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Spotlight
East-side story
Citrix Systems, which started its journey in India around
seven years back, has come a long way with 1,500 customers under its belt. It
expects over 50 percent growth in India in CY 2007. By Abhinav Singh
What began on a small note when Citrix Systems entered the Indian market with
the acquisition of a local company named PowerTel Boca has turned out to be
a big story. Citrix has grown its operations and boasts marquee names such as
Maruti Udyog Limited, LG Electronics India Limited (LGEIL), Ashok Leyland, Bharti,
Gati, Eicher and ICICI Lombard to name a few. The company achieved 27 percent
growth in revenue terms in CY 2006 in the Indian market and has now set 50 percent
as its growth target in CY 2007. It has 40 partners and three specialized system
integrators. Additionally it has also been engaged in R&D activities with
its Indian R&D centre having a significant presence in the company’s
overall product development strategy. Citrix Systems India has around 200 people
in the R&D and around 30 on the marketing side.
Application virtualization and acceleration
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 "We
have expanded operations in India with more people being recruited for
sales and marketing and are planning to set up a large office campus"
- Souma Das
Area, Vice-President-Indian Sub Continent, Citrix Systems India Pvt Limited
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Citrix Systems expects significant revenues to come from application
acceleration and application virtualization solutions. Souma Das, Area Vice-President
- Indian Sub Continent, Citrix Systems says, “The market for Presentation
Server is as usual growing rapidly in India, but we have also seen that the
application acceleration technologies such as NetScaler, WANScaler and SSL-VPN
have also grown quickly from Q2 2007 onwards. We exceeded our targets in India
for such products during H1 2007. We added 87 customers in H1 2007 and are extremely
pleased with our growth.”
The company is expecting that as the IT infrastructure of
organizations in India is experiencing a huge level of consolidation, the role
of application virtualization technology would be a key enabler for growth.
Additionally Citrix is expecting that lot of companies in India are moving towards
Web application servers where Citrix finds the role of its Web Acceleration
products making significant headway.
The company is bullish over the fact that SAP has certified that Citrix’s
virtualization product enhances the performance of its ERP application and this
fact will help the company boost sales of its virtualization products in the
Indian market.
Specialized partner approach
In order to achieve its growth targets the company has embarked on a specialized
partner program. Some of its specialized partners include Apara, CMC Limited,
IBM, Wipro and TCS. Das says, “Since we are selling multiple product lines
in India we wanted to have partners specializing in different product lines.
For multiple product lines, partners require customized skill sets.” In
February this year the company organized a Partner Accelerator Program in Mumbai
aimed at enhancing skill-sets of its partners. Around 250 people participated
in the program, which comprised of not only the 40 partners but also Citrix
experts in different technologies. Das says, “We have expanded operations
in India with more people being recruited for sales and marketing and are planning
to set up a large office campus.”
- Entered the Indian market in mid 2000
by acquiring PowerTel Boca.
- Brought in senior professionals to restructure
the sales and marketing efforts of the company in 2001. Souma Das the
current vice-president in India was one of them. The company rebuilt
its channel by doing workshops and events.
- Included Wipro and TCS as partners in
2003. The aim was to penetrate the enterprise segment. The company has
more than 1,500 customers in India of which Bharti is one of their earliest
wins.
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R&D: significant contributions
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 "Our
aim at the R&D centre will
be to expand into the development
of multiple product groups"
- Rakesh Singh
Vice-President, Products
and Managing Director,
Citrix R&D India Pvt Ltd
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Citrix’s development centre in Bangalore contributes
to the development of different product lines. An Application Networking Group
works on the development of the NetScaler range of products, and there is a
Virtualization Services Group, which works on developing new functionalities
on Citrix Presentation Server. Besides this there is the Advanced Solutions
Group (ASG), which works on new technologies. Presently the ASG is working on
a project called Pictor that involves the addition of virtualization functionalities
on graphics-intensive applications.
The Citrix R&D team has also developed a major portion
of the company’s Access Gateway Solutions besides the whole range of NetScaler.
The Indian R&D team plans to offer expanded product technical support for
Citrix customers across the globe through e-mail and on the telephone. Rakesh
Singh, Vice-President, Products and Managing Director, Citrix R&D India
Pvt Ltd says, “Our aim at the R&D centre will be to expand into the
development of multiple product groups. We will also be strengthening the R&D
team here by appointing technical relationship managers who will work closely
with our customers and assist them technically in case of upgrades or any technological
configuration required on Citrix products that they might have implemented.”
Recently the R&D team in India worked on developing the WanScaler Application
Firewall solution. Besides this the R&D team here is in expansion mode.
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