Delivering Mobile and Cloud Services Now Gets End-to-End Network Control

From the Data Center across the WAN to the User – with unique Citrix integrations for the Cisco Open Network Environment

In the long history of the Cisco and Citrix partnership, the two companies have worked together to deliver great solutions to many of the largest corporations in the world. About 16 months ago, we enthusiastically agreed to expand the solution sets we jointly deliver beyond Desktop Virtualization to also address the Mobility, Cloud Services and Cloud Networking marketplaces. Few other alliances in the industry can match the breadth and depth of the integrated solutions Cisco and Citrix are developing.

This week at Cisco Live in Milan, I now have yet another reason to stay excited about our partnership with Cisco… the new announcement from Cisco about Cisco ONE (Open Network Environment) Platform supporting “both” datacenter and enterprise networks.

Cisco’s decision to consolidate their automation technology in the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) is a powerful move that unequivocally demonstrates that Cisco not only gets “open” but is truly encouraging their partner ecosystems to add meaningful value to common customers via deep integrations. As a strategic partner, we support Cisco in this transition and have already made investments in tying the APIC to the NetScaler family of products, most notably with Citrix NetScaler 1000V.

The addition of the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module is an equally powerful step in making application centric infrastructure (ACI) and network automation truly ubiquitous across both current and future network infrastructure. By enabling the entire family of Cisco WAN, Access, Wireless and Data Center products to be uniformly controlled by the APIC , Cisco effectively does away any notion of needing forklift upgrades as customers transition to a software-defined network era.

At Cisco Live Milan, we’ll be demonstrating a real-life scenario of how ACI, enabled by deep Citrix and Cisco integrations, provides unprecedented visibility and control when delivering desktop and mobile services. Specifically, we’ll be connecting end-user experience data taken from Citrix XenDesktop, the market leading virtual desktop solution, and Citrix NetScaler, the ADC powering many of the world’s largest clouds, to seamlessly stream into the APIC Enterprise Module to enable fine grain network control of the end user experience. In the demo, the NetScaler Gateway detects a potential degradation in the end-user experience with its native knowledge of the HDX protocol and automatically calls on the APIC to change a network-level QoS policy. The APIC, now tied with the Enterprise Module, is able to drive the change across the entire network starting with the DC and extending to the the WAN and Access and wireless networks and show an immediate improvement in the end-user experience in an end-to-end network.

As the unified front-end for all things Citrix, NetScaler can also use the same approach to deliver value to mobile and virtual app delivery via XenMobile and XenApp. The NetScaler VPX, SDX, MPX, and 1000v can further broaden this scope to any forms of deployment across any applications in the public and private cloud.

Anybody can show a “relationship” with a press release and a quote, but it takes deep product integrations consistently delivered across various product lines to bring forth the true end-to-end synergy between companies to deliver meaningful customer value across multiple domains. Cisco and Citrix are great partners because of this synergy and we look forward to continuing to work together to deliver powerful value to our mutual customers as we transform to the mobile-cloud era.