On Citrix's 'Transform your datacentre into a delivery centre': last week Citrix held a series of calls / presentations to announce / re-state its positioning and messaging, with a couple of product listings and roadmaps to show, in words and pictures at least, how its capabilities and product offerings would support / enable its over-arching story, announced as the slogan for its re-named and grouped series of products now stabled under the Citrix Delivery Center brand.

In an area (virtualisation) which needs competition to raise awareness beyond the already converted, it's a pretty good summation of Citrix's overall corporate goal, as it speaks to a few relavent areas which not only capture sentiments already exploited by Citrix, but adds a couple of new and relevent ones to create, in my opinion, quite a neat and rounded story:

• Citrix products enable 'delivery of functionality'
• The data centre is tasked with delivering IT functionality
• This delivery is the outcome of setting the IT department up as a service provider

It is the latter point which could be the clever bit, given the industry in general has been somewhat pre-occupied with all things ITIL and service oriented of late.

I should point out that I made up the 3 bullet points above, but that's what I take from the slogan. Others might not, which is fair enough. The good thing is that the big picture story doesnt hammer on about virtualisation either. It doesnt need to. Virtualisation is the tool, not the outcome.

For anyone who is not a big fan of corporate mantras, mission statements, conceptual marketing and so on, this article provides some relevent commentary.

Obviously, to have any chance of sucess, as with any corporate identity, there needs to be an appropriate set of products and customer service capabilities to back up the story, and that's where we should focus our attention. If that's lacking, then fine, the story is hollow and the organisation responsible for marketing hot air is hopefully doomed to failure.

This latest re-stating of intent, from this analysts perspective at least, captures some interesting contemporary sentiment which deserves a look under the covers before being dismissed as an empty gesture.