Citrix is a leading provider of cloud, networking and virtualisation led solutions to organisations across industries. In an interaction with tele.net.in, Vishal Khare, director, enterprise business and government, India Sub continent, Citrix talks about company’s focus areas in India, challenges facing the organisation and Citrix’s future plans.

Edited excerpts…

How has the competitive landscape for enterprise business evolved over the past few years?

Most organisations have realised the potential of technology as a business enabler, and they prefer to work with an end-to-end solution provider than a point product sale vendor. Thus, businesses offering several solutions with a strong value proposition enjoy a competitive advantage over those offering only a few. Citrix is one such company that offers end-to-end mobility solutions that include mobility, virtualisation, networking and cloud services.

Which are the industries driving the uptake of enterprise solutions in the Indian market?

The Indian market represents one of the highest growth businesses for Citrix and therefore has top priority exposure within our company. Industries such as information technology, banking, financial services and insurance, telecom and government are driving the uptake of enterprise solutions in India.

What are the new business opportunities that Citrix sees in the enterprise segment?

Citrix has completed over a decade of its presence in India and has a dominant market share in desktop virtualisation and also has established itself as a leader in the enterprise mobility, networking and cloud space.

With technologies like desktop virtualisation and app virtualisation gaining traction and growing trends of mobility pushing organizations to adopt bring your own device and mobile workspace polices, Citrix has established itself as an end-to-end mobility solution provider. Citrix, with its Workspace Suite offers a single, flexible solution for comprehensive mobility needs. With Citrix mobile workspace applications and delivery infrastructure, businesses can transform by improving employee productivity, deliver high-performance user experience, secure enterprise content on cloud and personal devices etc.

Another area where a Citrix solution is increasingly gaining traction is networking. software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that is dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, making it ideal for the high bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications. For example, to optimise the adoption of SDN, Citrix has managed to create a dynamic network architecture facilitated by Citrix Netscaler that supports virtualisation and cloud strategies to increase agility, simplify operations and reduce costs. Organisations are seeing a shift from the traditional hardware-centric data networks which proved to be limited in functionality, slow in evolution and relatively static in nature to the adoption of virtualised network appliances which prove to be more efficient and agile.

What are the key requirements and complimentary solutions demanded by telecom service providers in the enterprise space?

The Indian telecom industry has come a long way and India stands as the second-largest telecommunications market in the world today. The growing adoption of mobile internet and big data is creating tremendous opportunities for telecom operators. In this scenario, solutions like desktop and app virtualisation can make a great difference in meeting the requirements of telecom organisations. These requirements include retail expansion, security concerns, improving customer experience, rural expansion and skill availability, compliance support etc.

Mobility solutions are proving to be very useful for telecom providers. This can be useful across two levels – for internal devices as well as for enterprise customers. For internal devices, there is a need for telecom providers to provide a managed secure access to mails, intranet, enterprise apps and data. This has been increasingly proved that every large enterprise organization will have to adopt these solutions in a comprehensive manner.  Adoption of mobility solutions can act as a value added service for enterprise customers. As telecom companies provide data networks to their enterprise customers, it is a logical extension that they can provide other value added services including mobile device management, mobile application management and mobile data management capabilities as well. This is not only helping operators gain more services but also helping them to bring enterprise mobility to the forefront, thus opening up a window of numerous opportunities to offer additional services.

What are the key challenges facing the company?

It is only in recent years that virtualisation has gained the amount of traction that we are seeing today. Prior to this, due to the lack of awareness, the adoption of virtualisation was limited within large companies owing to its complex and costly Implementation process. We have worked hard to build an ecosystem, which in turn simplified the adoption of virtualisation, and constantly advanced our offering for better user experience. As a result, adoption of virtualisation solution became widespread across companies of all sizes across verticals.

According to Indian Data Corporation, desktop virtualisation is estimated to reach $32.14 million by 2017. While there was some reluctance in desktop virtualisation adoption earlier, today businesses of all sizes are embracing desktop virtualisation given its several benefits. With XenDesktop, its own desktop virtualisation solution, Citrix has constantly innovated by combining granular controls with an uncompromised user experience. Not only does the adoption of desktop virtualisation give employees the freedom to work from anywhere, anytime on any device but also improves employee efficiency and overall productivity of the organisation.

What are Citrix’s future plans?

We are pioneering user-first approach in enterprise technology. This basically means creating a user focused IT infrastructure and delivery ecosystem, instead of placing the user at the end of the IT food chain. For instance, we are facilitating enterprises to offer their employees the freedom to choose their work device, as well as their IT service preference instead of leaving the decision to the IT departments. This shows a shift from the “end-user” to “user-first”.

As an end-to-end mobility solutions provider, we have created a one stop shop for customers to address all their mobility needs in one place. Overtime, Citrix has created an ecosystem which has made mobility solutions easier to adopt, and our aim is to set new standards of user experience and cost benefits.

Citrix is a channel driven organisation and channel partners continue to play a huge role in Citrix’s success. Recently, Citrix revamped its channel strategy and now focuses on a three pronged strategy of “Focus, Engage and Specialise”. Under the ‘Focus’ strategy, Citrix plans to reduce the number of its partners by 30 per cent and focus on a set of select few specialized partners who will concentrate on deeper interaction with customers and help them with their solution needs. The ‘Engage’ strategy creates a platform where partners can interact with each other to help, learn and stay up to date with updates from Citrix. Partners also share best practices from their experiences and come up with joint solutions to common problems faced by them. The last and most important component is ‘Specialise’ where a partner can become a specialised partner in particular categories. For instance, a partner can either be a specialised partner in virtualisation, networking or mobility. Partner Virtualisation Labs, which allow partners to experiment and test cases of customer environment, is another key company offering.