Ardence

Ardence, a Citrix Company, is a technology company headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts with representatives in Washington, D.C.; Virginia Beach, VA; Chicago, IL; Denton, TX; and Europe, Middle East, Africa and India. On December 20, 2006, Citrix Systems Inc. announced an agreement to acquire Ardence. Ardence is a software company that develops a Software-Streaming solution and an Embedded OEM Development Platform. The enterprise Software-Streaming solution delivers Microsoft Windows, SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux and Turbolinux operating systems along with all their applications on demand from networked storage. Using Ardence's software-streaming technology, any x86-based computer - desktop, server, or device - can be provisioned, or re-provisioned from bare metal to production in minutes. The core technology behind the software streaming solution is a device driver for the desired operating system that mounts the desired virtual disk over a custom UDP protocol. Basically, computers are configured to netboot a kernel that contains this device driver.