Citrix ditches ASP tag

NEWS The newly appointed CEO of thin client giant Citrix has admitted the company has backtracked on its positioning as a technology provider for ASPs. Speaking exclusively to silicon.com, CEO Mark Templeton said: "Its fair to say we were characterising ourselves as an ASP infrastructure provider nine months ago. It's fair to say that's not true now - in terms of words." Templeton insisted, however, that the sudden coyness in using the ASP acronym didn't indicate a change of strategy, just a change of rhetoric. "We do still talk about applications as a service. We have millions of users who are working in hosted environments, but you won't hear us using the term so much now." Templeton said the much-feted ASP (application service provider) revolution has failed to occur because the concept was initially over-hyped. However, he denied Citrix was part of the hype machine, despite the fact the company was one of the founder members of the ASP Industry Consortium (ASPIC), a body set up to promote the industry. Indeed, Traver Gruen-Kennedy, vice president of strategy for Citrix, was initially chairman of ASPIC. Mark Templeton recently received a vote of confidence from the Citrix board, being re-appointed as CEO just two weeks ago after Citrix announced last June it wanted to replace him. The markets reacted badly to his appointment, seeing it as a failure to find an adequate replacement. However, Citrix shares recovered when it upped analyst expectations last week for its next set of results. Templeton said the firm was back on track, following a difficult year. Analysts agree Citrix is looking healthier now than a year ago when Templeton was demoted by the board. Clive Longbottm, service director at analyst house quocirca, said Citrix is successfully moving from a client/server company to one based on web applications, and had picked up ASP business along the way. Citrix's brief flirtation with the ASP acronym is symbolic of the ASP concept's wider acceptance within the industry. Following a period of sky high expectations driven by the idea of software as a service, the pendulum has swung viciously the other way, taking a number of the smaller pure-play ASPs with it. Doug Michels, CEO of Citrix rival Tarantella, is cynical about the way Citrix used the ASP tag when it was still fashionable. "Citrix probably found investors liked the ASP story about a year ago," he said. However, Michels admits his company wasn't entirely innocent of the same crime, saying: "We probably don't talk about ASPs as much as we used to."