Citrix Launches New Education Licensing to Jumpstart Campus-wide Adoption of Desktop Virtualization

SANTA CLARA » 12/8/2009 » Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), today announced a new campus-wide licensing option for educational organizations worldwide, making it easy and cost-effective to deliver unlimited virtual desktops and applications to every faculty and staff member, and student. The new campus-wide option is part of the company’s longstanding Education Licensing program, which is a simple, flexible program that helps education customers get the most up-to-date technology, even on a limited budget. Academic institutions at both the K-12 and university level have been early leaders of the virtual desktop revolution, boasting significant cost savings with some of the largest desktop virtualization deployments in production. With the introduction of the Citrix campus-wide option, educational institutions can now take advantage of the industry’s most comprehensive desktop virtualization solution, Citrix XenDesktop™ 4, on a broad scale for as little as $9 per student.

Virtual Desktops for Every Student, Anywhere
Educational institutions are in a perpetual struggle to support increasing student demands for better computing experiences in classrooms, laboratories, from home or anywhere on campus – against limited and often declining IT budgets. In response, leading IT pros at educational organizations have turned to desktop virtualization solutions to extend virtual desktop access to students, as well as to help reduce the operating costs of managing desktops in classrooms and labs. A recent Citrix survey found that 82 percent of education IT pros see desktop virtualization as a solution for cost reduction and better use of IT resources (see separate press release).

The availability of campus-wide licensing combined with the power of XenDesktop, enables IT pros to deliver the best virtual desktop to every student, and do it at the industry’s lowest per student software licensing costs(1). Unlike other virtual desktop technologies, XenDesktop 4 enables IT to address the unique requirements of every student with a single, centrally-managed solution. XenDesktop 4 accomplishes this through its unique FlexCast™ delivery technology, which gives IT the flexibility to deliver different types of desktops to meet the distinct and varied use cases required by students – in class, from home or dorms, from PCs, Macs and smartphones. XenDesktop with FlexCast can deliver everything from basic desktops for students doing reports and essays, to high-powered workstations for the engineering and science students. XenDesktop can even give students access to online class registration and grading systems directly from their smartphones. Campus-wide licensing for XenDesktop 4 enables educational organizations to offer unlimited use of virtual desktops and applications to all full-time equivalent (FTE) students, as well as faculty and staff members for one low, fixed cost.

(1) Based on comparisons with competing solutions

“I am excited to see Citrix is offering multiple licensing tracks to meet the specific desktop virtualization needs of higher education. Citrix now has flexible licensing via user, device, concurrent user and campus-wide site licensing to support our college’s strategic virtualization goals and objectives. I am especially encouraged with the campus-wide site licensing. This will allow our college to implement virtualization strategies in innovative ways without having to worry about licensing limits,” said Dustin Fennell, college chief information officer, Scottsdale Community College (Arizona). “We’re working on making a swift transition to XenDesktop 4, and are particularly interested in the FlexCast delivery technology, which can give us the flexibility to deliver multiple types of virtual desktops with a single solution.”

“Educational institutions are one of the fastest adopters of desktop virtualization. With limited resources and a constantly changing student population, schools and universities can immediately take advantage of the benefits of centralized desktop management and delivery,” said Al Monserrat, senior vice president, sales and services, Citrix Systems. “With our new licensing programs targeted toward education and non-profits, we are able to offer an extremely attractive cost structure that will help more institutions adopt desktop virtualization across their entire student, faculty and staff population.”  

Program Pricing
The Citrix Education Licensing program now consists of two options for customers based on their individual purchasing needs.

Campus-Wide Pricing – based on a specific Full-time Equivalent (FTE) student count where 100 percent of students are licensed in a school, department, district or campus. Faculty and staff can be covered under the same terms and pricing as students. Campus-wide pricing is available now for annual licenses (includes Subscription Advantage) of XenDesktop at the following suggested program list prices:

•  XenDesktop 4 VDI edition – $9 per student per year
•  XenDesktop 4 Enterprise edition – $19 per student per year
•  XenDesktop 4 Platinum edition – $29 per student per year

For details on Campus-Wide licensing, please visit www.citrix.com/campus

Standard Education Pricing – provides a 40 percent discount from the Suggested List Price on “a la carte” purchases of all Citrix products.

For complete program details, please visit www.citrix.com/educationlicensing

*Source: http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1860966&ntref=hp_promo_L