Cloud Apps for the Small Business | BTalk Australia

(15min 23) Today on BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie looks at a suite of on-demand applications aimed at the small business user or telecommuter. Mike Mansbach, the head of global sales and marketing for Citrix, and HR Shiever, the head of Citirix Online for Asia Pacific, talk about the range of “GoTo” products, designed to make it possible for you to work from anywhere. The range provides remote access to your home or office computer, provides conferencing capabilities and enables you to give or receive remote technical support, with more to come.

Are we starting to see the widespread adoption of products that make working from home a much more viable option for many people?

Have you tried any of the “GoTo” products. Add comments on these or other on-demand applications in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

See also:
Citrix Systems Inc. company page on BNET
Understanding the Cloud | BTalk Australia
Head in the Cloud | BTalk Australia

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• Transcript

Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie and welcome to BTalk Australia and today, yes, it’s more about Cloud computing.

It seems there’s a lot of talk about the concept of using applications that run over the internet rather than off your computer hard drive, but are there real practical examples particularly when we’re talking about small businesses? Well Citrix has had a track record in delivering applications on demand. A lot of their focus has been in large enterprises but increasingly they’re looking at smaller businesses as well. With a suite of what they’re calling GoTo products and our Mike Mansbach is the VP of Global Sales and Marketing for Citrix and HR Shiever is the MD for Citrix online here in Asia Pacific. So Mike I might start with you. I guess the easiest solution out of your suite to grasp is the GoToMyPC product which, basically, allows you to access your home or work computer for anywhere online. But that concept’s been around for a while now hasn’t it?

Mike Mansbach: It has been around for a while. It’s been around for over 15 years now. What has changed about it is the ability to do it online. To your earlier point to do it in the Cloud and not actually have to own the infrastructure yourself either at home or to install anything on your own PC.

Dobbie: Yes, I guess so because things like PCAnywhere, which has been around for a long time, but you can only use it on a computer that had PCAnywhere installed on it.

Mansbach: You would have to download something on your own PC and run it that way. Whereas with GoToMyPC all you need is access to the internet and you can connect any to PC whether it’s a home PC to an office PC, home PC to your parent’s PC because they need some sort of support.

Dobbie: Right, it’s still a little bit different too. I think of Cloud computing and ie, although I appreciate the applications online, I think of the other applications like the word processing document maybe like Google Docs, for example, as being the application I’m ultimately using rather than the application that might be sitting on my home PC. So is this a bit of an interim step or do you think it’s a solution that’ll always be needed?

Mansbach: I think it’s a solution. I think the delivery mechanism is a solution that will always be needed. In essence we are a software-as-a-service or on demand provider and the applications that we deliver sit in the Cloud, so you as a user of the application are actually meeting the application in the Cloud much as we refer to the Cloud in broader terms. So it is, I believe, a delivery mechanism that’s here to stay and grow.

Dobbie: OK, now, HR is it an easy application to use and what’s the constraining factor for it? And it’s a leading question because I’m looking at internet speeds and thinking that’s, perhaps, one of the reasons why applications like this aren’t taken up as fast as they might be.

HR Shiever: Well, Phil, I’ll take both of those questions from an ease-of-use perspective. We at Citrix Online, and I think software-as-a-service in general, is really focused on delivering very simple, easy-to-use applications that are leveraging the Cloud or leveraging the public internet. The ease of use is tantamount to actually getting adoption in the areas that we focus on. So GoToMyPC, specifically, we focus on providing small business users, small home office users, individuals, consumers, the whole way up to large corporations. And with GoToMyPC we’re really enabling small businesses to be able to get access to their desktops remotely or from a laptop in a hotel back to their home office, and ease of use is ultimately important for the adoption.

