Citrix aims to secure more wins in SEA portal space

  • Company out to replicate US and European web portal success in SEA
  • Backed by Sanook Online win in Thailand, targeting media-related segment
 Citrix aims to secure more wins in SEA portal space

FORT Lauderdale, Florida-based virtualisation specialist Citrix Systems Inc hopes to replicate its success in the US and European online portal space and secure more wins in the sector in South-East Asia.
 
“We have done very well with major portals. There is a long list of companies globally that uses Citrix NetScaler at the front-end for reliability purposes, security and performance,” Citrix Asean area vice president Mark Micallef said at the Citrix Mobility Conference in Singapore.
 
“I believe it is about time we replicate the success we have in the United States and Europe in this region,” he added.

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NetScaler is Citrix’s application delivery controller, which the company claims helps organisations optimise, secure and control the delivery of all enterprise and cloud services, and to maximise the end-user experience for all users including mobile clients.
 
According to Micallef, 75% of Internet traffic goes through Citrix NetScaler at any given time. “This is because a lot of the large search engines and large web portals are powered by Citrix NetScaler,” he claimed.
 
Besides web portals, telecommunications companies would also find Citrix NetScaler useful, as they manage their growing data traffic, he added.
 
“The demand for Citrix NetScaler type of solutions will continue. A classic example: The iPhone 6 gets launched, so the first few things telcos will think about are ‘Will all this increase traffic? If so, how can one increase the reliability of the service? How to optimise the traffic?’,” he said.
 
Thai penetration

On Aug 16, Citrix announced that Sanook Online, Thailand’s largest web portal service provider, has implemented Citrix NetScaler SDX, leveraging the application delivery controller (ADC) to boost global load-balancing.
 
The implementation, which was actually completed in October 2013, was done by AMR Asia, Citrix's partner in Thailand.
 
“[Sanook] was looking at ways to optimise performance and reliability of its portal to all people in the country [and] NetScaler plays a critical part of the solution,” said Micallef.
 
Sanook Online, which has more than three million daily visitors and two data centres, is a web portal that offers users various content such as news, entertainment, and e-commerce services.
 
“As Thailand’s largest web portal service provider, we deal with a large volume of web traffic and content daily. It is crucial for us to implement the most cost-effective networking platform that is scalable to our dynamic needs,” Cherdsak Chokeruamchai, director of Sanook Online, said in a statement.
 
“Citrix NetScaler SDX not only provides us with assurance in our business continuity plan, it also reduces our costs significantly. The maintenance and technical support costs, rack space, ongoing power and cooling requirements have been lowered drastically, while the speed of our web portal’s response time and its security have not been comprised in the process,” he added.
 
The statement did not disclose details of the actual amount of cost savings Sanook achieved.
 
Micallef added that Citrix NetScaler SDX was key in supporting Sanook’s growth as its business expanded rapidly, providing the necessary IT infrastructure.
 
With the solution, Sanook was able to intelligently route application traffic to where it was most needed, providing on-demand service to varying individual requests. This optimised the availability, scalability, and performance of web-based applications, meeting the dynamic and demanding business and IT needs, he claimed.
 
“We understand the crucial role the network plays in ensuring the highest levels of performance, availability and security, and ultimately the quality of customer experience,” he said.
 
Eyes media companies
 
With the Sanook win to give it momentum, Micallef believes Citrix can secure more deals in the content-related segment. One area it is looking at are newspaper or media companies.
 
“We see newspaper companies, which are putting a lot of content on their portals, as a good opportunity,” he said.
 
“I can’t go into too much detail about its identity, but we have received strong interest from a big newspaper company,” he claimed.
 
Over the next few years, Internet traffic is expected to grow tremendously. In a Cisco report, annual global IP (Internet Protocol) traffic is forecast to surpass the 1,000-exabyte threshold in 2016 and by 2018, global IP traffic will hit 1.6 zettabytes.

Such traffic growth is expected to impact web and media portals, Micallef said.
 
He also said that Citrix is targeting at the government sector, which could be a big adopter of various virtualisation solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure, mobile device management, and others.
 
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