2010 is when desktop virtualization will take off

What are the technologies offered by Citrix? What will be your key focus
this year?

Citrix is active in the virtualization, space be it that of applications,
servers and desktops.

In application virtualization, we have products like XenApp, while for
virtualization of servers, we offer the XenSource, which is built on an
open-source platform. We got into the desktop virtualization (DV) arena around
two-three years back. Till Q4 '09, we had more than 1,000 customers worldwide
using our DV solutions. For us, the most important focus opportunity this year
is the DV market. We expect our highest growth to come from this segment and
believe that 2010 will be the year, when DV will really take off. To qualify
that statement, according to research done by Frost and Sullivan, the DV market
in India is expected to touch $140 million this year at a growth of 33.5
percent. The projection for 2011 is even higher with growth expected to peak at
over 35 percent. If you look on a global scale, the desktop market is around 20
times bigger than the server market in terms of sheer number of units deployed.
It, therefore, makes more sense for us to do business in this market. Last year,
we were more at a piloting stage with POC centers being setup for showing the
customer how DV pans out practically speaking. We expect to see more investment
happening in the market this year.

What are the growth drivers of the DV market?

The key verticals driving growth of DV are:

a) IT/ITeS: It is important for the BPO industry to be able to manage
customer processes. They also need the confidence that their data and
applications are operating in a secured manner. With virtualization of
applications and desktops, the data and applications can reside on the backend
servers and the security needs to be addressed only at that level instead of
managing it an individual end user level. Another aspect is that, this industry
typically has a large workforce numbering up to 5,000 to 10,000 employees. It
can be quite an effort managing each employees' PC, along with the on-site OS.
The amount of money that can be saved with DV is a big advantage with the TCO
being reduced by as much as 40 percent. Yet another advantage that DV can offer
companies of this type is the agility and flexibility to quickly recover from
any system failings, if at all. Suppose the site goes down, the risk of downtime
is higher but with DV, this risk is reduced as you can quickly transfer the
desktop system instances to another backup server and since it is virtualized,
this can be done seamlessly.

b) BFSI: With companies in this sector expanding their physical presence with
multiple branches, there can be an average of 10-15 PCs in each branch and the
effort and cost behind setting it up can be a fair bit, so in order to leverage
the cost benefits and ease of deployment, these customers are opting for DV.
Also with an ever increasing mobile workforce, security is a concern. With DV
however, this can be addressed by setting up security parameters at the backend,
so that, whoever tries to access from a remote location cannot tamper with data
unnecessarily.

c) Other key verticals include retail, pharma and telecom.

What are some of the inhibitors to adoption of DV? How are you overcoming
them?

There are two major inhibitors which are:

a) Personalization aspect: I would say that this was more of an inhibitor
around a year and a half back because the virtualized desktop interface (VDI)
was offered in one standard flavor and this did not enable the element of
personalization that users desire greatly. We now offer a feature called the
Flexcast, which is an innovation on our part, allowing customers to roll out
virtualized desktops that can be personalized as per the user needs.

b) Ability to access rich content - With a DV environment, the ability to
access rich content like multimedia content for instance was not really feasible
and just like the aspect of personalization, it acts as an inhibitor to adoption
of DV. To address this, we have a feature called HDX or high-definition
experience, which enables the user to access rich content within a DV scenario.

What are some of your channel initiatives this year? How many partners do
you have in India?

We are a 100 percent channel-driven business and it is important that our
partners are profitable transacting with us and our products. We have around 30
partners across the country who are registered under the 'Citrix Solution
Advisor Program'. We intend on reaching out to new geographies and new industry
verticals. We want to extend our reach to cover the construction, government and
defense sectors. While we have more of a presence in class A cities, we want to
expand into B- and C-class cities too. Our top 10 partners are classified as
Lighthouse partners. This is more of an aspirational league for the others.
Typically to qualify as a Lighthouse partner, the volume of business done with
us should be upwards of $1 million annually, with another requisite being
investments in dedicated resources for pre-sales and sales, market development
activities besides training and certification of employees. Also, since we
foresee cloud computing as a concept gaining momentum, we will be launching our
'Cloud Services Partner Program' at our Synergy event in the US and eventually,
the same will come to India. We will be looking to sign up with cloud service
providers and our channels can offer managed services like application and
desktop systems as a service to customers over the cloud.

Can you share about your offerings in the Application Delivery Networking
(ADN) space?

This is an offering that many don't associate with Citrix, which has
traditionally been in the market linked around virtualization of IT
infrastructure. We have a Netscaler hardware offering, which is essentially a
box that sits on the network for the purpose of global server load balancing,
optimizing network performance and security. Interestingly, our R&D center in
Bengaluru has come up with an innovative solution called, Netscaler VPX, which
is a virtual load balancer. This replaces the need for a physical box and
keeping in line with our business creating software for the virtualized
environment, this is an extension of that with the ability to balance the load
on the network over a virtual interface. The second advantage is that of
scalability based on throughput on the network. For the customer, it is a
pay-as-you-grow model, where if you want to scale up your capacity, then all you
have to do is upgrade the software.

How many customers do you have in India? What are some of the market
building activities you do?

We have more than 3,000 customers in India and around 20,000 worldwide. We
are one of the top players in the DV space in India and the application
virtualization market, and are catching up in the server virtualization space,
where we relatively new. We have an executive briefing session once every
quarter, wherein, we call around 30 customers and hold round table conferences,
workshops and understand their business requirements from across the table. We
also conduct conferences aimed at CIO/CTOs as well as sector-specific events
like those around banking or IT/ITeS and spend our marketing dollars on this, in
order to build awareness among our client base.

John jacob

johnj@cybermedia.co.in