The steady pace of digitization has pushed organizations big and small to re-evaluate their current strategies and reinvent themselves to stay relevant. Citrix has offerings that can be favourably aligned to suit the needs of an organization in their digital transformation journey.
Giving more details on Citrix’s stands to help businesses across scale and size, Makarand Joshi, Area Vice President & Country Head, India Subcontinent, Citrix has had an exclusive interaction with ITNewsBuzz Team. Edited excerpts…
ITNewsBuzz: What are your thoughts on India’s cloud market? How do you see the future of Cloud shaping up?
Makarand Joshi: Having spent the past decade exploring and adopting cloud technologies in varying forms, from the odd application to testing for different business units; organizations today are positioning themselves to adopt multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solutions. With the emergence of new age technologies, organizations are not only looking at enhancing their efficiency but also reducing the cost of solution deployment and maintenance. The focus has now moved to deploying hybrid-cloud solutions that fit into the existing set-up without causing considerable interruption. In this backdrop, cloud with its multifarious digitization and collaborative capabilities has risen to become an essential component of modern IT infrastructure. This trend was further validated with IDC’s findings on the overall server market in India witnessing a growth of 51.1% in revenue in the third quarter of 2017 driven by expansion of public cloud.
In addition to the use of more analytical tools to derive relevant insights, the hybrid or multi cloud model, with its inherent flexibility will be a crucial for businesses adapting and adopting cloud for productivity gains and cost reductions.
ITNewsBuzz: Could you explain the idea of multi-cloud and how it stands to help businesses across scale and size?
Makarand Joshi: According to research firm IDC, the spending on cloud services and cloud enabling hardware, software and services will double to over $530 billion by 2021. This goes to show the massive influence and acceptance of this technology over the coming years.
A multi cloud environment involves usage of multiple cloud computing services within the same architecture/IT framework. Some organizations prefer to manage their data using different services based on their requirements and characteristics like size and speed. With the right cloud mix, organizations can make the best of the resources at hand. Evolving workloads, business agility, freedom of usage and costs are variables likely to help businesses fully recognize the importance and relevance of a multi-cloud approach.
ITNewsBuzz: How is Citrix enabling the cloud journey of a business?
Makarand Joshi: At Citrix, we have uniquely positioned ourselves to help organizations in their transition towards cloud-based solutions. We evaluate the customer’s IT environment and accordingly recommend and deploy our services. The organization could be at the start of their cloud journey or may have already adopted a cloud-first approach, Citrix can meet them halfway in either case.
We believe a multi or hybrid cloud approach offers our customers the flexibility to host and manage their workloads where they want, utilizing the services they need to. So our cloud services allow businesses to manage a distributed range of on-prem, public and private cloud environments via a single cloud management plane.
Further, Citrix Cloud Services can also be used to extend existing on-premise Citrix software deployments. This will help enable the use of hybrid workspace services and deliver simple approaches to consuming cloud-native technology. Today, Citrix is helping Indian organizations in taking their first steps toward cloud computing solutions and by doing so, leveraging the potential of hybrid cloud.
ITNewsBuzz: Could you tell us how organizations’ have benefited from deployment of Citrix products?
Makarand Joshi: While managing data within an enterprise, employees should be able to access this data with ease and use it to derive definitive insights. This access, however, makes data susceptible to infiltration. With the recent upsurge in ransomware attacks, a collective strategy that takes security measures into consideration become crucial. Citrix is positioned to help organizations in achieving this balance. In the past, our virtualization solutions have been used by government machineries at a global level to deliver reliable and secure access across a distributed architecture.
Furthermore, our simplified solutions are capable of helping our customers in making the most of BYOD. This is basis secure enterprise mobility management, desktop virtualization, collaboration, and remote support capabilities. Therefore, by providing organizations with all the right tools for a truly digitized structure, Citrix is enabling the workspace of the future.
With extensive understanding of businesses’ requirements across markets, Citrix’s solutions are best positioned to offer the most complete and integrated workspace to enable people to securely access their apps, desktops and data from anywhere, using any devices through any network. Furthermore, Citrix’s offering of a digital workspace, which is secure-by-design, offers employees the perfect balance of flexibility, productivity and control irrespective of location or device.
ITNewsBuzz: What are your thoughts on Indian government’s push for digitization and the consequent automation of workspaces?
Makarand Joshi: The Electronic & IT Ministry has set a vision of making India a trillion-dollar digital economy in the next 5-7 years. Owing to this, over the last few years, the Government of India has been a strong advocate of digital based solutions and digitization. The focus has been especially on cloud and harnessing its potential to help accelerate the pace of growth.
According to research firm Gartner, the IT spends in the government sector in India is projected to grow by 8.9% in 2017 and to touch $8.5 billion in 2018. Besides this, IT services are also expected to account for about a quarter of the total spend. This statistic is a strong indication of the government’s agenda of promoting and providing the use of digital solutions across a wide user base.
Strengthening their resolve further is the allocation of over Rs. 3000 crores to the Digital India program in the Union Budget. With the thrust for digitization coming straight the government, organizations now have the backing required to transition to new intelligent solutions. Alongside the push for digitization we are also witnessing a shift towards cybersecurity of the digital assets of Digital India. We see huge upsides owing to our proven technologies in the space of alternate secure solutions.
ITNewsBuzz: What is Citrix doing to remain innovative in the World of Mobility and Cloud?
Makarand Joshi: India being at the cusp of technology adoption and IT restructuring is estimated to become a $1,871 million market according to a recent IDC report. With organizations actively seeking mobility solutions to ensure that their workspaces are no longer contained within four walls through remote working, the enterprise mobility market is booming.
The growth of enterprise mobility and cloud are likely to continue given the growing cellular infrastructure provisions being made available to the end consumers. This combined with increased network coverage and the emergence of low cost smart devices are definite driving factors responsible for stimulating demand further.
Additionally, as technology increasingly affects organization’s workload and IT requirements, move to automated workspaces is imminent.
Having said that, we will continue to reiterate our commitment to innovation through delivery of disruptive technologies. At Citrix, we take innovation seriously and have dedicated teams that are working every day to redefine the future of workspace.
At the end…
Cloud enabled SaaS apps will continue to be popular as leading businesses prioritize the need for a steady IT infrastructure, with a known cost structure and high SLA (Service Level Agreement). Additionally, in the future, the connected nature of cloud could be a powerful platform when integrated with intelligent solutions like analytics or even artificial intelligence.
