Citrix Expands Offerings for the Business-Savvy Cloud 
This fall, Citrix is expanding its cloud portfolio with the release of a new offering aimed at simplifying and automating the commerce and customer service aspects of running a cloud business. Citrix CloudPortal tackles on-boarding, account management, billing and metering, customer service and service provisioning.
This fall, Citrix is expanding its cloud portfolio with the release of a new offering aimed at simplifying and automating the commerce and customer service aspects of running a cloud business. Citrix CloudPortal tackles on-boarding, account management, billing and metering, customer service and service provisioning.
“Our new CloudPortal product line is a perfect example of that, enabling customers to quickly and easily transform general purpose cloud infrastructure into successful, innovative, profitable businesses,” Sameer Dholakia, group vice president for Citrix’s cloud platforms group said in a statement.
The cloud services market is projected to exceed $55 billion by the end of 2014, Dholakia noted. He added that such growth projects will require the delivery of more efficient technology solutions.
In order to grow to cloud-scale while maintaining sufficient margins and quality customer service, cloud providers need to make it as easy and fast for customers to add new services, change options, add users, and manage their accounts – on their own, at any time, Dholakia said.
“Some providers attempt to build their own customer portals, but soon discover the complexities and costs of maintaining the platform and integrating it with new service offerings. Ultimately, this hurts their time to market with new services, and decreases their flexibility as a business,” he added.
The Citrix CloudPortal product line offers customers and service providers a range of valuable services. Among them:
Self-service controls which improves the customer experience and can reduce management costs for providers.
Pre-built provider solutions to support IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), DaaS (Desktops-as-a-Service), SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and WaaS (Windows-as-a-Service).
Citrix CloudPortal comes in two editions
CloudPortal Services Manager. This brings automation to management of end user cloud apps and services. It provides out-of-the-box support for Windows-as-a-Service clouds (powered by Citrix XenApp) and Microsoft business applications (Exchange, Office, SharePoint, Lync, etc.) It also supports mobile users via BlackBerry Enterprise Server. For end user management, it provides multi-tenant Active Directory management and customer Active Directory synchronization.
For reporting, it can generate customized real-time and historic usage reports with drill-down analytics to bill customers and help them understand their usage patterns. Without any IT expertise, providers can add and change services, manage users, delegate control, and administer their accounts from one place. Service providers can also use CSM’s comprehensive SDK to add more than 150 custom Windows, Web and 3rd-party SaaS services to the platform, Dholakia added.
CloudPortal Service Manager is the new name for Cortex Control Panel and is based on technology Citrix acquired from EMS-Cortex earlier this year, according to a Citrix blog post from Sridhar Mullapudi, a member of the product management team for Citrix cloud offerings.
CloudPortal Business Manager. This is comprehensive BSS/OSS (business support system, operations support system) for cloud providers. It provides powerful, easy-to-use, account and partner management, pricing and billing, customer management, and reporting capabilities, enabling providers to bring large scale clouds to market rapidly with all the on-boarding and management tools they need.
As to availability, CloudPortal Business Manager is available today to cloud providers worldwide through the Cloud Market Development team at Citrix. CloudPortal Services Manager will be released in mid-December through the Citrix Service Provider (CSP) program.
