‘Desktop virtualisation is the next big thing’

Mark Templeton, president & CEO, Citrix Systems, practices what he preaches. “I don’t think I can live without the online technologies that we develop. I use technology for all the normal reasons,” he says. Back in 1995, when he joined the online technologies company as vice-president marketing, Citrix was just a $15 million company. Today, at $1.6 billion in annual sales, it is at the forefront of “virtualisation” and online collaboration. In a chat with C Chitti Pantulu, Templeton shares his vision of the future and what lies in store for the online world.

 

How have CIOs reacted to the recession? Are you beginning to see any changes with the recent improvement in the economic climate?

CIOs have responded in predictable ways, by cutting down budgets on the biggest projects and scrapping the smallest. The focus on projects at the centre of the pack is the norm now. The number one priority is to reduce fixed costs and move to a system of variable costs, a trend that has been consistent over the past one year. Now that they have done a lot of firefighting and see budgets are not coming back yet, the focus is to shift to variable costs. That is something Citrix is ideally suited for, with solutions that leverage the shift to variable costs.

Continuing the subject, has the slowdown fundamentally changed the way corporations are looking at IT and what is the fallout for Citrix?

There are companies that treat technology as strategic to their business. I would say they have continued to invest with a focus on standardisation and reduction of vendors with an emphasis on better pricing. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who don’t see technology as a strategic input for business and have therefore, slowed down. You could say the slowdown has been good for our business. Flat is the new definition of growth and the fact that we have not degrown speaks volumes about our success over the last one year. That is because over the last eight years, Citrix has invested in end-to-end virtualisation and we have taken a very different approach to it. It is a holistic approach that separates the physical from the logical, people from devices and devices from locations and operating systems from gadgets.

We are in an environment where the only constant is change. That change is being heralded by regulatory and geopolitical considerations. And there is a lot of disruption that is also leading to this change, geopolitical and financial. In this kind of environment, flexibility will be the most important factor in the future for corporations. We are at the core of providing that flexibility by providing the break from the legacy or dead ideas of distributed computing.

What are the prospects for virtualisation in emerging markets? Will their relative backwardness lead to technology leapfrogging and speed up adoption? On the other hand, what will be the issues on account of network shortcomings in these markets?

The main hindrance to growth in emerging markets is the lack of skillsets to leverage technology. On the other hand, there is also an opportunity to shift over to virutalisation with a particular focus on shifting from wireline to wireless technologies, which give a huge advantage in cost and flexibility. It is true if you don’t have connectivity you will be challenged where virtualisation is concerned. However, a key specialty of Citrix has been to get around low bandwidths. That is one reason why we have been doing well in India for that matter.

Talking about India, what growth have you been seeing here and what are your plans for the country going ahead?

India is a small market for us, but we have seen good growth here. However, India’s impact on Citrix’s overall revenues is tremendous given the immense development work that happens here. Bangalore is the core development centre for us as it works on the biggest pool of virtualisation technologies. All the Software as a Service (SaaS), desktop virtualisation and data centre technologies are done here. There are 400 people in Bangalore now. I see us doubling that number in three years and we need more space. We will open up another facility in the city next year and will participate in a big way in the sister cities programme between Bangalore and San Francisco.

How different is it to do business in emerging markets compared to either the US or European markets?

The US markets are much more trend driven, unlike the emerging markets which are more thoughtful where technology is concerned. They look at it more as a business enabler. But talking of Ctirix, we don’t per se approach the markets differently.

Where do you see the cloud proliferating faster, at the server and data centre end or the consumer desktop level?

The momentum till now has been at the server side. But I see desktop virtualisation as the next big inflexion point with a proliferation of consumer type devices in the workplace. Unlike server virtualisation, which was a win for only the IT industry, desktop virutalisation is a win-win for consumers.

What is your personal view of Web 2.0 technologies? What are the particular trends that you foresee both with personal computing and enterprise IT?

Web 2.0 has been in the making for the past four-odd years. And now it is lead by social networking, which is giving a fillip to collaboration technologies heavily dependent on consumer-generated content and pay-per-use revenue models. While this is prevalent on the consumer side, over the next five years, all these technologies will infuse the enterprise computing in a major way. If you want to see the future of computing, I would say go to the fringe. In computing, the fringe is gaming. The intersection of gaming and Web 2.0 is the next wave that will engulf enterprise computing. And clearly this is the crux of the roadmap for new products and services from Citrix. Online collaboration is the sweet spot that we are experiencing while we are moving towards the self-service model for application delivery with our technologies like Dazzle.

Finally, what is your view of the economic scenario?

It is more stable now. But it is not the ultimate goal. The global economy has to grow again. Stability means more predictability. We are a couple of years before we can work through what we have seen over the past 18 months. We have to be more efficient through the use of technology. During the last recession, we have seen a jobless growth in the US. Speaking of Citrix itself, the technologies we are developing will be relevant in this contest.