INTERVIEW
Race for virtual desktops
by Colombe Vergès
colombe.verges@
iteuropa.com
Provider of virtualisation and cloud computing solutions, Citrix Systems strengthens its southern European team and appoints its first Managing director in France, Eric Lecoq. IT Europa spoke to him to find out more about his views on the virtualisation market as well as his plans and strategy for the coming year.
with an experience of more than 20 years in the software vendors’ world at Compuware and Oracle, including eight years as marketing director and then managing director of BMC Software France. “Southern Europe has always been a strong
“
growth region for Citrix, as it often adheres to emerging technologies after the UK and the Nordics for instance. France has developed a lot of virtualisation in the large accounts, making it a significant part of the southern European market, which includes Italy and Spain.” With 60 people in France, and about 20 in Spain and about the same in Italy, France clearly accounts for more than half of Citrix revenue in the region. “So we need to accompany our partners, to
strengthen their technical and marketing skills. We also want to develop our relationships with the big systems integrators such as Fujitsu, Accenture and the likes, because the projects that are going to have to be addressed in the immediate future will be of significant size and touch IT transformation,” he explains, citing the recent £300m DWP contract won by Fujitsu in the UK. Employing technology from suppliers including Citrix, Microsoft, EMC and Appsense, Fujitsu will manage the Department of Work and Pensions’ desktop estate (or 140,000 machines across 1,000 locations) and introduce thin client and desktop virtualisation technology. “Systems integrators have a very active role
16
My mission is to encourage the massive adoption of Citrix’s desktop virtualisation offer in France,” starts Lecoq, who comes
in the virtualisation of desktops, so what we do this year is to develop strongly our relationships with them,” he continues. “We focus on a limited number of partners, whether resellers or systems integrators, because these new technologies require strong marketing and technological skills. In the first half, 50% of my marketing budget has been allocated to boost our partners’ competencies and training, so we created a particular programme that offers engineers and partners a week of training to better comprehend the virtualisation market.” Offering more flexibility and speed, as well
as a TCO 20% to 30% smaller than in a classical architecture, and demanded by both the enterprise and the consumer worlds, analysts estimate that the global hosted virtual desktop market should represent $65bn to 2013, which should see almost 50 million virtualised desktop users, he explains. “So it’s an exponential market – the market that should see the biggest growth in the next five years, according to all experts.” If demand for virtualisation has slowed last
year because of the crisis as well as the wait for the arrival of Windows 7, Lecoq sees both phenomenon behind us today. “Although we’re still in a difficult climate, companies have gone back to an investment-led world. Windows 7 is there and we have agreements with Microsoft, which recommends our XenDesktop solution to virtualise enterprise desktops.” Other important agreements announced
in September last year have been signed with Intel, enabling Citrix to deliver Xen-based client virtualisation solutions to millions of Intel-based devices. Xen hypervisor is an open source industry
standard on which Citrix and Intel have worked together, and which brings a new level of openness, security and scale to the server virtualisation industry. “The whole technology that enable desktop virtualisation is going to evolve more and more towards the offering of virtualisation in a more intimate way at the desktop level, allowing you to dissociate your private and professional environment at the desktop level in a secure and waterproof way,” concluded Lecoq. “This collaboration with Intel is going to give more and more scope to develop even more virtualisation usage, and these agreements are getting closer to the launch date.”
www.citrix.com
OUR ANALYSIS
Desktop virtualisation is certainly Citrix’ next big thing, but may need more explaining, first to the channel, and then to IT customers who have yet to see how it delivers a return, unlike other forms of virtualisation. We’ll be following this technology as it emerges in the real world.
30 APR 2010
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32