Citrix says it has no interest in delivering native
Linux support in its products, and that it will continue to rely on
the Windows platform.
The company, which is a close partner of Microsoft, says there
is no significant demand for Linux in the public and private
sector.
At the firm’s annual iForum global user meeting in Orlando,
Florida, Citrix chief executive officer Mark Templeton said, “There
is no real demand for Linux support in our main products.”
Templeton acknowledged that the public sector in particular was
moving towards adopting or partly adopting a Linux environment, but
he described these moves as “experiments”.
He said, “Governments may make these moves through policy
judgements, rather than business needs – that is what governments
do. If there was a real business need for Linux it would be widely
used by businesses, but it is not. We are doing things to address
business needs, rather than for the ‘cool factor’.”
Templeton observed that open source-based collaborative
products such as Star Office, sold by Sun Microsystems, “worked
better on Windows anyway”.
Citrix, which is rapidly expanding its product portfolio to
allow companies to accelarate and optimise the delivery of
applications to employees, acquired Orbital Data to enable it to
offer WanScaler, its new wide area network optimisation system.
The appliance-based product currently relies on a Linux OS, but
Citrix intends introducing a Windows-based WanScaler appliance,
said David Jones, Citrix vice-president for business
development.
Jones also said Linux companies such as IBM, Red Hat and Novell
“would be very interested” to see Citrix develop native Linux
versions of its products to run on their server platforms, but he
said there was no real demand for it in the marketplace.