Mobility will Drive Enterprise

Mobility continuesto  be the topmost issue as well as the enabler for the development of IT enterprise. Citrix, says Kaushal Veluri, Director – Channels & Alliances, India Subcontinent, Citrix. With increasing adoption of mobile devices, the role of channel partners in Citrix’s marketing strategy is also growing.  

1)      What trends do you see in mobility technology that will help enterprises become future ready? 

Mobility is the number one area of focus for most organizations. Eight out of ten, if not, all CIOs talk about the fact that mobility is their major concern for their investments in infrastructure. The number of mobile devices and the number of different innovations that are happening in the mobile space is constantly increasing. The next generation is all mobile driven, they want to bring in their devices into the organizations. Therefore, mobility does become one of the most important aspects. There is a lot of convergence happening today between the mobility, desktop or the virtualization space— this is what we call as software defined work space.

It means that you should be able to work from anywhere, on any device, at any network, and should be able to access your applications and have the most productive environment that you can work in. There are various aspects of mobility space – mobile device management, mobile application management, etc. But it all comes down to software defined process; I believe that’s the trend will define how mobility will be treated by organizations. This trend will apply to both large enterprises and SME organizations as well. In Citrix as an organization, we focus on how to help organizations build software defined process.

2)      What is the channel strategy that Citrix channel follows?

Citrix has always been a channel driven organization. We provide lot of value to our channel partners and at Citrix, we have actually evolved with our channel partners from being a single product company into a multi technology solution oriented organization. Our channel partners have also evolved from being point product sellers of simple things to becoming solution providers to organizations. Citrix, at the very core has always been and will always be a channel driven organization. As an organization, we are very lean — we have a limited sales work force or a technical work force out there in the market place. Also the channels really add value to the entire chain.

It’s more about how we mutually benefit each other and how do we grow together in that space. We have had some channel partners who have been with us for 14- 15 years. We are in software defined workspace so it is even more interesting today. When a partner goes out and talks to a customer, he understands that the customer needs. Our partners are always looking at increasing their touch point with the customers – increasing their ability to form a relationship with our customers.  

3)      How do you ensure your partners have the best possible support to take your product to the market, in the face of competition?

Today we are solutions driven organization and business. When a partner goes to a customer and talks to them, the customer is interested to hear about a solution to their business problem – whether it is branch office automation, or whether it is in the manufacturing situation, they want to know how to automate, and how do they better manage their inventory. How can you as a partner add value to them? This all comes down to solution driven concept. The support part of it becomes very critical because the customer expects the solution to work flawlessly, and become a better and effective way of managing that business issue. A couple of months back, we combined our presales team and post sales consulting team into one single team.

Prior to that there used to be separate teams, so the pre sales person would go and engage with the partner and sort of hand off when the sale gets done. Then the consulting team would come in if required. The knowledge was there in these two teams but because these two teams were separate, the knowledge sharing was not happening. By combining these two teams we have added tremendous value to the partner space. Today the experience of the implementation team with complex customers is easily been transferred to the presales person, so that the presales person is able to design a better solution and help our partners. It becomes like a circle where you are helping each other with the knowledge you have. So this is one of the big support options that we have extended to the partners by making a change internally within our organization.

To help our partners understand the technology, we run these constant programs with the partners. We do the enablement activities with the partners like every other organization. We run technical seminars with them, we run webinars, we have something called tech in a box (we run webinar for the partner technical people every fifteen days on a different topic). It’s an easy way to reach out to them, but at the same time the regional teams call the technical people of partners into the office and have a lunch and learn session with them. Even with the sales team we do similar things. We believe strongly that it’s not about sitting inside a room and expecting a change. It’s more about on the field on the job mentoring that candidate. The partner sales person goes out to the customer space along with the Citrix person so that they learn from each other. So that’s the kind of support that we give to our partner from a sales and a technical perspective.

4)      How do you support your partners in the cloud adoption environment?

Everything seems to be moving into the cloud. I love the fact that a couple of years back nobody really understood what cloud was. Finally it all comes down to the core competency. If my core competency is managing this infrastructure at my place, are there certain  things that I can move off to the cloud and use it in a more utility based methodology? I think that’s where the thinking is coming. Our daily habit of consuming things is impacting consuming of technology as well, and how do I use it as a utility, and therefore how do I move it to the cloud.  So what you are doing in personal life is also impacting all your professional aspects. Our partners are obviously coming back and telling us about that. If you are looking at Citrix technology, I think it is still in its initial phases of moving to the cloud. It’s not something like Microsoft, who move lot of their work loads and are able to deliver.

I think our technologies are still in the initial phases of getting moved on to the cloud – like  desktop as a service or application as a service that is delivered from the cloud. We are working very closely with our partners. We have a Citrix service provider licensing (CSP licensing) which is clearly a monthly subscription based licensing model. We started identifying a few partners and we have started working with them. ANG is very successful on the CSP model on cloud based offering. India, because of our adoption of the cloud as a country and our technology at Citrix, we are in the initial phases of that. We are working very closely with some of our partners. We are doing some real good work with them. I believe that the course of this year is where we will strengthen our cloud practices along with our partners and have the ability to deliver more and more of that kind of work.

5)      Do you have any plans of expanding on geographies?   

Citrix has been very focus on the metro cities. We have a very strong presence in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Pune and Chennai. Technology adoption, and the prevalence of technology and the entire mobile scenario are also very much prevalent in other cities as well. Our technologies have been primarily enterprise and large mid-market kind off technologies. But yes, we are very actively looking at expanding into geographies – into the next rung of cities. We are working very closely with the distributors on how to expand into Chandigarh, or Jaipur, Nagpur, Nasik, Aurangabad, Vizag, Cochin, etc.

We are also planning to expand into. We have had presence in Srilanka, Nepal, Bangladesh market,  it is more about focusing on expanding more deeply into those markets. Yes, we are definitely looking to increase our pan India presence with the help of our partners. But the partners can add tremendous value over there for us. That’s what we are looking towards our partners and distributors who can add value to the Citrix eco system by helping us expand into those markets.