“Aligning with the correct channel partner is critical to our growth,” Kaushal Veluri

Describe Citrix's products and solutions driving the Indian market? What is the next product/solution in store for the Indian market?
Citrix's technologies power mobile workstyles and cloud services. On the mobile workstyle front, our solutions enable organisations to embrace executive mobility helping people work with other people, data and apps from the latest devices, anywhere; embrace consumerisation, empower employees and simplify IT through adoption of Bring-Your-Own-Device; help employees work productively from any location through workshifting and help organisation secure confidential business information while maximising access and collaboration.

While on the cloud services front, we help organisations to build a unified storefront for self-service
apps and data, Citrix helps the organisations to effectively migrate from the PC era to the cloud era, impacting their infrastructure strategy at the end user front with mobile workstyles and at the IT end with cloud services. We focus strongly on the enterprise and the corporate space with desktop virtualisation, Citrix has a unique solution on simplified desktop virtualisation called VDI-in-a-box, which helps the SMB organisation to simplify IT by enabling desktop administrators to deploy virtual desktops for use on any device, reduce costs by deploying virtual desktops for less than the cost of PCs, empower users to bring their own devices to improve productivity, collaboration, mobility, etc.

Explain briefly about the business model of the company.
The workplace of the 21st century is undergoing a remarkable transformation, driven in part by innovation in consumer technology. People are increasingly bringing the smart phones, tablets and other devices they use ubiquitously in their personal lives into the workplace and expecting the same kind of rich, selfservice experience they have at home. This "consumerization" is driving rapid change in business and IT, dissolving the lines between work and play. Citrix transforms how businesses and IT work and people collaborate in the cloud era. With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile work styles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organizations. Citrix products touch 75% of internet users each day and it partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries. The company's overall annual revenue in 2011 was $2.21 billion.

Describe in detail about the channel structure of Citrix.
Citrix is a 100% channel driven organisation and channels contribute significantly to our business. Our channel partners have evolved with us from being a tactical solution provider to a system integrator kind of organisations as they build their business on desktop virtualisation. Citrix's channel landscape currently has partners who have the ability to manage the entire sales cycle for a complex desktop virtualisation deal from initial positioning to sizing and architecting the solution to running a successful PoC at the customer location and finally implementing the solution as well. Citrix reaches out to the end user customers through 5 key SI partners, 50+ Citrix solution advisors, 4 distributors and a few key Citrix service provider partners for hosted solutions and Citrix cloud advisor partners for building solutions on the Cloud platform. In addition to this, we also help our customers and partners to enable themselves on our technologies with the help of 5 key Citrix authorized learning partners.

Citrix's sales go-to-market is based on named accounts in the enterprise and corporate space and the rest-of-the-universe in the commercial space. We do not believe in restricting our partners to operate in any one space and each partner has the ability to work with us on any account. Primarily we see a lot of traction in the enterprise and corporate space with our SI and focus CSA partners while the majority of our CSA partners operate successfully in the Commercial space.

How significant are the channel partners for Citrix's business growth in India?
Channels form a critical backbone of our outreach in the market. With a lean organization in the country, it is the channel partners that help us to take our technology to the end user organizations and build the business for Citrix India. Being a solution focused organization, we also work with channel partners with solution based skill set and approach to the market. Citrix currently operates in the country through 90 partners which include distributors, SI, CSA (Citrix Solutions Advisors), CSP (Citrix Service Providers) and CCAP (Citrix Cloud Advisor Partners).

Do you plan to increase your channel base in India by the end of this year?
The mainstream induction of desktop virtualisation by Indian organizations to empower their employees and the adoption of Cloud to efficiently manage their IT infrastructure are two of the driving forces for partners to align with Citrix. From a Citrix perspective, aligning with the correct channel partner is a critical factor of our growth strategy.

As we increase our penetration into enterprise and corporate accounts and look to broad base desktop virtualisation into the commercial and SMB space, we will evaluate the right partners and look to increase our partner base in the country by upto 25%. Citrix is looking for solution providers and regional system integrators to help take the desktop virtualisation and cloud technologies to our enterprise and corporate customers in major cities and focus partners in tier 2 cities to help us take our SMB solutions to the customers.

Which vertical in the Indian market contributes the most in the business growth of Citrix? And, what are your further plans to enhance the business growth from these verticals which brings in a larger chunk of business?
Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services. Primarily our solutions are industry agnostic and have proven to add value to organisations across all industry segments. We have seen tremendous growth in our desktop virtualisation technology adoption from BPO, ITeS and BFSI segments with a focus on security, manageability and mobility as the key drivers. While we continue to focus on seeding desktop virtualisation in more customers in the above segments, our focus continues on helping customers in other segments realize the value from unlocking their physical desktops and moving into a virtual world.

Please elaborate on the recent channel program in India and its response. Are you planning to come up with a new channel program in the coming months?
With a focus on desktop virtualisation and solution building, right skills are a critical component of the partner's success. Ensuring that our partners have the right skills to take the technology to our customers is our most important focus area. With the right sales and technical skills our partners can be successful thereby helping us grow our market share in the country. Under the aegis of Citrix Partner Accelerator, we conduct regular programs on enabling our partners on sales and technical front. These include: Citrix Summit: Inviting our partners to understand the latest strategy and future roadmap by attending Citrix Summit, our premier global partner event in San Francisco (May) and Barcelona (October).

• Citrix Partner Huddle: Yearly partner event for all partners in India conducted in April to share with them our local strategy and connect them with key executives in the country.
• Citrix Partner Accelerator: Quarterly event to share our latest sales and technical updates with our partners.
• Citrix Virtual Computing Expert: Our regular events to share best practices of our technologies with our partner technical resources to help them adopt the same expertise as Citrix technical experts.
• Citrix Certification Workshops: Our regular workshops to get our partner technical resources certified on our technologies thereby helping them manage the customer organisation's infrastructure.

In addition to these, we run regular incentive programs for our partners not only on Citrix products but also working with our ecosystem partners to help them on their solution sales. We will shortly be announcing a special incentive program for our partners, this year.

What are the future plans for Citrix India?
Channels partners are an integral part of the Citrix DNA. We are a 100% channel driven organization and we will continue to help our partners - CSA, distributor, SI and alliance, realize the value from powering mobile work styles and cloud services. Our efforts will be driven in the direction of helping more of our CSA partners become small SI's as they build the desktop virtualisation solutions for customers. We intend to increase our channel base in the country with the right channel partners while at the same time helping our existing partners to add value to their customers and themselves. Our plans include constantly enabling the partners to help their customers implement solutions on Executive Mobility, workshifting and bring-your-own-device, to enhance the productivity of their employees while helping IT to develop solutions around Unified Storefronts, Enterprise Cloud Networks, Cloud Convergence and Desktop Virtualisation.