Ready to look at Windows and non-Windows: Citrix

MUMBAI, INDIA: At Synergy 2013, CIOL got a chance to understand from Mark Templeton the changing issues and concerns and Citrix's own approach to licensing and maintenance issues, something that tops the pecking order for Indian CIOs. The CEO had acknowledged then that consumer mindsets and choices keep changing, and there is a new scenario every time someone introduces a new technology in the market. He had explained his weed-out model and how the company weeds out issues to iron them out until something else pops up as another set of weeds. He had been confident in proclaiming that Citrix offers a wide array of choices with as radical an option as concurrent licensing or service-provider based licensing (with a retrospective drift) at various fronts, besides device-based licensing, subscription-based or annual models of course.

In his own words on making licensing CIO-friendly, "we try to make licensing management easy and little less frictionless (as it is kind of impossible to avoid the friction completely). On technology front, we want our servers to connect backstage smoothly and we want them to be smarter so that they can make everything smoother for customers."

For an Indian CIO, someone who struggles with expensive maintenance and unreasonably unruly models at times, the semblance of something called empathy and the openness to experiment with new models, are two undertones that stand out in Mark's comments. This very apparent acknowledgment of the need to be CIO-friendly, is something that Indian market would appreciate a lot in any vendor. That said, there could be other stuff on Citrix's platter and intent, that is attempting to resonate more with the Indian contingent.

As the head for Pre-Sales for Citrix India, Nilesh Goradia looks just the right person and at the very vantage point where he can pass on the baton of Citrix's strategy on Indian lanes. Like what should we read into Citrix's announcement of XenMobile Enterprise, a unified app store and XenDesktop 7 this Synergy. Nilesh helps us put some of these new names into Indian context and christens them into an Indian accent here.

What caught your eye first with what was announced at Synergy?

Many key updates were worth watching like release of XenDesktop 7 or the boost to enterprise strategy on an overall basis along with announcements made with Cisco and NetScaler. First thing to consider from an Indian market view is Enterprise Mobility advantage given the huge population and potential here with mobility. Adoption of mobile devices is happening quite rapidly and functions like single file management, data management would be quite useful. No one amongst our competition has the kind of application edge that we have brought forth or mobility related strengths. I see this making a huge impact in the Indian market.

Who is Citrix vying with: Indian legacy environments or Redhat's KVM or vSphere or others? Would your push towards cloud chase the virtualised incumbents first?

We support every hypervisor as part of our Cloud strategy from KVM to vSphere to XenServer at back end. Virtualisation is something I would tag as more or less legacy itself now.  We believe that customers can mature from virtualization to cloud level soon. Customers want to combine everything into one solution. There is also the space of private cloud with a lot of prospects. Since we are a strong cloud platform (with 99 per cent Cloud enabled with Citrix virtualization), so we are moving in that direction with some pace.

Has desktop virtualisation reached or is reaching a saturation inflection, more so with the way PC market is going?

Desktop virtuasliation has in fact been a mainstream force. We are signing many customers, like a recent deal with a large enterprise in Gujarat. This space reinforces our leadership on Cloud platform side.

What new will happen with Xen Desktop 7?

It will drive a lot of adoption by 2014. It has got many new features, Many projects are still getting implemented, and this new version brings a lot of simplification on administration and a shift in design.

The market is taking new shades in India as you see it?

In the past ten years, a lot of applications were Windows-based, and even end user computing scenario was controlled by Windows. Now with the advent of consumerisation, people are talking of Android and iOS and thinking of new applications. Workforce in the field needs new devices like tablets and desires new apps. So for instance, an insurance company would now want someone to help them balance both these sides and take care of security and configurations etc too. They need someone who can support both the Windows and the new era OS environments. Today technology has to be complimentary to business and an insurance CIO for example would be worried about migrating all Windows apps, which is a tough call; and at the same time, he would need to facilitate the field force's use of tablets easily.

Many virtualization players are contributing a lot to open projects like OpenStack, CloudStack. How does that work for Citrix?

Our incubator focus with Apache project and OpenStack is significant. We keep contributing there as well in XenServer areas. Virtualisation, on a whole, will move towards a new level slowly and steadily.