Citrix Systems, Inc., a leader in application delivery infrastructure, announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Ardence, Inc. of Waltham, Mass. According to Citrix, this strategic technology acquisition will extend the company's end-to-end application delivery infrastructure leadership by enabling the real-time, on demand provisioning of desktops, server images and service oriented architecture Citrix Systems, Inc., a leader in application delivery infrastructure, announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Ardence, Inc. of Waltham, Mass. According to Citrix, this strategic technology acquisition will extend the company’s end-to-end application delivery infrastructure leadership by enabling the real-time, on demand provisioning of desktops, server images and service oriented architecture objects. This real-time provisioning capability promises improved IT agility; increases security and reliability, and offers new options for how businesses deliver applications and desktops over the network to users.Ardence has two product groups: one focused on on-demand provisioning, the other focused on real-time operating systems. Citrix stated that it has selected Ardence for its synergistic technology that, when combined with Citrix’s existing product portfolio, reinforces its overall application delivery strategy and positions the company as a strategic vendor for desktop delivery infrastructure.Several examples of how Ardence technologies will improve an enterprise’s application delivery infrastructure include: 1. Provisioning Desktops for Delivery Over a Network – Using Ardence’s innovative OS-provisioning and remote network boot technology, any x86-based computer can be provisioned with an entire physical or virtual desktop environment from bare metal to production in minutes. This capability could be used, for example, to deliver new versions of operating systems, service packs and hot fixes to a diverse range of end users in minutes, then quickly rolled back to previous versions if problems are detected.2. Enhanced Management of Citrix Presentation Server Components. The provisioning capabilities of Ardence will allow IT administrators to more quickly add new servers to a Citrix Presentation Server farm and allow for the dynamic configuration of servers in a data center.3. Provisioning Web Server Images as Load Changes – Ardence also complements the Citrix NetScaler line of web application delivery solutions, allowing IT administrators to dynamically change the amount of storage or CPU capacity available to web applications during peak load times. For high-volume e-commerce applications, the Ardence technology can even re-provision web servers from one application to another on the fly as demand fluctuates. As customers adopt services oriented architectures (SOA) for their web application environments, the Ardence technology could also be used to provide on-demand provisioning of these application components. The financial terms of the agreement are not being disclosed. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2007. Software Development