SDA India is an online resource for Software, Development,IT, Architecture, Open Source, Mobile, Security, Databases, Delphi, C, OS, Asp, .Net, Php, Xml, Java

Many organizations are discovering a fast growing need to virtualise applications as they struggle to deal with two opposing forces of modern businesses: increasing dispersed and external workforces with an increasingly stringent need for security and control of data.

Becoming a common watchword in IT, virtualisation is described by some as “the abstraction and pooling of IT resources in a way that masks the physical nature and boundaries of those resources from resource users.” Virtualisation brings with it the benefits of consolidation and today occurs on several levels in an enterprise.
Citrix has been in the forefront of application virtualisation for many years now and is now looking to make the same mark in emerging virtualisation markets.

SDA Asia talks to Nabeel Youakim, Vice President & Product Line Executive for Citrix Windows Application Delivery on the trends driving the uptake of Virtualisation especially in the Asia Pacific region and how citrix is changing the face of business and driving business. Youakim also talks about the recent XenSource acquisition and how this move will impact Citrix’s position as a player in the Virtualisation field.

SDA: How do you think Virtualisation is changing the IT landscape and what are the trends that are driving this market?

Nabeel Youakim (NY): There are many different types of virtualisation one of which is application virtualisation. This solves the challenge of managing the applications on the desktop. For the user it looks no different, they turn on their PC, click on the icon and it just runs. But, the application is actually executed on the server.

We intercept the user interface before it reaches the server and deliver it to the user and allow a multi user environment on the server. Although you may have multiple applications running on the server, the technology isolates each application by itself so they don’t conflict with each other on the server and you can have multiple applications on multiple servers. Another advantage is that we free the user and the company from buying more Personal Computers to run the latest applications. Because we run the application on the server and the user interface, we can run it on any device.

Server Virtualisation which is mainly dominated by VM Ware and provides a hyper visor that runs on the server platform, typically a windows server, has the ability to virtualise the server operating system. The benefit of this is that today there are millions of servers which are not being utilised to its full capacity. So a lot of money is put into the server and it’s not being used fully but still consuming power and air conditioning which leads to cost. With server virtualisation you can have one server and a hyper visor to virtualise it and you can have the exchange server and the file and print server on the same box so, now you have only one piece of hardware and not two.

SDA: How strong is the virtualisation market in Asia Pacific?

NY: It’s definitely as strong as anywhere else because server virtualisation is something everyone has been doing for quite awhile…the value is the same whether it’s in US or Europe or in Asia.

I think a lot of companies in Asia are virtualising their servers because they want to reduce cost. IT budgets are not increasing.

Application virtualisation which is what we have been doing has been very strong for us in Asia. We have been growing here year on year by 20 per cent.

The other value of application delivery is to reduce cost in delivering applications and to run applications on a minimum amount of bandwidth which is very big in Asia because bandwidth continues to be very expensive in the region.

SDA: Desktop virtualisation is an emerging market, how far do you think this market will take off and why?

NY: Gartner estimates USD 5000 is spent to manage per desktop per year. A big component of the cost is the people cost. It’s not the hardware or the software but managing it that’s really expensive.

Desktop virtualisation is definitely a cheaper option because now you are able to take for instance 1000 PCs (personal computers), off the operating systems and manage them in a data centre where it is much easier to manage, control and secure them and then you can deliver the desktop remotely to the users. The whole idea of desktop virtualisation is about reducing the cost and managing the desktops. That’s why it is taking off and becoming very interesting for a lot of organisations.

SDA: Citrix very recently announced that it has acquired XenSource. How does this acquisition tie into Citrix’s virtualisation strategy?

NY: XenSource is a company that has developed a virtualisation technology called Xen Enterprise. We plan to complete the acquisition by our December quarter and after that the first thing we are going to be doing is to sell that product into our server virtualisation space which is a very big market.

Today only an estimated 5 per cent of the servers in the marketplace are being virtualised which means there are still 95 per cent of servers which have not being virtualised so it’s a very big opportunity for us. Obviously we will be competing with VM Ware and other virtualisation technologies in that space.

Secondly, the XenSource technology enables us to make our desktop server product a better product. Since for desktop servers, you virtualise the desktops rather than the server, we will now be able to provide the virtualisation technology and connect the desktop server technology to those servers as part of one solution.

