DUKES: Propalms Inc. has been operating a 20 plus employee development center in Pune for the past four years. Fast emerging as a potential marketplace, I visit India twice a year to communicate with the development team and the channel partners. To further support our distributors and resellers and to instill more confidence among customers, we would open an India office in Mumbai this quarter. On this visit, we are short listing competitive workforce across sales & marketing, technical support, and development departments.

DUKES: Our successful distribution model across 43 countries manifests the worldwide policy to sell only through channels. Our India distributors — Teqdis and Xceed Technologies — have a robust channel base and an in-depth industry knowledge. The second tier encompasses more than thirty partners, which comprises system integrators and solution providers, who act as ‘feet-on-street’. We want to have alliances with quality partners to empower their business growth, rather than sign up hundreds of partners. We are committed to offer extensive training, provide lead generation, and take other initiatives to aid them make good profit margins and build a loyal customer base.

DUKES: Box-pushing is a strict no-no. A prospective channel partner should have technical skills and good knowledge of the server-based computing environment. A partner who is experienced in Microsoft server platform can effectively sell and up-sell our offerings. A successful
partner today is one who sells a gamut of cost-effective solutions to enterprises with a three- to five-year
IT roadmap.

DUKES: Today’s business environment provides many complex challenges for IT departments, not least in the delivery and security of application and data. These rapidly changing areas, coupled with shrinking IT budgets, challenge companies to find technologies that can help them drive the business forward and increase productivity. Propalms TSE is simple solution for terminal services and VDI managing all applications from one simple web management console. Propalms TSE adds indispensable management capabilities and scale to accommodate a growing number of users, applications, and servers securely and reliably in a cost-effective manner.
The key differentiator in India is the expensive and ‘not-so-great speed’ bandwidth, which acts as a catalyst for organizations to prefer centralized server-based computing environment.

DUKES: Unlike vertical-focused offerings by other vendors, Propalms offers easy-to-install and cost-effective application delivery solutions to enterprises of all sizes and across verticals. With over 3,500 individual customers across the globe, our offerings are fit for organizations from five users to thousands users. We have a sizeable number of customers in finance, telecom, distribution, and other verticals in India. The key to success is breaking into large enterprises, thus emulating case studies/references, which mid-size companies usually tend to follow. Telecom/mobile and manufacturing are huge focus verticals. The burgeoning IT spends by large enterprises and untapped mid-market/SMBs is certainly a huge market for us.

DUKES: Propalms TSE is a complete server-based management solution that extends Microsoft Terminal Services 2000/2003 and 2008, offering features such as application publishing, virtual desktop broker, seamless windows, resource-based load balancing, virtual IP, windows start menu, and browser-based application launch pad. Microsoft Windows Terminal Services, also known as SBC or thin client architecture, is the most cost-effective method of application delivery for businesses of all sizes. In SBC, support costs can be reduced as all users and applications can be managed centrally. Apart from accessing applications from remote locations with local network type performance, the TCO can be reduced, ensuring a rise in productivity.

DUKES: We work closely with ISVs in global markets like Japan, who sell our hardware, software, and services offerings to ‘five-to-many-user’ organizations. In India, we are actively looking to associate with competent ISVs, which mainly cater to SMBs. We have alliances with ASPs (Application Service Providers) in the US and Europe where we rent our offering licenses, which help them remain scalable in operations.

DUKES: We will initially start the model for the US and European markets as SMBs will not have to spend on servers, desktops, and other hardware and technical skill to manage their infrastructure. The problem in India is primarily the low bandwidth and fluctuating internet, particularly in the upcountry towns, which house a huge number of SMBs. In a hosted environment if Internet connectivity drops down, it’s a temporary shutdown for SMBs. Most Indian SMBs still prefer to have a server at their site. I feel there is at least there is 18 months to go before SMBs prefer ASP model in India.

DUKES: We incessantly affix more functionality into our flagship product TSE 6.0 to offer more value to customers. TSE 6.1, with improved features, will hit the market by the second quarter of 2009. Proplams VPN, which will be shortly launched in India, marks our foray into the appliance market. With TSE 6 being an integral part of VPN for the Windows platform, the Linux version would be available as standalone appliance (without TSE 6).

DUKES: Being a Microsoft partner, we have alliances with major vendors such as IBM, HP, etc. We already have virtual desktop offerings that complement VMWare. We plan to partner with Parallels to make our offering ‘Virtuozzo’ compliant, thereby offering opportunities for customers to effectively manage their virtualized environment. We would announce several acquisitions in the next twelve months. Our goal is to clock a worldwide turnover of $20 million in the next three years.

DUKES: For SBC environment, it is bit a difficult to calculate the exact ROI. However, our licensing fees are much less than our competitor, resulting in lower TCO for enterprises. Apart from pushing market share from Citrix, we intend to win new customer accounts. Our endeavor is to be recognized as a brand which is ‘Real Buyable Alternative to Citrix’ across enterprises. With over 3,500 individual customers across the globe, our offerings are fit for organizations from five users to thousands users. We have customers in finance, telecom, distribution, and other verticals.