Interviews

Citrix Enables Seamless Migration From PC To Cloud

Citrix
Nilesh Goradia
Head, Workspace Services & Government Business, India Subcontinent, Citrix

With rising impetus on consumerization of IT, Desktop virtualization is estimated to reach $32.14 million by 2017. Among several benefits, desktop virtualization offers improved employee efficiency, productivity, easy implementation of BYOD policy.

In that perspective, Nilesh Goradia, Head, Workspace Services & Government Business, India Subcontinent, Citrix shares with Channel Times, Citrix’s policy towards Indian market, the impact of BYOD, desktop virtualization and CloudBridge. Excerpts

Channel Times: What is your view on mobility and desktop virtualization on mobile devices pattern in India?

Citrix: With organizations realizing the increasing importance of mobility along with the consumerization of IT, Desktop Virtualization has gradually become a mainstream enterprise technology and as estimated by IDC, is estimated to reach $32.14 million by 2017. Desktop virtualization, which was previously seen as a niche technology, is now being adopted by customers across verticals. Organizations are embracing mobile workstyles due to their numerous benefits, the most important being, allowing employees to work using the device of their own choice from anywhere, in a secure manner. Apart from this, the adoption of DV has seen to improve employee efficiency and productivity. It enables mobility trends such as BYOD and enterprise mobility to be possible across all industry verticals. Due to innovative business models such as DaaS, where Desktops are delivered on demand without the need to set up an infrastructure, DV has also gained popularity among small businesses and seen tremendous adoption across sectors such as BFSI, IT/ITeS, BPO, telecom, manufacturing and education.

Channel Times: There is a trend of work from anywhere, work on the go. Yet the enterprise data and apps are on-premise.

Citrix: Till a few years back, enterprise applications and data were restricted to on premise machines. However, with the rise of cloud, the new inclination is either to move everything to a datacentre you can connect with from anytime, anywhere or to adopt a cloud model. With services, application and content moving to cloud, employees have the freedom to work from anywhere, on the device of their choice and access company data in a secure manner. Enterprise data and applications are slowly moving off from local data centres or over LAN and now running on cloud (private, public, or hybrid) and delivered over any network (LAN, WAN, 3G/4G etc). Given the developments in IT, it is expected that in the future, the number of diverse platforms will continue to grow.

Channel Times: What is Citrix doing to remain relevant in the World of Mobility and Cloud?

Citrix: Due to consumerization of IT, employees are demanding to choose their own devices and move beyond the ones stipulated by the company. As a result, companies are looking to adopt powerful technologies to maximize the true potential of a consumerized workforce. Citrix plays a key role in helping organisations to effectively migrate from the PC era to the Cloud era impacting their infrastructure strategy at the end user front with mobile workstyles and at the IT end with Cloud services. Citrix’s market-leading desktop virtualization solutions enable businesses to transform Windows desktops, apps and data into a cloud-like service accessible on any device, anywhere.

Citrix has been an early mover in the cloud space providing technology that powers some of the largest Public and Private Clouds. Many large Cloud Service providers and Enterprises across the globe use combination of Citrix XenServer and Citrix Cloud platform as the choice of platform to run their Public and Private Cloud infrastructure.

Channel Times: Will Citrix continue to maintain the lead in desktop virtualization, even as VMware view has vastly improved and even exceeded XenApp in performance and scalability?

Citrix: Virtual apps are the obvious option for supporting BYOD, enabling secure remote access, or transforming an organization’s PC refresh strategy. This approach often backfires though, as inadequate solutions in the market and lowest common denominator approach to computing impairs the user experience, causes headaches for IT, and fails to meet key business requirements by delivering only basic capabilities to customers. Only XenApp with HDX technology delivers the best user experience on any device, location or environment.

Channel Times: What is Citrix’s strategy on DaaS? Will it be aligning with Microsoft in this space?

Citrix: Citrix has recently launched Citrix Workspace Suite which is a cloud-based solution offering and helping customers build and deliver desktops as a service through cloud. It can also help service providers to deliver desktop as a service. Citrix is completely aligned with Microsoft on this as the Workspace Cloud is hosted in the Azure Data Centre and supported on Microsoft Azure.

Channel Times: With offerings like Azure RemoteApp, how will Citrix compete in this space?
Citrix: Citrix has always complimented the Microsoft RDS Solution and has delivered applications with great performance on low bandwidth and high latency networks. Citrix’s Mobile Workspace enables customers to deliver any application from the cloud including mobile applications. With its enhanced features and capabilities, Citrix will provide additional benefits over RDS which will help customers to deliver a seamless experience across any network and any device.

Channel Times: Please explain about CloudBridge.

Citrix: Citrix CloudBridge accelerates application delivery across public and private cloud networks, and provides enterprises the unique ability to support WAN virtualization. Combined with visibility into application performance, CloudBridge allows enterprises to evolve toward software-defined WANs for hybrid networking. As the needs of branches differ, CloudBridge offers two solutions for scaling WAN throughput. The WAN optimization edition provides application acceleration and bandwidth efficiency to cost-effectively support growing bandwidth demands, while the CloudBridge Virtual WAN edition dynamically adapts WAN bandwidth to cater for growth and cost-effectively improves WAN reliability.

CloudBridge offers a host of benefits including:

Deploying WAN virtualization for more scalable, cost effective and reliable application delivery
Improving the virtual desktop experience and branch office networking for users through application acceleration
Amplifying WAN optimization or WAN virtualization deployment with application visibility to ensure optimal performance
Simplify branch office networking
Accelerate storage replication and data delivery

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