Certification Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 36) INSIDE CERTIFICATION Citrix: Preparing IT Pros for an Evolving Landscape JULIEANN SCALISI Today’s dynamic workforce and new technologies present serious challenges for any growing organization’s IT department. Technology professionals find themselves faced with distributed and mobile employees, increased infrastructure complexity, increasingly robust enterprise applications and the rise of Web 2.0 and mashups. Matt Eastwood, IDC group vice president of enterprise platforms, confirms this trend in a recent article: “Enterprise customers of all types continue to focus on driving business growth. This growth drives new computing demands, which increasingly require both scale-up consolidated systems and scale-out distributed configurations to meet very different workload needs in today’s enterprise.” To give IT professionals an edge in this challenging landscape, Citrix Systems now offers a series of new administrator-level certifications. As a provider of application delivery infrastructure, Citrix introduced certifications and supporting curriculum this year to prepare IT professionals to manage technologies that accelerate application performance. They do this by efficiently and securely delivering Web applications to the enterprise, optimizing WAN application performance and speed for branch offices and remote or mobile workers, and increasing visibility into their application-delivery infrastructures. The newly announced certification tracks are Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA): • for Citrix NetScaler 8 • for Citrix Access Gateway 8 Enterprise Edition • for Citrix EdgeSight 4 • for Citrix WANScaler 4 Three of the four tracks are based on newer Citrix products that had never been supported with certification, reflecting the rapid growth of the company’s product portfolio. The new certifications expand the number of Citrix CCA tracks offered from three to seven. The three tracks previously available focus on the company’s Windows application-delivery solutions (CCA for Citrix Presentation Server 4, CCA for Citrix Access Gateway 4 and CCA for Citrix Password Manager 4). The new certifications validate IT administrators’ knowledge of the latest Citrix products, as well as make it dramatically easier to keep pace with growing complexity and rising expectations in IT. Professionals are able to demonstrate they are keeping abreast of evolving technology trends in the application-delivery market while maximizing the performance, security and cost savings of their Citrix environments. Efficiently and Securely Bringing Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise A recent benchmark study conducted by Nemertes Research, “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace,” found strong interest in Web 2.0 applications across enterprises. According to the study, 18 percent of respondents use blogs, 32 percent use wikis and 23 percent have begun to deploy really simple syndication (RSS) as key methodologies for managing information flows throughout organizations. With ever-increasing user expectations for enterprise Web applications’ performance and availability, the Citrix NetScaler platform supports Web 2.0 growth by optimizing the delivery of Web applications for millions of users worldwide. An integral part of Citrix application-delivery infrastructure, Citrix NetScaler accelerates Web application performance up to five times by leveraging multiple acceleration technologies and innovative TCP optimizations. NetScaler makes Web applications run faster, and Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise Edition provides secure application access, allowing administrators to reduce the ongoing cost of secure, anywhere access and improve end-users’ experience. The new CCAs for Citrix NetScaler 8 and Citrix Access Gateway 8 Enterprise Edition validate technical expertise on their respective products. By achieving the certifications, IT professionals are well-prepared to address technology developments in the Web 2.0 space, including enterprise mashups, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and complex application environments. The CCA for Citrix NetScaler 8 focuses on product capabilities such as easy graphical policy configuration and full transaction-level application intelligence. 36 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE December 2007
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