==> The ten things I learned about Citrix

Number One: It's about the marketing.
Citrix is pulling together the pieces and presenting them as a platform to the market. My only wish is that some company would not use the "Center" naming convention for their product line. But they have called this Delivery Center. The primary message is that Citrix will make distributed technology easier to deliver. The focus will be on provisioning, publish/subscribe, virtualization, and optimization over the network.

Number Two: Merging enterprise and consumer computing.
Citrix's strategy is to be the company that closes the gap between enterprise computing and consumer computing. CEO, Mark Templeton firmly believes that the company's participation in both markets makes it uniquely positioned to straddle these worlds. I think that he is on to something. How can you really separate the personal computing function from applications and distributed workloads in the enterprise?

Number Three: Partnerships are a huge part of the strategy.
Citrix has done an excellent job on the partnering front. It has over 6,000 channel partners. It has strong OEM agreements with HP and Dell and Microsoft. Microsoft has made it clear that it intends to leverage the Citrix partnership to take on VMWare in the market.

Number Four: Going for more.
The company has a clear vision around selecting adjacent markets to deliver an end-to-end solutions. Clearly, there will be more acquisitions coming but at the same time, it will continue to leverage partnerships.

Number Five: It's all about SaaS.
Citrix has gained a lot of experience in the software as a service model over the past few years with its online division (GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting). The company will invest a lot more in the SaaS model.

Number Six: And its all about the Cloud.
Just like everyone else Citrix will move into Cloud Computing. Because its NetScaler appliance is so prevalent in many SaaS environments, it believes that it has the opportunity to become a market leader. It is counting on its virtualization software, its workflow and orchestration technology to help them become a player.

Number Seven: Going for the gold.
With the acquisition of XenSource combined with its other assets, Citrix can take on VMWare for supremacy in virtualization. This is clearly an ambitious goal given VMWare's status in the market.

Number Eight: Going after the Data Center market.
Citrix believes that it has the opportunity to be a key data center player. It is proposing that it can lead its data center strategy by starting with centralization through virtualization of servers, desktops, and operating systems and provide dynamic provisioning, workflow, and workload management. Citrix has an opportunity but it is a complicated and crowded market.

Number Nine: Desktop graphic virtualization.
Project Apollo, Citrix's desktop graphics virtualization project seems to be moving full steam ahead and could add substantial revenue to the bottom line over time. However, there is a lot of emerging competition in this space so Citrix will have to move fast.

Number Ten: Size matters.
And speaking of revenue—Citrix is ambitious. While its revenues have topped $1 billion, it hopes to triple that number over the next few years. And then, what? Who knows.