Quoting from the Citrix official announcement:
Citrix Systems, Inc. the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Ardence, Inc. of Waltham, Mass. This strategic technology acquisition extends Citrix’s end-to-end application delivery infrastructure leadership by enabling the real-time, on demand provisioning of desktops, server images and service oriented architecture objects.
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Several examples of how Ardence technologies will improve an enterprise’s application delivery infrastructure include:
- Provisioning Desktops for Delivery Over a Network
Using Ardence’s innovative OS-provisioning and remote network boot technology, any x86-based computer can be provisioned with an entire physical or virtual desktop environment from bare metal to production in minutes. This capability could be used, for example, to deliver new versions of operating systems, service packs and hot fixes to a diverse range of end users in minutes, then quickly rolled back to previous versions if problems are detected.- Enhanced Management of Citrix Presentation Server Components
The provisioning capabilities of Ardence will allow IT administrators to more quickly add new servers to a Citrix Presentation Server farm and allow for the dynamic configuration of servers in a data center.- Provisioning Web Server Images as Load Changes
Ardence also complements the Citrix NetScaler line of web application delivery solutions, allowing IT administrators to dynamically change the amount of storage or CPU capacity available to web applications during peak load times. For high-volume e-commerce applications, the Ardence technology can even re-provision web servers from one application to another on the fly as demand fluctuates. As customers adopt services oriented architectures (SOA) for their web application environments, the Ardence technology could also be used to provide on-demand provisioning of these application components…
The financial terms of the agreement are not being disclosed. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2007.
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Upon close of the transaction, the Ardence team and products will remain based in Waltham, Mass. and report into the Management Systems Group (MSG), also based in the Boston area, under Lou Shipley.
Brian Madden published some interesting thoughts about this acquisition you may want to read.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.