'Efficiency and Scalability are Driving Cloud Adoption in India'

Businesses are quickly adopting advanced digital technologies for contemporary demands of globalization, workforce efficiency and effective decision making. Today's SMEs are gradually inclining towards enabling their respective business ecosystem for doing more with less. Since, these SMEs work as small business units, technology providers aims to bring more efficiency in the business processes for the sake of customer satisfaction. In an exclusive conversation with Faiz Askari of  SMEStreet, Eklavya Bhave, Head - Channels and Alliances (India & SAARC) at Citrix

Eklavya is the head of Channels and Alliances for India and SAARC region, in his current role he is responsible for accelerating Citrix’s channel growth by defining a comprehensive partner sales and go-to-market strategy, leveraging programs and creating alignment with market opportunities through an integrated field engagement model.

What kind of focus does Citrix is having towards Indian market?

Citrix have more aligned towards the Indian market. The outreach have become more indepth. Last few years have gone in reaching out to the market and now we have made our presence more engaging

What are the trends you witness among the Indian SMEs with regards to IT adoption?

Indian SMEs have a different perspective towards IT spending as compared to large enterprises. Smes want technologies that have strong relevance for their respective businesses. We at Citrix understand their business behavior and come with a solution which can add value in the overall business ecosystem of SMEs.

From the technology standpoint which are the areas where Citrix is seriously looking?

We are continuing our focus on virtualization, security and at the same time enhancing business productivity are some of the key priorities. Cloud is also an area where there entire industry is witnessing huge traction.

In addition to the above we are also focused around networking and security as well. Security of app and data have become essential demand for business continuity. And the way our businesses ecosystems are evolving from the perspective of technology adoption considering trends such as smart homes, IoT and related areas, networking became prime component for the entire digital transformation.

How is Cloud adoption happening among Indian Small enterprise segment?

Cloud has been the fore front of customer demands. Globally as well as in India we are witnessing great action around Cloud. Few years back, cloud was only getting discussed in presentations and strategic planning. Over a period of time, technology priorities have changed, cloud based applications are becoming very vital part of market. Most of the businesses are demanding sales force automation, multiple computing devices per employee, CRMs, ERPs etc all are urging the respective IT departments to facilitate this data access and ensure business continuity to the max. Cloud has a strong answer to most of such demands.

What is the status of cloud within the business strategy of Citrix?

We started working on cloud based offerings for our customers last year. Now in this year we are adding more solutions that are exclusively designed for SMEs. As I mentioned, we explored the market, we understood the market demands and we added products and solutions which fits the requirements of SMEs. Moving forward, there will be more and more targeted offerings will come on to cloud. According to me, scalability and flexibility are two major drivers of cloud.