Citrix, EMC ally to provide Business Continuity Solutions

NEW DELHI: Citrix and EMC have announced a strategic alliance to provide

Business Continuity modules to customers in India. The tie up is a part of the 'Citrix

Business Alliance' (CBA) program, which was launched in India this May. The

companies will be combining Citrix's Metaframe application serving software with

EMC Information Storage systems.






Business Continuity Solution enables an enterprise to function in any
circumstance, even in the event of a disaster. In the event of a disaster,

Citrix enabled organizations can use any compatible computing device (which can

be anything from a workstation to a PDA) to access their mission critical

applications and information. The EMC solution ensures that the data located at

the primary data center is synchronized with the data located at the secondary

data center.






EMC country manager for India, T Srinivasan, informed that the Indian government
is expected to be a major customer of the BCSs, and already talks are on with

several departments handling critical information. "The solution comes in

various degrees of sophistication. The SMEs may chose to implement the first

module only, which is tentatively priced at $50,000 and go in for consolidation.

Then they might also want to implement the other phases like back-up and

recovery," Srinivasan added.






Citrix Systems India managing director, Souma Das, said that Citrix is open to
other alliances as well, and they already have a SAP tie-up for applications and

CRM, and a partnership with Microsoft worldwide, to name just two. "In

India, Citrix will be looking for both hardware and software partners," he

added. It may be recalled that on June 24, Citrix and Symbol had announced a tie

up to enable Workforce Mobility Solutions.






Both the companies feel that customer education starting from the grass root
level will be a crucial variable in the marketing of business continuity

solutions. To the same effect, Citrix has a partnership with NIIT, and EMC has

worldwide training programs. For their business continuity solutions, they are

organizing a series of presentations nationally for the prospective clients to

begin with.






With increasing global warming in terms of political tension and awareness of
data management’s exponential increase, the company sources that the expected

volume of business projections are on the optimistic side.






Though both Citrix and EMC claim the alliance has nothing to do with the border
situation, the timing of the alliance could not have been better. The global

alliance also comes in the wake of a post 9/11 panic trend of corporate citizens

having a very stringent disaster management routine, with enterprises often

volunteering to go in for a secondary server for back ups of critical

information at a non-disclosed location.