Eyeing some 23 million branch offices worldwide, Microsoft Corp. and Citrix Systems Inc. have announced a collaboration to develop a new line of branch office appliances, with the first device in the family scheduled to ship by the end of 2007.

The devices will combine Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Firewall with Citrix’s upcoming WANScaler network acceleration technology. It will be based on Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 operating system, and Citrix will also add remote management capabilities to the mix.

WANScaler will be based on technology Citrix is acquiring through its US$50 million purchase of Orbital Data. It uses a variety of techniques, including compression and TCP multi-plexing to boost data transfer rates over wide area networks.

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