30 Minute Iinterview

Desktop virtualization: a Greenfield opportunity

Citrix Systems is optimistic about the desktop virtualization market in India and expects to garner a significant number of customers in this space. The company has introduced its Citrix Delivery Center product line, which ties together the company’s application delivery infrastructure systems. Souma Das, Area Vice President, Citrix India talked to Abhinav Singh about the growth opportunities in the desktop virtualization market and the company’s road map for India.

Souma Das

On desktop virtualization

Desktop virtualization is a Greenfield opportunity for us and has become one of the most talked-about technologies in recent years because it breaks the hard-coded link between hardware and software, allowing individual computing components to be dynamically combined and reassembled for maximum efficiency and agility. Centralized control allows fast and easy provisioning of new systems for permanent and temporary workers in any location. Through desktop virtualization, IT can have a secure, standardized and centrally controlled corporate desktop environment. Desk-side visits are virtually eliminated in this scenario so that IT can provide faster support with lower costs and business users don’t need to wait for personnel to come on-site for support, so that they can get back to work faster. We find immense opportunities in the Indian market as the technology allows a desktop to be available to an employee on the fly in situations wherein the employee is traveling. It also helps in the dynamic allocation of resources, which is a boon to organizations that have thousands of employees and for which desktop management, and allocation of resources is a challenge. Industry experts estimate that up to 30 million office workers will move to virtual desktops over the next five years, creating a new $1 billion market for desktop virtualization. We are targeting this market with Citrix XenDesktop is an end-to-end desktop virtualization solution that makes desktop delivery simple and secure. The solution provides customers with a comprehensive solution for delivering Windows desktops as a hosted service without compromising the end user experience.

Citrix Delivery Center

We have announced Citrix Delivery Center, a product family targeted at the application delivery infrastructure market. The Citrix Delivery Center features four primary product lines, Citrix XenServer, Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix NetScaler and Citrix XenApp, which is the new name for the Citrix Presentation Server. We have also unveiled a new tool called Citrix Workflow Studio designed to help customers by orchestrating communications across multiple Citrix products as well as third-party solutions. The Citrix Delivery Center product family also includes all Citrix solutions that go to market as part of the above

four product lines, including Citrix Access Gateway, Citrix EdgeSight, Citrix Password Manager, Citrix Provisioning Server and Citrix WANScaler. These products are aimed at enhancing the value of application delivery for all applications and desktops and serve as key differentiators to the four primary Citrix Delivery Center product lines and these will continue to be available both as standalone solutions. The new solutions aim at the growing need for IT organizations to transform static data centers into dynamic delivery centers. In an era where businesses run on applications, the ability to deliver applications and desktops to any user, anytime, anywhere from a secure central location is rapidly becoming a core focus for most IT organizations.

Green IT

Citrix solutions increase the number of users supported by a server, reducing the number of servers required. Moreover, Citrix NetScaler is a solution for Web application delivery and acceleration, which replaces several appliances, reducing energy consumption. Organizations can gain significant cost savings and efficiencies from direct and indirect recycling as well as better asset management. Virtualization is a technology area, which contributes towards a ‘zero carbon footprint’. The ability to communicate with different locations without having to travel means carbon emissions are dramatically reduced and business has real cash savings not only around travel expenses but also by optimizing people time.

Citrix India

2007 was a great year for us and we added close to 250 customers in India. Good growth in the NetScaler product line and resulted in the addition of 40 customers. For the WANScaler line of business we had healthy growth in India and closed 12-15 deals. Indian customer wins in the CY 2007 included Ace Designers, BLA Systems, BL Kashyap & Sons, Newswire 18, Mahindra & Mahindra Finance, Tropicana Beverages, CRISIL and Bajaj Hindustan. We also reduced the cost of our partner training programs by 80%. We are looking at expanding our set of specialized partners for selling Application Networking Group (ANG) solutions so that we can penetrate further into the market.