30 Minute Interview

India’s emerged as an R&D hub for Citrix

Emerging trends such as SOA and Web 2.0 are changing the application delivery infrastructure and Citrix Systems Inc aims to leverage this trend. Sanjay Uppal, Vice President, Application Networking Group, Citrix Systems Inc talked to Abhinav Singh about the application delivery market as well as recent acquisitions of Caymas Systems, XenSource and QuickTree

Sanjay Uppal

Application networking market

We have seen that traffic continues to grow constantly on the Web and that applications are getting distributed into pieces. The number of bandwidth-intensive applications entering data centers is also on the rise. One can gauge all this from the richness of applications such as Google maps. There has been a trend that more traffic is also going into data centers and the key here is to deliver rich applications in a fast and secure manner.

About Citrix’s role in SOA and Web2.0

We have observed that SOA, which is a new way for applications to be delivered, is becoming more XML-enabled and it will enable the Citrix NetScaler range of products to switch on XML tags. Also Citrix WANScaler will also be able to optimize the communications in an SOA environment as XML is text-based and hence can be verbose. SOA is important in application delivery as the things can be done from a binary standpoint with a lot less of information. As applications become componentized, we will be performing the same functions of performance, security and cost within the application infrastructure.

With regard to the Web 2.0 space there are two ways in which Citrix can play an active role. Firstly we will load-balance based on any attributes that we find, all the way up to Layer 7. So when there is a conversation going on, say, you want to switch on a particular XML tag because there are a hundred servers and you want to find the least loaded one, Citrix’s NetScaler will transparently look at what the XML tag is and find the right server in the back-end to be able to terminate the conversation. Secondly, at Layer 4, we can take a number of TCP conversations that are going on and collate them down into a smaller number of TCP conversations to the back-end servers. As the adoption of Web 2.0 grows, the number of TCP conversations will also grow exponentially. So if you take that growth and terminate it at the back-end server, you need to put in a lot of expense. Even if an organization uses open source operating systems and applications, like Google (a Citrix customer) does, it will still need to incur the operational expenditure of all of its servers.

Caymas Systems, XenSource and QuickTree acquisitions

Citrix had acquired Caymas Systems, which adds NAC (Network Access Control) functionality to the suite of technologies within the Citrix ‘skill set’. By the acquisition of XenSource, Citrix has now been able to offer end-to-end application delivery infrastructure that leverages the method of application, desktop and server virtualization best suited for the delivery of applications to any user. Similarly the acquisition of QuickTree has helped address the key security and performance challenges of XML and Web services. The move has also strengthened Citrix’s end-to-end application delivery infrastructure by enabling it to incorporate more XML processing capabilities across the Citrix application networking product line, including Citrix NetScaler, Citrix WANScaler and Citrix Access Gateway and has been able to further increase its focus on the acceleration, optimization and secure accessibility of applications.

About R&D in India

India has emerged as an important R&D hub for Citrix’s application and networking group. We are doing some significant work on next-generation platforms of some of our major application networking products. There is tremendous scope for the application networking products in India, as there are a number of organizations having a large number of branch offices, which are distributed, across the country. It is a priority for them to deliver applications securely and quickly to different locations. We already have customers in India such as CNBC-TV18 and HDFC Bank amongst others for our application networking products and hope to further expand our customer base here in the near future.