We have announced the XenClient, which is a hyper-vizor for the PC. It connects to XenDesktop and offers complete management from an end-to-end perspective

How important is APAC for Citrix as a region?
APAC is extremely strategic for us as two-third of world's population lives in India and China, which are the two biggest nations. In terms of revenue, APAC contributes a small percentage of 10 to 11 percent of the overall mix in each quarter. We are aiming to increase this to 18 to 20 percent. We want APAC to grow faster. There is a strong potential for this growth, which is to be led by three countries-Japan, India and China. APAC as a whole is growing at around seven to eight percent, which is more than our global rate. India and China are higher with double digit growth.

How bullish are you about India?
The Indian market is relatively small, but we have planned big investments. We would like to tap the new market of desktop virtualization (DV), which we believe has huge potential here. Desktops are physically aligned to people and there is a large number of people in India. We plan to increase our manpower base from 600 to 1,000 and a lot of this will include R&D resources. We find that India is a great place to invest from an R&D point of view because the intellectual capital is high here.

What are the differences between India and China as markets? Also from a channel perspective what is the difference?
The market of China is bigger and more advanced than the one in India. But there is a lot of potential in India and hence we are investing in the country as much as here in China. The Chinese market is booming with accelerated growth and India is the second biggest region for us as far as growth is concerned. The challenges in each country are different. In China, language is a big factor when you look at it from an R&D perspective, while in India the challenges are even greater with aspects like infrastructure environment, network bandwidth. The speed with which things move is slower in India in comparison to China. The Indian channel community is more of the traditional sort with resellers and system integrators in the chain. On the other hand, due to China's fast growing economy, investing in a particular technology becomes a challenge and therefore partners are wary of an investment lock down in a specific technology.

What is your take on the scope for virtualizing the desktop?
We are very excited about DV but the question is whether the market is ready for it. In my opinion, all the corporate customers would like it. From an end user perspective however, it is a different kind of thinking. Opportunity wise there are around 1.2 billion desktops in the world and according to Gartner, around 60 million desktops will be virtualized over the next few years. Over the last two quarters itself; we sold around 1.5 million licenses for DV. One of the catalysts for DV is Windows 7, which is a great OS and it should be run on every desktop. In order to deliver Windows 7 experience in a cost effective manner, DV is the way to go. The issue of bandwidth is holding DV back. Any vertical that needs better control of its environment, security and which ensures that compliance is in place, would need DV. Banking and Pharma are two of the biggest verticals and other verticals where IP is a key factor are the ones with DV potential.

What are your some of the plans for channels?
We recently conducted a XenDesktop roadshow in cities like Mumbai and Delhi to educate our partners about the products. An event, which is known as Partner Accelerator is held annually in India. We will have a global partner summit, which will take place in Berlin this October for which our Indian partners will also be invited. We are also investing in training our partners. Further, we also plan to increase our current partner base. We want to inform our partners about XenServer 5.6, which is our latest update in the XenServer series. The other thing that we have announced is the XenClient which is a hyper-vizor for the PC. It connects to XenDesktop and offers complete management from an end-to-end perspective. Desktop as a service is still in its infancy and will be a cloud based solution. We would want our partners to deliver applications to their customers over a virtualized platform. We also have the VPX line of application delivery networking products.

Talking about competition, how do you compete with VMWare in the DV space?
DV is more complicated than server virtualization and I don't think VMWare will ever get there because it is just too complicated on the desktop. Though VMWare has done a great job on the servers but with Microsoft and Citrix coming in partnership and offering DV at one-tenth the cost at a higher performance, we are definitely ahead in the game as far as our product is concerned.

What advice you would give to your partners?
Some of the partners are concerned whether this is the right time to invest and if so then which vendor to invest in? 'Do I invest in both and cover my bets?' We say invest in one and not in both because it is just a waste of time. We also tell our partners to be niche and not to provide too many options to the customer because more the options, more is the cost. We suggest to sell a specific stack of solutions instead of spreading yourself too thin. Partners try and hold on to a customer and not to a vendor. Maybe they should rethink and hold on to a vendor.

JOHN JACOB
johnj@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1