So we will be covering all the virtualisation platforms that are in the client server window and Linux world because since the XenSource technology is derived from the Linux source platform and it also runs on Linux’s servers.

SDA: How do you plan to tap into the 95 per cent of server virtualisation market that hasn’t been tapped into?

NY: : The market will slowly take of as people start realising the value of virtualisation. As customers roll over their servers they will look to virtualisation as reducing the cost of the overall purchase. Instead of buying 3-4 servers they just have to buy 1, although it’s going to be a bigger one with more memory it will be cheaper than buying 3 or 4 smaller ones.

Secondly, virtualisation will reduce power consumption, thus reducing the cooling requirements which will save money. Also in the case of server virtualisation when an organisation shrinks the number of servers it has, it will also save on the number of people needed to manage it. So, there is a lot of cost savings from a people management perspective.

There are a lot of technical challenges to virtualisation; you can’t do everything on the server when it’s virtualised. A lot of those challenges are being solved. XenSource has just come out with a new version of XenEnterprise 4.0 which has some very good technology in the area of management and moving virtual machines around the XenSource environment. So, as technology improves, more customers will start virtualising their servers.

SDA: How does Citrix plan to sell its new suite of solutions?

NY: We have always been a channel company. We have some 6000 channel partners and that’s how we go to market with all our technology and we will be doing the same thing with our XenSource technology. We will be selling through our existing channel at the same time going out there and recruiting a new set of channel partners. And also the XenSource technology has an OEM channel and they work with partners such as Intel, AMD and Novell.

SDA: What does this synergy mean to both Citrix and XenSource customers?

NY: It’s all about making it easier for customers to make the end solution work so if the end solution --especially in the desktop server space-- includes multiple layers of software from multiple companies it is always challenging to negotiate with those companies and make sure they all work together to ensure the software stack works. In our case we will be able to own the complete software stack other than the Microsoft component and we partner with Microsoft very closely therefore, for our customers it means a more integrated, low cost solution, to deploy in desktops.

SDA: How will this acquisition affect the strong partnership both companies have with Microsoft and the commitment to the Windows platform?

NY: Microsoft is a strong partner of ours so we will continue to work with them. For them it means that their customers will be able to have more options on how to run the windows desktop or the windows vista desktop XP. So, its good news for Microsoft because they will now be able to get their desktop environments right on their server delivered via a server environment. And because the XenSource part sits on the Windows Server it supports the Microsoft technology as well.

SDA: Many enterprises are still hesitant about delving into virtualisation because they have the notion that it is complex. How far do you think this is true?

NY: It’s not so much complex as challenging. There are so many bits that may go wrong so organisations may not be sure it’s going to work for them. A lot of people have virtualised development servers or test servers. In an organisation they may have the main servers that are running the business and some other servers that test or develop applications. So they have started virtualising their testing environments not their main environments. We see now that once there is enough trust in server virtualisation, people are moving their main environment to a virtualisation platform. That is where the growth is going to be I think in server virtualisation.

SDA: What is Citrix’s go-to-market strategy for the future?

NY: We will be very aggressive out there; the reason we entered this market is because we see a big opportunity for our customers. Today we have 180,000 customers and within those customers we estimate about 600,000 servers are using the Citrix presentation server. So, we have the ability to go to those customers and tell them there is a better way of running presentation server now. That’s a benefit to our customers so we are going to market with that.

From a measurement perspective we announced as part of the XenSource acquisition that we estimate to generate about USD 50 million in revenue next year.

SDA: Citrix Ready is a new alliance partner initiative Citrix introduced earlier this year, could you tell us more about this strategy and what is its goal?

NY: Citrix provides software and we also have a lot of partners that work with our software and provide a total solution for example server partners like HP, IBM and Dell and terminal partners like IXL. We also have a lot of companies that provide additional software on top of our software e.g SAP, Oracle, Microsoft because their applications run on our presentation server. We actually have about 13,000 partners around our ecosystem.

Citrix Ready is a program where our customers can get some confidence that these partners have done some testing of their application or piece of hardware with our technology. So if they are Citrix ready that means we have done the testing and that application or piece of hardware is ready to be rolled out with Citrix.

We offer this to all our partners and have about 50 partners on it today.