30 minute interview

“We are part of a stronger brand”

Prabakar Sundarrajan CTO & EVP, Strategic Planning & Corporate Development, NetScaler

The explosion of Web-based applications and remote support centres will drive Netscaler’s application delivery solutions

What is driving enterprises to increase their application delivery capabilities?

Active enterprises are diversifying their applications portfolio. For instance, there’s been a growth of Web-based applications with a browser interface. There are many remote users (including customers and own employees) accessing applications, and enterprises are permitting external users to access internal applications. All this puts pressure on enterprises to deliver data securely and efficiently to remote users. With this arise concerns about application performance and cost of delivering it to different users. To solve them, enterprises have had to consolidate their applications at a central data centre. This creates hurdles as delivering applications over a distance poses challenges for an organisation resulting in slow application performance and vulnerability of data, including the need for additional bandwidth. Hence, enhancing application delivery performance which meets the key issues of security and performance while delivering applications has become important for organisations the world over. We see a bright future in the application delivery market. It is believed that this market would be worth $2.8 billion worldwide by 2008.

Is there scope for application delivery solutions in India?

The Indian application delivery market is expected to grow exponentially due to the mushrooming of R&D and technical support centres which are servicing customers thousands of miles away. To offer customers timely service, it is important for these centres to enhance their application delivery capabilities. The aim of enterprises is to do away with application delivery latency. Many want to increase the utilisation of their existing bandwidth instead of going in for additional bandwidth. We have customers such as Vincity AQ, State Bank of India (online), cricinfo.com and LIC as our customers in India for our application enhancing solutions. Our Indian customers were facing application delivery problems, and had to invest in additional bandwidth to meet their requirements.

What are the capabilities of best-of-breed application delivery systems?

Best-of-breed application delivery systems should have functionalities such as data unification capabilities, caching, compression and a capability to check for any attacks before delivering an application. In NetScaler’s application enhancing solutions, SSL-VPN functionality is pre-integrated. A best-of-breed application delivery system is also intelligent enough to obey an organisation’s access control policies and ensure that these policies are adhered to even when data is in the cache. Moreover, these solutions should be application-independent and be able to enhance delivery capabilities irrespective of application type. Take for instance an organisation with Microsoft Exchange, a client-server application and thin clients; a best-of-breed solution should be able to accelerate the performance of all the different co-existing protocols within an organisation.

Will things change now that NetScaler’s been acquired?

Our products find greater acceptance now that we are part of a stronger brand. Till now, potential customers hesitated while doing business with a privately-held company such as ours, but after the acquisition these concerns will be done away with. We feel that after the acquisition, our products will have perfect synergy and will be able to intelligently interact with Citrix’s products especially with their presentation server. We feel that the acquisition will help us leverage Citrix’s vast market reach.

—Abhinav Singh