Mr Mark Templeton, Chief Executive Officer of Citrix Systems, has helped the company to grow from a $15-million company to a $2.2-billion entity in 11 years. As the PC era gives way to the cloud, Citrix Systems has gained relevance because of its ability to enable access from various devices, something that is crucial in today's always-connected mobile enterprise. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Your mission is to facilitate people to work from anywhere on any device. This is enabled by the cloud today. What was your original vision when you articulated this statement before the cloud arrived?

Visions and missions are usually far reaching and aspirational. We have believed this for a long time and delivered this over the history of the company. Our aim is to make usage simple because today's users don't want to be trained. We have always believed in independence and have supported the ability to work on any platform, like a Mac, PC, iPad, Android tablet, etc., and this has become more important in the cloud era.

About 99 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies are your clients. What's your next growth path? Do you want to target smaller companies?

Around 40 per cent of our clients are large enterprises, 40 per cent are medium-size enterprises and the remaining 20 per cent are small enterprises. When we said that 99 per cent of the Fortune 500 use Citrix, they use only some of our products and services, and there is an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell our other offerings to them.

In 2011, your revenues climbed 18 per cent to touch $2.2 billion. Considering the growth of cloud, are you satisfied with this figure?

We are happy but never satisfied. This is good growth considering the state of the economy, especially given the situation in Europe.

You said that 33 per cent of your employees are new in 2011. Does this mean that attrition is a big problem for you? Are you losing employees to other cloud companies?

Actually, we have 7,000 employees, of which around 1,300 are new. Our attrition is typically in the 12 per cent to 13 per cent range, while the industry average for enterprise software is 17 per cent to 18 per cent. India's attrition is just a fraction of this.

You believe that as the world shifts from the PC era to the cloud era, total cost of ownership (TCO) will be replaced by total value of ownership (TVO). TCO has always been hard to measure. What of TVO?

I think that it will be harder to measure in classic IT terms. However, in classic business terms, it will be easier. Business is concerned with branch expansion, offshore resources, employee retention, and from this angle, TVO is easier to measure.

According to you, anything that is an exception in the PC era will be an assumption of the cloud. What are the assumptions of the cloud era?

Good question. Actually, I haven't thought about it. But I can tell you that while the PC touched around 600 million people, the cloud will touch three billion of the over six billion population of the world. It will be driven by the 1.5-billion middle class of the world over the next 10 years. The cloud is all about breaking the hard coding imposed by the PC era.

> balaji.n@thehindu.co.in

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