Nothing Tandem about IT

KERALA: He looks to be just the man capable of taking a brave dive. Specially when it’s not about the well-trawled industry waters but a pocket of air, a fuzzy sky. While his peers may be busy ascending heights to a distant peak, he is at a precipice for going the other way around. May be from where he stands, he sees potential not on some elusive summit but on the open, unexplored thickets spread hidden around wild terrains below. Covert niches, untouched segments, lateral approaches to Cloud and much more. Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, India Subcontinent, Citrix Systems India Pvt Ltd tells us where exactly he plans to use his parachutes. Surprisingly enough, it may be way ahead where others pull the plug.

Cloud is paradoxically cluttered today. Everyone is here, the erstwhile industry big boys, the likes of unknown David, new guys, old cheese, big enchilada, small bets, etc. Where does Citrix’s model fit in here?

I will try to explain it with the TV analogy. We are not the TV guys, but we take care of the DTH services. We are not the TV channels or the broadcaster. We do virtual computing to a major extent with application and desktop virtualization while Cloud or Core hypervisor is a smaller part of our pie. Our approach is different. It is very open and very agnostic to other stuff. In terms of TCO, our proposition is one-tenth of what other vendors would provide you. But at the same quality. Openness is a major element too. We have huge areas of interest when it comes to SMEs and service providers. We also provide cloud platforms that are open irrespective of the fact whether the hypervisor is from Microsoft or VM. We want to give customers absolute choice.

Does this kind of model allow you to make money?

Yes, in fact open approach is a strong reason that customers want to work with us. We are dominant in desktop virtualization space today. SaaS too is extremely profitable. The open version of our hypervisor is free while the paid version is for enterprise-class functionality.  With the cloud networking technology we provide, one can go from private cloud to public ones for business peaks with seamless bridges. We also provide Collaboration and SaaS options.

The very word ‘open’ is prone to debate these days. Your arch rivals in virtualization claim to be as open as your genre of vendors. What’s your take?

{#PageBreak#}

It depends. For higher availability or a certain kind of SLAs, you may choose to go to someone else. It is all about the level of expectations one has from open versions and free versions. To take ownership of the system is an entirely huge responsibility though. Openness also has to be as much about co existing with other architectures.

With the kind of grip you have on the segment of desktop virtualization, what do you see happening next?

If we talk about today’s status, counting the number of desktop sold in corporates, those for existing users and other categories, there is a attractive number of over 30 million endpoints in India now. Less than four per cent have been virtualized here while a huge number of 96 per cent remains. The rate of this technology will be fastest with a cycle of adoption of about eight years. We believe we will go there faster even as everyone is resonating the same message, be it Microsoft, Cisco, HP or Dell. When we started, we were alone, now the whole industry is confident of the big potential. That proves and spurs us further.

Acquisitions like Xensource or Sharefile must be impacting your portfolio strongly? How would it change ahead inorganically? Any question marks or dogs?

We will take both organic and inorganic routes. All the products in our portfolio have huge opportunity ahead of them. None of them have plateaued. Desktop virtualization will stay. SaaS adoption rates have been growing well also. We take collaboration to next level. We invested in Sharefile, a cloud company to enhance this area. The ability to share content has a lot of potential for every single knowledge worker out there. NetScaler was an ADC piece (Application Delivery Controller) and that technology is very prevalent today. Seventy five per cent of time on the Internet and that’s the first layer of load balancing. Cloud management is the new space of potential.