Citrix + Softricity + Microsoft – Softricity = ?
In the old days, Softricity was a partner of Citrix. Citrix is a partner of Microsoft. And Softricity was a partner of Microsoft, but is now part of Microsoft. See where this is going?
When Softricity was acquired, there was some industry speculation as to what would happen to the great interoperability between SoftGrid and Citrix’s presentation virtualization server product, MetaFrame, now called XenApp.
Chad Jones, Senior Product Manager for SoftGrid/MS AppVirt has posted a blog entry to a blog entry (ain’t the web meta-cool?) that dispels any remaining doubt, and demonstrates how Citrix and Microsoft continue to be “better together” as partners when it comes to application virtualization.
The article in question outlines how their two products work together for optimized interoperability. We’ve known this story for a long time, and in fact, Citrix has been the “gateway” technology for getting SoftGrid into many of our customer’s environments. We still believe that the two solutions work great together, and are quick to recommend their combination.
There are several jumps here – all of them are interesting reading:
Chad Jones’ article on the SoftGrid Team Blog
(There are two good KB articles on Citrix/MS AppVirt on this post.)
Working Together – Application Virtualization from Citrix & Microsoft (Citrix Community Blog)
My favorite highlights from the Citrix post:
There are several scenarios in which the application virtualization capabilities of both Citrix and Microsoft work together:
…
3. Publish MS App Virtualization sequences in XenApp – In addition, it is possible for Citrix XenApp and Microsoft Application Virtualization to work together. Microsoft Application Virtualization packages can be published in XenApp.
4. Apply XenApp policies to Microsoft Application Virtualization packages – This interoperability can be taken a step further. Existing Microsoft Application Virtualization sequences can interoperate with the XenApp policy features like SmartAccess and the XenApp Profiler, further extending the overall manageability of the joint solution.
