Souma Das is a contented man today. When he joined Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) as Area Vice President for India Subcontinent in 2001, he had a challenging task of getting customers for his new company’s virtualization offerings, for which market in India was at an embryonic stage. In fact, sensing a huge opportunity for its products, the app delivery company Citrix had started its operations just a year before in India. And Das was confident that as an emerging economy India would be a lucrative market for his company’s products. As enterprises started expanding globally, managing IT had become a great challenge for them. No wonder, their data center is complex; and with that complexity comes inflexibility, poor service availability, and of course higher operating costs. So to regain control, one has to drive down risk and cost, enhance manageability, and give IT back the agility and scalability it needs. Obviously, Virtualization is the answer.

Das was successful in conveying this loud and clear to his prospective clientele. And it has been already successful in understanding the crux of Indian virtualization market essentials, which is growing at the rate of 24 percent. In fact, Citrix is currently growing at double the rate of actual virtualization market growth in India. Citrix has achieved a captivating compounded average growth rate of 53.8 percent in these eight years of its existence. “It has indeed been a challenging journey so far, but I cherish it as a satisfying achievement,” states Das.

Virtualization is a powerful concept where servers run the applications and software and give users remote access. The research firm IDC has predicted that Virtualization will become main stream soon as it gains wide-scale adoption. Enterprises across segments like IT/ITeS in India have been early adopters of consolidation and virtualization. The domestic IT and ITeS market revenue will touch Rs. 1,10,000 crore in 2008, while sustaining the growth of 27 percent recorded in 2007. The success stories of virtualization that have gained momentum are expected to have a positive impact on other segments like Manufacturing, BFSI and Aviation, says the study. It has set in motion the beginning of a pace of growth p at 2.0 percent that could be characterized by opportunities arising out of leveraging the IT infrastructure built up so far. Citrix aims to leverage this huge opportunity.Well, since its inception, Citrix’s go-to-market strategy was to attack the upper mid, large, and enterprise segments.

Of late, the company has sensed that the fast-maturing small and medium business (SMB) segment would also be prospective customers to it. Hence, Citrix is engaged in crafting its SMB strategy nowadays. “Though we are now seriously considering entering the SMB space in India, we retain our focus on the large enterprise market,” says Das. The company is now contemplating bringing its range of products in application virtualization series into the Indian SMB market. Das says, “It makes sense at this point of time to enter India in the SMB segment, since the potential is huge. When IT becomes the language of business in this segment here, virtualization will drastically reduce the business turnaround time as it adds agility to the business requirements. There is a huge opportunity to deliver our services via SaaS model as well, by making our partners or SIs host our solutions.”

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