Citrix Systems, Inc. today announced that Citrix XenDesktop 4 was named winner of the Breakthrough Product in the Best of Tech-Ed 2010 awards program by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. The Breakthrough Product award is the top honor given by the editors for the most innovative product in all Best of Tech-Ed 2010 award categories. According to the editors, Citrix XenDesktop 4 was chosen because, “Citrix is providing easy and powerful virtual desktops, and there’s a good chance that will be the future of IT.”

Best of Tech-Ed 2010 awards recognize companies that offer innovative products for the industry. The judges reviewed 298 products and services submitted for the contest and chose 46 finalists to be interviewed at the Microsoft Tech-Ed North America 2010 IT pro conference in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 9th. Winners were then chosen based on their innovation, strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage and exceptional value to customers, and announced later that evening in an invitation-only reception.

“Choosing the best product in each of 14 categories — from our list of 46 products — was both daunting and exhilarating for our judging panel,” said Jason Bovberg, Senior Editor of Windows IT Pro. “All 46 finalists represent highly distinguished products and services in their categories. Through our exhaustive interview process, it was clear that some of our winners stood a step above the pack, whereas other picks were more difficult to determine. The winners in those categories typically offered an edge in product functionality, boasted enhanced feature sets in new versions, or introduced innovative technology — giving them a slight advantage over the competition.”

XenDesktop 4 is a comprehensive desktop virtualization solution that delivers a complete Windows desktop experience as an on-demand service to any user, anywhere, making virtual desktops a mainstream reality for hundreds of millions of corporate employees for the first time ever. Unlike first-generation VDI-only solutions that were applicable only to a narrow set of users, XenDesktop 4 with its new FlexCast(TM) delivery technology is the first product in the industry to support every major desktop virtualization model in a single, integrated solution — a breakthrough that improves ROI, simplifies management and extends the benefits of virtualization to every employee in the enterprise.

“XenDesktop’s recognition as winner of the Breakthrough Product in the Best of Tech-Ed award program is very exciting for us. XenDesktop is the only desktop virtualization solution to win this prestigious award,” said Raj Dhingra, group vice president and general manager, XenDesktop product group at Citrix Systems. “We have been very focused on adding innovative capabilities to XenDesktop to drive mainstream adoption of virtual desktops. Awards like Best of Tech-Ed validate our vision for delivering a market-leading, comprehensive desktop virtualization solution that meets the broad range of customer needs in this thriving sector of the industry.”

A complete list of the Best of Tech-Ed 2010 award winners is available at https://www.windowsitpro.com and https://northamerica.msteched.com .