For the past 10 years Citrix, in all its various versions, has proven itself to be my faithful friend.  Together we have wheather all of the trials and tribulations that IT can throw at a person.  And furthermore, we've been successful.  Citrix has, in large part, been responsible for the success of my ERP career.  That's why, with much sadness, I realize this once great product does not have much of a future.

Microsoft has had remote desktop offering since 1998 when they released Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition.  Its functionality, while extremely useful, was somewhat limited.  If you just needed to publish a single application or do server load balancing in a meaningful way Citrix was the answer.  Don't even get me started about the bandwidth benefits of the ICA protocol versus RDP.  But alas, this is all ancient history.

With Windows 2008 Server Microsoft has added into terminal services all of the functionality that once made Citrix great.  The most compelling feature new feature added is support for Remote Applications (aka published apps).  With remote applications you no longer have to have your users running in a full desktop session to take advantage of remote computing power.

Now, you can simply publish out an individual application and it interacts seamlessly with your desktop giving the illusion that it is installed locally.   

The second traditional advantage Citrix has always had was the ability to publish your applications to the Web.  Microsoft also has an answer for this now with it's TS Gateway.  The model is you place a gateway server on your network perimeter and your Internet users users connect to it using RPC over HTTP.  The beautiful thing for the end user is that no VPN is required.

In interest of fairness I should mention one of the main limitations are ever encountered with this new version of terminal services.  You requirement for connecting to the new terminal services is that your workstation or laptop be running either XP SP3 or Vista SP1.  Many enterprises have chosen to go with extremely thin clients such as Winterms or are running Linux on the desktops.  At this time such an approach is not possible although I'm sure third parties will very quickly stepped in to fill these gaps.

So is Citrix dead?  Only time will tell the answer.