The Indian subsidiary will report to Citrix's Asia-Pacific headquarters in Australia, and will be headed by managing director, Dinesh Puri, who was previously managing director of PowerTel BOCA. In April this year, Citrix had acquired PowerTel BOCA's with all of its existing assets, 46 employees, 200 customers, and four regional offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad for an undisclosed amount.

Citrix Software will target all organisations, from major enterprises to emerging ASPs and will focus on developing new business opportunities in the Windows and Unix marketplaces, informed Puri. The company will market its solutions through value-added resellers, system integrators and OEM licenses. Datapro is currently Citrix's sole distributor in India and caters to the Indian market through 25 channel members.

According to Youakim, enterprise acceptance of server-based computing, mass adoption of the Internet, increase in server capacity, and broad availability of cost-effective bandwidth are fuelling the emergence of the ASPs, who manage and deliver application capabilities and server solutions to multiple users across wide-area networks for a fixed monthly fee.

Through application hosting, ASPs remove the burden of day to day IT management by assuming total responsibility for application roll-out, updates, on-going maintenance and support. As a result, organisations are free to focus on core business objectives, rather than arduous IT issues.Application services range from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management solutions and vertical applications, to groupware, personal productivity suites, and full desktop and printing services.

According to Youakim, Citrix application server solution enables ASPs to run applications on servers that can be accessed from a variety of client devices: "Since the applications are installed and updated on servers instead of on each client, the complexity, time and resources required to manage the applications are reduced. Local and remote users can easily access the latest applications over the Internet or other connections."

"Our Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) technology provides the foundation for turning any client device - thin or fat-into the ultimate thin client," claims Puri.

On the server, ICA has the ability to separate application logic from the user interface. On the client, users see and work with the application's interface but 100 per cent of the application executes on the server. And with ICA, applications consume as little as one-tenth of their normal network bandwidth.

The ICA protocol sends only keystrokes mouse clicks, screen updates and audio across the network. Applications consume just a fraction of the network bandwidth usually required. This enables the latest, most powerful 32-bit applications to be accessed with exceptional performance from existing PCs, Windows-based terminals, network computers, etc., adds Puri.