Currently the second largest market for desktop virtualization vendor NComputing, India is a fertile ground with several greenfield projects. Will Poole, Chairman, NComputing, discusses with Heena Jhingan the company’s strategies to grow bigger in the enterprise space and make India the numero uno market
What new opportunities in enterprise client devices do you see in the India market?
India is the second largest market for us and based on the current rate of growth, it is positioned to soon become the number one. One thing interesting that we have done in India is that we had our initial success predominantly in education, particularly in rural India. We have taken the best of our technologies that we used for the education vertical and we are now using them in the SMB space and the enterprise. As enterprises begin to expand and start to face issues around managing branch offices, we will see further uptake of our technology.
It comes out that a branch office’s needs are quite similar to a school’s requirements. For example, we have Mahindra Finance that has about 4500 desktops deployed with NComputing across their organization. Maruti has also recommended NComputing technology to all its dealers in the country. What is common to this example is the branch office architecture, and we recognize these branch offices have challenging operating environments, located in tier-1 and -2 cities and daunted by unreliable power. So, having a technology like ours that consumes 90% less power is more valuable for enterprises.
Typically our customers could save about 50% on the capital cost on installing our technology versus PCs.
Can you share the company’s strategy to reach that goal?
There are two avenues—one is to continue to build on our software platform called vSpace. Recently, Gartner labeled us as a major player alongside Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. The other is to make the devices that will be appropriate for the enterprise market. Earlier, when we started out, we had devices that were optimized for the education sector, but now we have a number of device solutions focused on enterprises. One of the most exciting is the N-series, which is focused for Citrix. We have a lowest cost, high performance devices that are fully compatible with the Citrix platform. We are also adding the management console, and support contracts.
We will be working with partners (we have about 800 at the moment). These can range from a value added reseller in a tier-3 city to a large player like NIIT or Everonn. We have over 50,000 customers worldwide and, as we grow the Indian proportion, the Indian customer base will substantially accelerate.
We are fortunate to have been selected in major deployments—in Andhra Pradesh, for example. We don’t sell a standalone solution; the solution gets integrated with the help of our partners to meet customer needs.
What is the composition of your education business? Are there some new trends coming up there?
We have had success in both government and private schools. The highest volumes have been from the government, most of which are greenfield. As for the private education space, there are a couple of things they expect from us. They, of course, care a lot about capital and operating expenses like anybody else. They also often have some established technology in schools and we have an offering called the vSpace client, software that can run on existing PCs and turn them into thin clients, accessing the high-performance server on the network the same way our devices access server on the network. This enables them to make use of an existing computer lab that may have outdated PCs, but they still function. By adding the vSpace client, accessing new, fast servers that sit alongside, the schools can refresh their computer lab at a very low cost. This way, they also get a common architecture across their legacy devices [along] with the new devices they buy from us. Another thing that is relevant is the trend of using tablet PCs. NComputing is ahead on that curve as well: we have the vSpace client to run on either Android or iPad. So, with the same software you can convert you PC into a thin client and you can also use that from a tablet to access an application on your server.
Did you face any particular challenges in reversing the usual direction and moving from the education sector on to larger enterprises?
The real challenge is to attune our products to enterprise demands. Unlike the education sector, they require management consoles, sales and support contracts. They also have specific technology demands, for example Citrix. We therefore built specific devices (L400 and L500) to support Citrix software. Enterprises also ask for wireless options, so we added Wi-Fi on these. Enterprises today need multiple monitors. So we came up with a product line that focuses on enterprise needs with support, management, Citrix technology, dual monitors and wireless—none of which were required for the success of our solution in the education space.
