Kurt Shintaku's Blog

On May 20th Microsoft announced with Citrix, the immediate availability of a new branch office appliance that optimizes application delivery to remote branch offices.

This appliance accelerates applications over the Wide Area Network and pre-positions application content closer to branch office users, called the Citrix Branch Repeater this appliance will be sold by Citrix as part of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, an end-to-end infrastructure designed to help customers transform static datacenters into dynamic delivery centers.

Just as digital television repeaters amplify and retransmit media signals to homes in a given neighborhood, Citrix Branch Repeater sits between corporate datacenters and branch offices, amplifying and retransmitting applications to branch office users. The Citrix Branch Repeater provides an ideal complement to application virtualization solutions, enhancing application delivery and performance while simultaneously delivering critical Windows Server infrastructure services in the branch.

News in the branch office market has been dominated in recent years by WAN optimization appliances. These appliances accelerate access to applications over the WAN and minimize bandwidth utilization. This compelling value prop allows customers to centralize their server infrastructure while mitigating challenges of performance degradation and reducing their monthly WAN costs. Over the last year we have seen these appliances, often built on Linux, move up the stack and offer services such as print, DNS, DHCP, authentication, and security. WAN optimization appliances with Windows Server present a tremendous opportunity for us to protect the Windows socket in the branch office to ensure that our customers remain committed to our core infrastructure services from the datacenter to the branch. We believe this socket will be a valuable platform on which to sell additional services such as management, security and unified communications offerings to the branch customer. As customers investigate WAN optimization alternatives, it is critical that we engage them early to help them understand the value of joint solutions like the Citrix Branch Repeater.

While the current version of the Citrix Branch Repeater is built on Windows Server 2003 and ISA Server 2006, Citrix has begun development and testing of the Branch Repeater on  Windows Server 2008 and will provide an update on availability of these versions of the Windows 2008 based product at a later date.  

The enclosed press release and FAQs contains more detailed information. We have also scheduled an Academy Live session on June 3rd titled – Branch Office Infrastructure: Partners Competitors, and Opportunities. This session will cover this announcement as well as branch office products from our partners Cisco and Packeteer.