those solutions.