With the aquisition of Netscaler nearing its conclusion, and Netscaler exec's speccing out their new Porsche's, what does it mean for the Citrix Gateways Division?

When it was announced in June, Netscaler was positioned as being a seperate division, the Citrix Applications Division. But would it really make sense to have one comapny that built hardware in 2 seperate places?

Now you could see further synergy from merging the organisations, becasue whilst Netscaler provide an SSL VPN in the Application Gateway, it doesn't have anywhere near the granular control of Access Gateway Enterprise.

Would it make sense to consolidate the hardware platforms? At least give them a common look and feel to present the impression of a family of technology?

Given the functionality in AGE but no SSL acceleration, perhaps it would be one plan to integrate the functionality of AGE into the Netscaler applicance to leaverage its SSL acceleration technology, this could then extend the modular approach adopted by Netscaler.

At a seminar the other week which featured Netscaler, I was asked which SSL VPN a customer with Presentation Server should choose. To me its almost a non-question. If you have Presentation Server and are using version 4.0 or intend to move to it, then it makes sense to go with Access Gateway Enterprise to get the indepth granualr control of the ICA channels, along with all the other features.

There is no way that a technology investment in AGE will be wasted, it is what enables SmartAccess which is the new cornerstone for Citrix, Netscaler will be used to improve perfomance and scalablity, but the underlying functionality comes from AGE.So for now it seems sensible to go with AGE, despite some of the short comings.

I will just be interested to see if Citrix choose to go with the Netscaler box just becasue it is quieter than the Gateway appliance.