Company: Citrix Systems Inc., Fort Lauderdale, FL

Company Division/Group: A&R Partners

Company Description: Citrix Systems, Inc. is the global leader and most trusted name in on-demand access. More than 160,000 organizations around the world use the Citrix Access Platform to provide the best possible access experience to any application for any user. Citrix and its 6,200 partners offer access solutions for individual professionals, small businesses, and enterprises.

Nomination Category: Company, Office & Product Awards Categories

Nomination Sub Category: Best New Product or Service

Nomination Title: Citrix Application Gateway & Voice Office

   1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its functions, features, benefits, and sales results to date. You may include here hyperlinks to product photographs and data sheets. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, http://www.youraddress.com:

Citrix® Voice Office application suite delivers the benefit of IP Telephony to users by providing practical, converged voice and data applications. The Citrix® Voice Office application suite is a set of packaged applications that are an optional feature on the Citrix Application GatewayTM.  Application Gateway delivers the best access experience for everyone: rapidly expanded on-demand access for the business, simple access for users, and high-performance, secure access for IT. Voice Office applications are pre-packaged, meaning no integration work whatsoever, and help increase user productivity, simplify user interaction, reduce user training, and enhance organizational communications.

The Voice Office suite of applications includes:

Express Directory is an LDAP-based, organization-wide directory with single keystroke per letter entry and high-speed pruning algorithms. This application makes the directory key on the phone usable by reducing the time to look-up and dial by 75% when compared to using the existing telephone switch directory.

Visual Voicemail enables users to see a visual list of their voice messages with the ability to select the most important ones to review, without having to listen to each message in a serial fashion. 

Broadcast Server delivers priority messages such as emergency, IT, and weather alerts in the form of text, graphics and audio messages to the screens and speakers of IP telephones. Recent weather occurrences, computer virus outbreaks, and the increased focus on homeland security have increased demand to communicate quickly with employees.

Zone Paging enables organizations to leverage their IP telephony systems as a conduit for voice paging. Organizations can now deploy a cost-effective means to deliver emergency alerts, make general broadcast announcements, and ultimately improve overall internal communications.

Click-to-Call using Citrix® Smart Agent enables users to dial their telephone by simply clicking on telephone numbers within emails and applications and information that can be accessed using Internet Explorer. Smart Agent alleviates the need to install and maintain TAPI service providers or soft phones on each personal computer.

Application Transformation allows for virtually any existing HTML or XML-based business application to be transformed for interaction on IP telephones using the Citrix Application Gateway™ and Citrix® Design Studio.  Applications include corporate directories, employee time-clocks, ERP applications, inventory reports, back-office applications, and more.

Application Menus are used to easily build an organized view of multiple business applications available to a user’s IP telephones and mobile devices.

   2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, product reviews, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, http://www.youraddress.com:

http://citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=22582

http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=22660

   3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed the nominated product or service:

Goutham Rao

CTO, Gateways Group

A network and security veteran on an international scale, Rao provides technology, architectural and product leadership with a focus on identifying new market opportunities and creating winning business and product solutions for Citrix customers and partners.

Rao joined Citrix in December of 2004, through the $50M acquisition of Net6, Inc., a leader in Security, SSL VPN Remote Access and Communication Application Solutions.  With Net6, a Silicon Valley based start-up, he held the positions of both CTO and Chief Architect, establishing a strong position for the company leading up to the acquisition by Citrix Systems, Inc.