Early this week, there was much buzz and speculation about how Cisco and Citrix will be doing business differently. The news was finally unveiled at Mark Templeton’s keynote, when he introduced Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior, and they jointly announced the expansion to the two companies’ current partnership on three strategic areas: cloud networking, cloud orchestration and mobile workstyles.  Details are outlined in this press release.

The Cisco and Citrix alliance is a natural fit – the two companies have a common culture and vision with complementary solutions. We believe this expanded partnership greatly strengthens Cisco’s enterprise networking offering as we continue to enhance application service delivery over the wide area network.  

It builds on Cisco’s leadership in WAN optimization, which delivers the highest unit share of Cisco WAAS over any other vendor, and the broad security adoption with over one million Cisco ASAs deployed worldwide.  To support deeper network and application intelligence, Cisco and Citrix will now work together to deliver seamless co-existence of Citrix’s NetScaler ADC offering with Cisco WAAS and ASA technologies to support our joint customers.

This is the next phase of the strategic partnership we announced last year to make Cisco networks Citrix-aware.  The commitment for joint technology development and the go-to-market partnership has already created great synergies between our businesses and brought us great success in helping our customers deliver an optimal virtual desktop experience.  We believe strengthening the relationship will help customers smoothly transition to the mobile-cloud era.

As I blogged a couple weeks back on the new release of the Cisco VXI Smart Solution, Cisco will showcase how a Cisco Intelligent Network provides a secure, reliable and fast virtual desktop infrastructure to our joint customers.  For customer joining us at Citrix Synergy Barcelona, you can see that latest joint innovations in action, including:

• Cisco WAAS Optimizing Citrix traffic, now with support with multi-stream ICA shows a side-by-side comparison of two iPads running Citrix Receiver viewing a PowerPoint presentation, one optimized with Cisco WAAS and one that is not.  With the upcoming release of WAAS 5.1.1 optimizing the Citrix ICA traffic, we are able to show up to 90% reduction in the traffic that traverses the wide-area network(WAN) and apply granular QoS priority. 
• Cisco AVC (Application Visibility and Control) automatically detects delays or failures in the network and chooses the optimal path for Citrix traffic using PfR (Performance Routing).
• Single sign-on for XenDesktop and XenApp on a tablet with Cisco ASA software v9 on the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances allow users to have a seamless, secure, unified interface to their virtual desktop without an extra layer of signing on with a VPN client.

To learn more about Cisco at Citrix Synergy Barcelona, visit http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le21/le34/citrix/barcelona.html.  Get your network ready for the mobile-cloud era.