Citrix Campus agreement will it increase demand for Microsoft skills?

DATE: July 20th 2010

The Citrix Campus agreement may force many academic organisations to seriously look at Microsoft technologies such as RDS, App-V and VDI instead due to prohibitive costs.

Having just experienced a prolonged battle in trying to get a cost effective way forward with this campus agreement, I've decided to push Microsoft as the way forward for my customer.

Whilst it's a known fact, Citirix licensing costs more than the Microsoft equivalent product, substantially more. What needs to be understood is that Citrix do not necessarily follow the Microsoft way of licensing for acadmic institutions. This is what takes an already expensive product and blows it's costs out of proportion.

Microsoft options

With Microsoft technologies becoming better over the years, the advantages Citrix technology held may not be as appealing any more especially when the cost difference is so much.

Technology such as Remote Desktop Services (RDS) which is a newer version of Terminal Services provides similar capabilities to Citrix XenApp, with less of the limitations than previously. Ok, it's not the enterprise product XenApp is, but is this really important in the academic world?

Citrix licensing

The campus agreement touted by Citrix allows academic institutions to pay a yearly charge which includes Subscription Advantage. On the face of it sounds great, as instead of paying per user or device (or concurrently in some instances), academic institions can license their entire estate for a smaller yearly charge.

Actually there are big differences, which can end up in licensing costing a 100 times more than Microsoft's offerings.