So I think to your second point around adoption I think ease of use is one of the things that has been driving adoption and has been accelerating adoption for Citrix Online. I think your comment around the internet is also important. I think the growth and the penetration of broadband in Australia has driven the growth of these products in this market. And one of the things I think I’d like to note is that we’re seeing that growth accelerate both because of the internet penetration but also I think the current economic situation is driving the compression of the adoption curve because people and individuals and companies are looking and saying, hey, these products make me more productive, they allow me to save travelling between locations and those things, while they may have been nice to have in the past, they are must-haves now. In order to face this economic environment I need to be able to react and to be able to collaborate and to be able to save money and we’re really seeing that drive growth right now.

Dobbie: But internet speed is going to be an issue isn’t it? And I guess if you’re accessing your home PC it’s a double whammy isn’t it because you’re concerned not just about the download speed where you’re accessing your home PC from but also you’re concerned about the upload speed from your home as well, so both of those need to be fast links. If I wanted to access a Word document what sort of speed would I need to have an experience which isn’t just going to be completely frustrating?

Shiever: In GoToMyPC you could access anything from a dial-up connection the whole way into a very fast line. One of the key things about our technology is we’re really focused on fast compression technology. We’re not moving entire screenshots over the internet so we’re not moving a lot of data. What we’re really doing is just moving the pixels that we need to. So if you’re moving around the screen and your mouse is moving we’re not moving the whole screen over the internet we’re only moving the pixels that change because your cursor has moved. And so between the compression technology and our screen scraping technology we’ve really focused on narrowing down that bandwidth usage requirement. And so, absolutely, in the Australian environment these tools are ready to use today.

Dobbie: Now what about, take the example, I’m looking at a Word document when you’re using applications like PCAnywhere or in the ye olden days and you used to hit Print, of course, expect you’d print something out at home where as you want to actually print something out where you are remotely is that doable?

Shiever: Absolutely and that’s one of the things with GoToMyPC is that we enable you to set up either a local printer to where you’re accessing from, so let’s say it’s a hotel business centre or you can print remotely in the location where your PC is. So you get the flexibility to do what you need to do to do your job. Additionally, GoToMyPC, let’s say you play a WAV file or an MP3 file on your home PC it will actually stream that audio as well to the PC that you’re accessing from.

Dobbie: Right, now Mike, the other space you’re playing in is in conferencing; you’ve got GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, but there is lots of competition isn’t there in this space? And a lot of those applications like Messenger apps, for example, are free to use so what’s the difference here? What are you bringing to the table?

Mansbach: There is a lot of competition there’s competition that’s free, there’s competition that’s expensive and there’s competition in between. And in essence that which we bring to the fore are two things one is ease of use so the set of tools that we bring to the market are growing because they are easy to consume because they are intuitive to use for first time users as well as for experts and that’s really what technology adoption is all about. It’s about enabling people to understand it, to get it and to use it without fearing it. That’s number one and the second piece is the stability of the platform that we have built. So while free is good, free is only good if it works. And with our parent, with Citrix and with the infrastructure of global datacentres that we’ve built, we have extraordinary resilience and the applications work when you need them to.

Dobbie: Now all this stuff we’re talking about — I guess what you’re doing is bringing to the fore things that have been discussed for so long. The concept of telecommuting, I don’t know, when did we first start talking about that? I think we started talking about it in the 80’s. So is this going to make it more of a reality? Is this the decade or even the year that people are really going to start to take on telecommuting as a concept and it’s going to become mainstream?

Mansbach: I think so, I think that the core difference between what was and what is, is telecommuting has been supported by audio, the telephone, right, and that’s effectively how people telecommuted before they got on com calls and they talked with people and solved problems. What has always been missing from that experience is the visual sharing or visual collaboration. And what we believe will happen is that web conferencing, really what is visual collaboration will be as ubiquitous as the phone. And it’s the combination of the audio and web collaboration that drives the true adoption and ability for people to web commute.

Dobbie: Alright, and to be able to do it from anywhere as well. I guess, cause what you’re talking about now is, as you said, is applications that I could be in an internet cafe and completely replicate my desktop from work.

Mansbach: You could be absolutely anywhere. Historically, people have been tied to offices for their work so the office location, physical office location, is how they define their work day whereas now with the availability of web conferencing, with the availability of audio conferencing in a seamless fashion; your office is wherever you happen to be.

