After gobbling up small firms, Citrix hopes to capitalize on their products

Citrix Systems is entering a new era as it absorbs a string of companies it has acquired in the past three years and tries to adapt to its increasingly demanding customers.

Fort Lauderdale-based Citrix , which launched software product upgrades this week, is in the business of connecting companies and their employees to software applications. Those customers demand to be linked quickly from home offices, laptops and mobile devices. And they want assurances that everything they use is secure.

Increasingly, corporate clients want to log in from growing foreign markets such as China and India.

"People are becoming more impatient about technologies," said David Jones, Citrix vice president for business development. "We have to make it easier for people to work on their terms, not on our terms."

With almost 3,800 employees, Citrix is the largest technology company headquartered in South Florida. Revenues last year reached $1.13 billion, up 25 percent from 2005. It was the first time the company passed the billion-dollar mark.

Analysts expect that revenue growth rates, while still strong, will fall below 20 percent starting this year.

For the past three years Citrix has been on a steady buying spree, picking up at least nine small and medium-sized companies with specific technologies that Citrix coveted. Its $225 million purchase of Expertcity Inc., a Santa Barbara, Calif., company specializing in Web-based access services, "has been a home run by anyone's standards," said analyst Steven Ashley, who follows Citrix for investment firm Robert W. Baird & Co.

So far, Ashley said, Citrix has taken advantage of the acquired companies' capabilities.

This week Citrix upgraded NetScaler, a software package that speeds up the delivery of Web applications. The product was obtained when Citrix bought NetScaler Inc. of San Jose, Calif., for $300 million in 2005.

Citrix also released its Citrix Desktop Server 1.0, which allows remote workers to plug into their company's Microsoft Windows system. The product, part of a market segment known as desktop virtualization, comes from the Citrix acquisition of Massachusetts-based Ardence Inc. in December.

Many of Citrix 's upgraded products are aimed at Web 2.0, a term used to describe the gradual change of the Web from a series of sites to a computing platform characterized by sharing among users.

"What we're doing is making Web applications faster, more secure and more available," said Morgan Gerhart, a senior product manager with the company's access networking group.

But Citrix faces plenty of challenges. It already sells to 98 percent of the Fortune Global 500, so it must get those businesses to pay for upgrades. The companies are likely to run lots of tests of the new products before committing to them, Ashley said.

Citrix also faces competition from the likes of VMware Inc., which focuses on the virtualization market.

Citrix said last month that it would restate past financial results because it misdated stock options. An internal audit committee, which is investigating how options were granted, has said it has found no intentional wrongdoing by any current executive, but did not give details of its review.

Despite the obstacles, the company is confident that it is well positioned to take advantage of corporate demand for faster, more mobile products.

"Users keep changing where and how they work," said Jones, the corporate vice president. "We have never, ever had a bigger opportunity."