The takeover of privately held San Mateo, California-based Oribital will be worth around $52m, and the acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2006. The 60-strong company, which has been in business since 2002, claims to have 75 enterprise customers.
Citrix is making a bid to marry a complementary set of applications delivery technologies that can be used to manage and optimize the performance of any server-based, web-based, or desktop-based program on any end-point device, depending on access requirements, the available bandwidth, and whatever the type and state of the network connection.
The recent acquisition of application monitoring vendor Reflectent gave Citrix a platform in the area of what it calls application visibility, while the acceleration technology it got last year as part of the acquisition of NetScaler fleshed out the area of application optimization.
The acquired Orbital Data will provide technology that will optimize the delivery of any web or client-server application delivered over wide area networks by Citrix Presentation Server and Citrix NetScaler.
The companies said that in internal tests, the product can seemingly improve the performance of Presentation Server by as much as five times, especially where remote printing and local file save tasks necessitate the transfer of large volumes of data over the WAN.
Once the deal closes, Citrix will sell the Orbital Data line badged with the Citrix WANScaler brand.