Dobbie: Now, I guess the other part is support. You’ve touched on that as well because when you’re working in an office and something goes wrong with the computer if you work for the right company then you might get somebody who comes and fixes it fairly quickly. When you’re at home that’s more of an issue, but you guys have got that one covered too.

Shiever: We do, GoToAssist there’s a product line that we built specifically for those who both want to deliver a world class and those who want to receive a world class customer support experience, and it is as well a simple concept. Imagine, if you will, the smartest IT guy that you have who’s able to look at your PC any time you want him or her to solve your problem for you. We’ve all had the experience of calling somebody up and saying, hey, can you walk me through how to solve this problem that I’m seeing and the next 10 minutes of conversation is an awkward one essentially who’s on first, can you see what I’m seeing, are you doing what I’m asking you to do, well I don’t know because I don’t really understand what you’re asking me to do. In the case of GoToAssist, you as somebody who needs support can simply invite an expert to your desktop and ask them to solve it for you while they’re looking at it, and you get to watch how they solve that problem in real time.

Dobbie: Now, HR, are these new applications likely to create security concerns, particularly if you’re part of a large corporate and you’re accessing a lot of these applications from home? Can it open ways that hackers could access the network?

Shiever: Phil that’s an excellent question. It has traditionally been a concern with companies adopting software as a service. With our products a couple things I want to focus on. Number one, everything like as a GoToAssist application that Mike was just talking about is permission based, so an agent from a customer can not come into your desktop unless you invite them and you have the ultimate control to say, this session’s over, this is finished. Once that session is over that person, that agent, that remote support person can never come back to the desktop. And so they’re very permission based.

The other thing I would like to note is that with all of our products we have corporate versions specifically built for deployment within corporate environments; these allow the IP department to do administration over who uses these applications and how they use them, the ability to reuse licences when somebody leaves the company, the ability to, let’s say, shut off certain functionality. Let’s say that you do not want your agents to be able to transfer a file outside of your company, well, you can turn that functionality off. So we’ve specifically built our products to enable corporations to comfortably deploy them within their environment. Additionally, Citrix as a company is ultimately very concerned about security. We built a reputation on having very high security. All of the Citrix Online products are, and not to get technical here, are 128-bit AES end-to-end encrypted. And, basically, what that means is that even though this stream is being carried over the public internet it is not decrypted it is entirely 100 percent encrypted between the desktop that you’re accessing and the desktop you’re accessing from.

Dobbie: That’s good to hear. Sorry about the phone, by the way, I don’t know how that happens no one ever calls me. Finally, I guess, as we move forward we’re more working from home or working from different environments you’ve got a lot of ground covered with these apps but where to next? What’s Citrix going to do next in this space?

Shiever: We’re looking to continue to advance the use of Cloud-based computing by delivering a set of applications that are useful for businesses of all sizes. Really, if you think about the number of things that trainers or sales people or marketeers or support professionals need to do and you think about extending that into other functional organisations within companies you can start to imagine the breadth and depth of tools and productivity utilities that we can bring to bear for the market.

Dobbie: So you’re talking about things like CRM presumably as a key element of all of that you start to get into big integration issues don’t you? And I guess that becomes the problem where you have standalone applications like your GoTo suite that they’re easy to understand. Once you start getting into more core applications integration becomes a bigger issue.

Shiever: I think what you’ll see from us as a constant is the delivery of applications that truly are simple to use. So when we evaluate where we want to go next we will likely focus on areas where we know we can drive broad adoption because a lot of people can use a set of tools simply versus getting into complex line of business applications that may be functionally very, very deep but drive what I would consider to be more of an expert purchase or sale and minimise the number of people who can actually benefit from the solutions.

Dobbie: Makes a lot of sense. OK, well, thank you very much guys for your time. I hope you’ve enjoyed your time in Australia and thanks for shedding a light on some of the latest applications from Citrix.

Shiever: Thank you.

Mansbach: Thank you Phil.

Dobbie: And you know, I told my mother to never call me at work.