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C. Ramanan, Director – Commercial Business, India Subcontinent, Citrix Systems India Pvt. Ltd, talks about software defined networking and the scope for the technology in India.
What do you think will be the next big thing in enterprise networks?
A lot of things are moving towards the software defined way. We can foresee changes in the enterprise networks. One is around consolidation, where a lot of customers are looking at consolidating their networking portfolio, minimizing the point products and number of appliances that they own. This consolidation has already started happening and we can see a lot of customers interested in doing that.
The next change that we are seeing is with the adoption of the software defined network which is helping customers by bringing in better manageability and reducing the TCO.
Both, consolidation and software defined networks are going to penetrate further in the enterprise networks.
What are the biggest benefits of SDN?
Customers do look out for commodity hardware being managed by software. There is a focus on SDN, and adoption also is slowly happening. ‘Getting more from one’, which is the basis of virtualization, has also been applied to networking. We have been very successful doing that.
They (customers) see a lot of value in migrating to the software defined way. While SDN reduces overheads of managing the network (there are fewer devices to manage in the datacenter) and also brings down TCO, the features and functionality of conventional network is not compromised. SDN is also elastic, scalability wise. That’s why customers are migrating to, or looking to migrate to the software defined space.
This shift (to SDN) is already happening. Networking is now part and parcel of the datacenter, because everything is becoming centralized. We are seeing that customers are looking for simplicity and ease of manageability at the networking layer, which is already moved to the datacenter. That’s where the software defined way of looking at things is easier for customers.
As part of datacenter consolidation, lot of customers are adding their networking piece also (along with servers and storage) for their data center consolidation project. With software defined network getting added on to this, customers get benefits of lower energy consumption and lower carbon footprint.
How prepared are the Indian channel partners in catering to SDN and other new networking technologies?
A lot of system integrators / partners in India have skillsets and ability in terms of helping their customers migrate their enterprise architecture to the software defined datacenter. Partners are developing their skill sets internally to undertake seamless transition for their customers.
Earlier, networking was looked at as a separate portfolio where tasks like switching, routing, firewalls were categorized as a separate portfolio. With this shift that is happening where networking is part and parcel of the overall datacenter, partners are working with vendors like us to develop their skillsets wherein an integrated solution is being offered to the customers, rather than having isolated resources in place. They will have knowledge about servers, storage, virtualization, and on the networking front as well. The (human) resource will have to have domain knowledge on all these portfolios. To this end partners are working with vendors like us.
Which industries are growth markets for SDN ?
Among some key verticals – because of the nature of their business – that are able to immediately adopt to SDN, is the dotcom companies. There are surges in the number of hits and that’s why they need to have software defined ways of managing their customers and traffic so business continuity is not affected.
The next key vertical is the banking and financial services sector. We see a lot of new application adoption, and a lot of banks are coming up. They see new number of branches which are growing. The more number of users make it necessary to have scalability in their networks.
Other verticals include large manufacturing companies, transportation services companies, and ITES companies. One of the key things with ITES companies is that they use multiple applications for software development and many users have multiple applications. Instead of having multiple point products which is cumbersome for the IT administrators to manage, they look out for this (SDN) kind of software defined solution which is very simple for them to manage and it also brings down the cost of ownership drastically.
How does Citrix approach partner training and enablement?
One of the areas in which we train our partners is in the pre-sales solution architecting front where our team members spend a lot of time with the channel pre-sales community. We have activities like ‘tech caravan’ in every region, and our presales people in every region work very closely with our partner presales persons. We keep doing knowledge sharing activities on a regular basis.
Apart from this, we have our education services which is running successfully in India. We have a lot of CALCs – Citrix Authorized Learning Centers – in India, which run certified training courses for our partners, where after 3 -5 days of trainings, the participants get a certification. Therefore, partner tech resources need not travel to another region – we have CALCs available in all the major cities.
