Yesterday Citrix announced a new XenServer pricing modelthat is already creating headlines across the industry. XenServer is the first server virtualization product to do away with the complex and outdated per CPU socket pricing, moving to a per server model.  Administrators no longer need to worry about counting the numbers of sockets, cores, CPUs etc - servers is what matters.

Part of the Citrix DNA is to simplify and streamline the whole customer experience - in addition to building intuitive and easy to use products, we extend the ease of use concept to how the product is evaluated, purchased and supported.  Citrix XenServer doesn't have a plethora of confusing options and add-on packs - everything is bundled into one or more editions within the product line, dramatically reducing the size and complexity of our price lists and the purchasing & ownership experience.

We noticed that selling based on per 2 CPU sockets was causing confusion in the marketplace, especially between sockets, CPUs, and CPU cores.  In the days of multiple core CPUs does pricing per physical CPU make sense?  How many administrators know exactly how many sockets are in their organization - (everyone knows the number of servers) - Per server just makes sense.

So for XenServer 4.1 each license is an entitlement to support a unique physical server within the organization. In addition we support both annual (12 months  usage) and perpetual licenses.  We're defining per server as industry standard 2 and 4 socket servers, as these represent apprximately 99% of all servers - 8 CPU (and above) servers are specialized systems and we continue to offer unique pricing.

Moving forward you're going to see a continued focus on ease of use, making Citrix XenServer the best server virtualization choice!

Anyone watching Citrix these days knows that Citrix believes virtualization is critical. However, we're not just a server virtualization company.   

We see virtualization as part of a much bigger IT infrastructure. Citrix believes virtualization is critical. We were preaching virtualization before long before the rest of the industry knew how to spell the word. We think it's so important that we acquired XenSource to expand our leadership aggressively.

We think it's so important that we renamed our flagship product XenApp to clearly assert it's dominance in one of the most critical areas of virtualization (an area where our competition still is on training wheels) - the APPLICATION. We have an end-to-end virtualization product strategy, from applications to desktops to servers.

We do not, however, believe virtualization is the end game - it's an enabling technology that needs to be APPLIED to something much bigger and more strategic - something like application delivery.

Citrix is not just a server virtualization company, our vision is much bigger and more strategic than that - we're an application delivery company.