Citrix offers 'pay-as-you-grow' pricing

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 19 November 2009 08:16

IT Industry - Market

Citrix is claiming ‘groundbreaking’ new ‘Pay-as-You-Grow’ on-demand pricing for its Citrix NetScaler line of application acceleration, load balancing and web security appliances, which it says allows its customers to buy only what they need today, knowing they can easily scale up their network as demand grows with a simple software license upgrade.

Citrix announced the new pay-as-you-grow pricing today at Interop New York which it says allows users to get around the fact that  “most networking systems require expensive hardware replacements to expand capacity and functionality, which often forces customers to over provision and pay for more than they need at any given time.”

According to Citrix, the new pay-as-you-grow pricing from Cbreaks this dependency, “enabling customers to buy only what they need today, knowing they can easily scale up their network as demand grows with a simple software license upgrade.”

The company says the flexible pricing applies to both high-performance NetScaler MPX hardware appliances as well as the new software-based NetScaler VPX virtual appliances, and it says that instead of making purchase decisions based on “unreliable traffic growth projections”, NetScaler customers can now purchase a networking solution that meets near-term performance and capacity requirements, “with the confidence that they can easily and quickly scale in the future without costly hardware replacements.”

Citrix claims the new licensing flexibility makes NetScaler “an ideal complement to server virtualisation, enabling customers to scale overall datacentre capacity in the most efficient way possible.”

And, there’s some endorsement for Citrix from both Qualcomm and IDC.  “Forecasting datacentre capacity requirements is a tricky proposition for any large company, especially as enterprise networking needs become more dynamic,” said Zeeshan Sabir, director of information technology at Qualcomm,“ adding that “Citrix NetScaler Pay-as-You-Grow pricing offers some compelling new cost efficiencies that can help simplify the hardware provisioning process.”

According to IDC’s Cindy Borovick , “with IT budget growth remaining constrained in the face of macroeconomic uncertainty, any development that will provide greater investment protection is welcomed by customers, unlocking networking performance with a license upgrade takes a benefit once reserved for software products, and applies it to a strategic portion of the networking market.”

Citrix says its Pay-as-You-Grow pricing is available today for all NetScaler VPX virtual appliances, as well as for the NetScaler MPX 7500, MPX 9500, MPX 10500 and MPX 12500 hardware appliances, and customer upgrade licenses can be purchased through any authorised Citrix Solution Advisor.