Citrix Online currently has over 100 corporate customers across the region accessing its suite of web-based remote-access, support and online meeting technologies including Citrix GoToMyPC, Citrix GoToMeeting, and Citrix GoToAssist.

As well as servicing Australian and New Zealand customers, the centre will also be the secondary 'hub' for handling sessions generated in South East Asian countries.  The data centre is designed to be fully redundant to cater for all worldwide sessions, acting as a backup in the event of downtime in one or all of Citrix Online's other four data centres.

H.R Shiever, managing director: Pacific, Citrix Online, said the data centre represents a significant investment into the Australian and New Zealand markets, both in terms of fixed costs to establish the centre and ongoing bandwidth costs.

'Our market in Australia and New Zealand is growing rapidly, especially as broadband penetration increases and people become more familiar with web-based access technologies.  We established this centre is to ensure our standard of providing customers with world-class performance continues as we expand,' he said.

Citrix Online is partnering with hosting provider Euinix to establish the centre using Teleglobe, Telstra and Comindico. 

In addition to the centre in Australia, Citrix Online has also recently opened a centre in Los Angeles. 

According to Gartner forecasts, the web conferencing and team collaboration software market will grow to US$1.1 billion in the Asia Pacific region by 2008.

'Our products are popular because people can easily and quickly connect remotely using a very secure and available service.  We opened this data centre to guarantee this experience for our current and future customers, especially given projections of customer growth in the Australasian remote-access market,' said Shiever.