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According to Souma Das, VP, India sub-continent, Citrix Systems, the green IT needs of enterprises can be addressed to a great extent by intelligent virtualization software solutions. Over 18 months, enterprises can achieve 40% RoI from virtualization initiatives. Excerpts

What are the benefits that enterprises can draw from virtualization? How are Indian enterprises using virtualization for better business economics?
Over the past couple of years there has been a paradigm shift in the way virtualization is perceived especially with the gaining popularity of the Green IT concept and the adherence to strict environmental standards and regulatory norms. Till date, many companies have been addressing the Green IT needs by deploying energy efficient hardware components. But a significant number of green IT needs such as reducing carbon emissions, heat emissions and coolant requirements can be better achieved through intelligent software solutions. And that is what we are trying to communicate through our virtualization product line. Virtualization also makes great business sense in the present recessionary scenario where there is an increasing need to cope with IT budget cuts and optimize costs. It is estimated that over a period of 12-18 months enterprises can achieve 40% RoI from virtualization initiatives.

Could you briefly talk about Citrixs suite of software-enabled energy saving concepts?
Citirx has been one of the pioneers in the concept of application virtualization and for the past fifteen years we have remained the unilateral leader. We have almost 80% market share in the application virtualization space and have more than 200,000 customers including Global 500 companies using our XenApp products. Apart from this we also have our server virtualization and desktop virtualization products named XenServer and XenDesktop respectively that we are aggressively focusing on in the Indian market. Though server virtualization is not a new concept anymore, Citrix has redefined this space with the introduction of a new product named Provisioning Server which assigns server workloads in a robust manner in a virtualized environment without any lockdown process. This helps to better manage and optimize the server farm and reduce the need for physical servers. On the server virtualization side we have signed a worldwide OEM agreement with HP, Dell and have tightly integrated our products with them to improve the IT agility of data centers. Apart from this we have also been actively delivering solutions through thin clients and have also launched a new product named WorkFlow studio that orchestrates different components and creates a workflow for a cloud-computing environment.

How does desktop virtualization take the entire concept of virtualization to the next level?
Over the last few years, IT managers and CIOs have invested heavily in integrating and consolidating their hardware, enterprise applications and data at the backend. Today, almost 100% IT users are desktop, remote, home and thin client users and they have been leveraging IT as a tool. However, the front-end has always been the most neglected IT terrain. Most of the large companies in the high growth industries such as BPO, KPO and IT services have a large number of employees that are predominantly desktop users. These companies have to deal with the problems of heat emissions, hardware refreshes and manageability issues on a continuous basis.

The next big wave in the way IT is perceived and delivered is desktop virtualization. We launched our desktop virtualization product XenDesktop in May 2008 and we feel this will redefine how desktop virtualization will mature. XenDesktop is unique from the perspective that it can maintain a single master desktop OS image for all similar kind of users instead of the conventional process of trying to maintain separate fully loaded desktop virtual machines in the data center for each employee with applications hardcoded into each one. So, this significantly reduces the storage requirements and desktop lifecycle costs. This is a big advantage for enterprises in terms of saving on manageability costs, as the largest IT expense for them is managing and refreshing desktops on a regular basis. Desktop virtualization along with thin client solutions also makes the systems reusable and secure.

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