BYOD is not just mobile data management: Sanjay Deshmukh

C-Change 2013

BANGALORE, INDIA: Sanjay K Deshmukh, area vice president, India subcontinent, Citrix in a conversation with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, on the sidelines of C-Change 2013.

Excerpts:

CIOL: What is the current scenario in terms of bring your own device (BYOD) adoption in Indian enterprises?

Sanjay Deshmukh: In a survey that Citrix conducted, we found that more than 90 per cent of enterprises will be ready to do BYO by the end of 2014.

Some companies are already implementing it, or creating programmes, or defining policies because they understand that it will change the way people work in an organisation. However, there are certain aspects that need to be considered, such as who will buy the device, or what to do if the device is lost, or what if the device fails, or what if an employee leaves the company within a year of buying the device etc.

So, based on priorities, companies will take a decision on this.

CIOL: What are the kind of technologies that CIOs are looking forward to that will enable them to ease BYOD transformation?

Sanjay Deshmukh: Today customers take a very point solution specific approach in trying to address BYOD requirements. Some of them are only looking at a mobile data management, MDM, technology to implement BYOD. However, MDM is the first step, but not the only step to BYOD. When you are looking at BYOD, you also have to secure data because otherwise you will not be able to give employees the ability to access data securely across all platforms and devices. So companies will also have to consider mobile application management.

There are four different varieties of applications

Standard browser based apps that can be accessed through a standard browser.

Software as a service based applications, which is the cloud, productivuty applications such as emails etc. and Windows-based applications.

 

These applications are just modulers and securing them do not mean that you have to invest millions of dollars in order to create all four blocks, in oder to roll out BYOD.

You can start from one aspect, which could be MDM, and go on to build he rest gradually.

CIOL: What is Citrix' startegy for cloud?

Sanjay Deshmukh: We will help enteprises who want to build hybrid cloud. Our definition of hybrid cloud is giving the customer the freedom to choose whichever hypervisor they want.

Most of the customers stick with the same hypervisor that they have for all virtual machines that they will be creating in their data centre. This will change.

Customers are building cloud infrastructure with multiple hypervisors based on priority. Our focus is to give customers a cloud solution orchestrating all these multiple hypervisors. We will also help companies to build highly optimized Amazon style cloud platforms.

CIOL: When it comes to cloud, is there a need to rebuild enterprise applications in order to accommodate it?

Sanjay Deshmukh: It depends on the application and what the customer wants to do with it. If it is about running an application only on a hypervisor or virtual server, then you do not have to tweak most of the applications. You can work out of the box for most of the applications, in a virtualised kind of an environment.

However, if you are looking at a true cloud kind of an infrastructure where you have your applications running on premise on virtual server. Then there is a spike expected in the business and you need some additional capacity or compute from Amazon and so want some bit of application running that infrastructure. In such a complex architecture, you need to see if the application supports this kind of deployment architecture and that is where some tweaks might be required.

CIOL: On one hand you are partnering with Microsoft and on other you also compete with them on a few fronts. How does this relationship work?

 

Snjay Deshmukh: It is a mis-norm that we are competing with Microsoft. It is one of our strongest and oldest partner for over 20 years now.

We partner with Microsoft in multiple areas. In virtualization front, Microsoft works with us and provides the components, such as VDI, licenses, management utility solutions, that are required in our solution.

There are some overlaping capabilities that might exist in some products of Microsoft. However, Microsoft does not intend to position their technology against us.

CIOL: There is the Cisco-Citrix-NetApp partnership one one side and Cisco-EMC-Vmware on the other. Isn't it a bit

Sanjay Deshmukh: The Cisco-NetApp-Citrix partnership is more focused on desktop virtualization solution, whereas that of the Cisco-EMC-VMware partnership is largely focused on server virtualization and cloud fronts.

So, even though customers and sometimes analysts look at it as the same thing, it is not and although they appear similar on the face, they are very different.