Growth In the Range of 50 Percent-100 Percent Per Year

An extensive interview with Citrix Online President Brett Caine revealed that he has a clearly   defined goal.

"We want to make remote access and collaboration services as easy to use as e-mail," Caine said.

Remaining focused on that goal has enabled Citrix Online to realize tremendous growth, which during the past three years has been between 50 percent and 100 percent in terms of annual revenue. The company, which became a division of Citrix Systems, Inc. about two years ago, generated just over 10 percent of the parent company's revenue last quarter while offering Web-based access, support and collaboration software and services.

Global Growth in "Early Stages"

Caine described Citrix Online as being in the early stages of global growth, with close to 1,000 customers in Europe and hundreds in the Pacific region. The company has more than 14,000 corporate customers globally. It has five data centers worldwide, with the newest having been opened in Sydney, Australia.

"More companies and customers are looking for on-demand solutions that are delivered in an application hosted environment. We deliver solutions that we refer to as SAFE — secure, available, fast and easy.

"Ease of use within a software environment is always the hardest thing to deliver, but we've been able to do it across all three of our products — GoToAssist, GoToMyPC and, most recently, GoToMeeting. For more than half a decade, we've been delivering industry-leading solutions for remote access, support and collaboration." "Ease of use within a software environment is always the hardest thing to deliver, but we've been able to do it across all three of our products."

New Products to Fuel Future Growth

When asked about new developments and products, Caine said they will be integral to the company's ongoing success. A 2.0 version of GoToMeeting was released a month ago.

Next month will include the release of the seventh generation of GoToAssist, targeting the call center and support marketplace. Also, Citrix Online later this year will release the fifth generation of GoToMyPC.

"The way you attract and retain customers is you ensure that they have not only a great experience using your products, but they have confidence that you offer the leading capabilities that are important for them to use your products. Whenever you deliver software as a service, you always want to be mindful of keeping churn low."

Limiting the churn rate is part of the firm's accomplishments, with more than 90 percent of its corporate customers renewing annually.

Limiting the churn rate is part of the firm's accomplishments, with more than 90 percent of its corporate customers renewing annually.

"The distributed workforce is requiring companies to rethink the way they provide remote access as well as to enable workers that are remotely distributed around the world to work together. It's no longer good enough just to give somebody access to corporate resources. You need to give them access to the resources and the people that enable the company to do business. There's an ever tighter linkage between remote access and business collaboration across the globe and we're seeing this every day in our business, not just in terms of running our business, but what our customers are sharing with us and … why they're buying our solutions."

Call Center Sector Offering Growth

When asked about growth opportunities in the call center environment, Caine said he is looking forward to significant growth opportunities, both for his business as well as for Citrix Online's customers' businesses.

"You have these isolated, remote workers working out of their home. They have the need to be able to be supported in a new and different way. The burden on the organization to be able to support a distributed workforce that’s connected to the world through a cable modem is really a different paradigm than what most companies historically have built in their infrastructure, which is, 'I'll send a help-desk guy to your desk and solve the problem for you.'

"Now that person is sitting in their office, maybe in a major city, maybe out on a farm, and the difference is dramatic in terms of the infrastructure you need to provide to support them."

Skyrocketing Penetration Predicted

Caine said products such as GoToAssist that provide remote access solutions to the call center and contact center are less than five percent penetrated today. He added that they are expected to grow to more than 30 percent penetrated over the next five years.

"Companies … need a new and different way to support their customers. This move towards remote solutions or remote services is a key part of the whole self-service model.

"Companies … need a new and different way to support their customers. This move towards remote solutions or remote services is a key part of the whole self-service model."

"It gives the agent a way to diagnose, troubleshoot and support the customer in a way that's just not possible to do only on the phone or only through chat or only through e-mail. You need that interaction, and you need to be able to see what the customer sees in this remote session."

Caine views this as a growth opportunity for his company's customers, which can provide a value-added service, with some firms looking at it as a way to deliver a premium offering by attaching a remote support solution set to premium service offerings.

"Our solutions and technologies allow companies to provide remote solution installation assistance, and I can do that right now instead of waiting for a tech to come on site two weeks from now. It's a revenue enhancement opportunity as well as a cost avoidance opportunity, depending on the type of customer we're selling to or the type of end-user customer our customers are trying to support.

"It's like being there. If I'm a customer and I need a support problem solved on my computer, that agent in the call center can, in a permission-based way, take control of my computer and solve the problem for me because they see what I see and they have a set of tools and technologies to diagnose, troubleshoot and solve my problem."

The Call Center Support Paradigm

Caine said this type of experience is changing the way companies provide support.

"Companies are now creating revenue paradigms on the Internet that require support in a unique and different way. That is what we are focused on, and we see companies every day recognizing that the paradigm of call center support — where I describe my problem for you and then you try to troubleshoot it over the phone through a set of questions and answers — is insufficient. The pressure on the agent to solve problems, the bandwidth of the agents to solve ever-increasing, complex support issues in a wide set of markets … is just taking too long, and it's costing companies too much in order to support these employees and customers who are distributed over the Internet."

When asked about offshoring, Caine said it is a significant part of his business. He mentioned an example in which one of Citrix Online's largest customers found that its India-based call center improved customer satisfaction statistics by about 15 percentage points.

How was this accomplished?

"The agents … now can quickly get into a remote support session, diagnose, troubleshoot and solve the problem for the customer without going through a long, verbal troubleshooting process. With GoToAssist, agents are empowered to deliver the best access experience for everyone."