Ensuring Efficiency for SMEs: Citrix

Technology holds all the prominence in today’s business. SMEs have realized the potential of technology so as the technology layers have understood the potential of Indian SMEs. In an exlcusive interaction with Faiz Askari of SMEStreet, Eklavya Bhave, Head Partner Strategy & Sales for India and SAARC region at Citrix have shared insights on how Citrix is focusing on the  on the small & mid-market segment which is commonly called as SMEs.

What are the key priorities for Citrix in India?

The major priorities for Citrix are to expand into the Indian market and enable our partners to succeed. This means that we are aggressively exploring new industry verticals and entering into new business geographies. In order to realize this commitment, we are looking at Small and Medium enterpirses segment (SMEs).

According to you what are the key challenges that SMEs are facing which can be addressed through Citrix’s offerings?

SMEs have their own challenges. The major and the ultimate challenge is to derive best possible RoI. Since, these SMEs work as small units, our approach is to bring more efficiency in the business processes of our customer organizations. These SMEs often work in remote working environment. Our solution ensures high level security of the business critical data, flexibility and scalability of solutions deployed. For example, in a pharma company confidentiality of data becomes a very important and strategic aspect of doing business. IP & Data protection becomes very crucial for business and at the same time collaborative communication is a need of the hour. So, at Citrix, we aim to deliver flexible, redundant and collaborative business environment by ensuring a strong security layer for data protection.

The infrastructure management often becomes a challenge for a SME. Due to the fact that SMEs usually remain resource crunched, do you witness such issues while convincing the SME customer?

Yes, we agree that SMEs often have to deliver in limited resources. That is the reason, we bring efficiency to the table. In today’s ICT infrastructure environment, multiple applications is a common fact. Now, organizations of small size often struggle in the maintenance of these applications. Hence, upgrade becomes a challenge. Now, as a solution to this problem, Citrix has some strong and in-depth cloud based solutions which addresses such issues.

In a country like India, bandwidth still acts as a challenge and SMEs often remains a challenge. On such backdrop how do you differentiate your cloud solution from rest?

We understood this point and introduced an innovative solution specially for bandwidth issue. We have a solution called CloudBridge which combines all the bandwidth and manage them as per the availability resulting into a improved quality of experience.

In a typical SME environment, bandwidth remains a challenge, sometimes availability and sometimes it’s the cost. SMEs usually take backup bandwidth lines to ensure business continuity. But the organizations fail to get seamless experience when any bandwidth line goes down. In order to deliver a seamless experience of connectivity, CloudBridge is a robust solutions which we have introduced.

What is your go to market strategy for tapping the SMB business opportunity?

The entire SME line of business is driven by partners. We work with partners who are equipped with knowledge  and commitment towards SME segment. We ensure that their capabilities can get enhanced and they should leverage this business opportunity.

Is there any significant channel expansion that you are looking?

We aim to add around 25 partners in next few months to address the SME market. We are keen on exploring tier 2 and tier 3 cities.