Vijender Yadav, Director and CTO, Propalms Network.
Propalms Network is a leading provider of application delivery and secure remote access solutions for Terminal Services, Application Virtualization and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures. Propalms provides a unique solution suite that helps organizations of any size to increase efficiency of their business processes and productivity of their users & resources by making the corporate applications, data and network services available anytime, anywhere to any device. Propalms’s solution suite includes Propalms TSE for application virtualization over Microsoft Terminal Services, Propalms VDI for Virtual Desktop delivery using hypervisor from VMWare, Microsoft (Hyper-V), RedHat (KVM) & Parallels (PVC) and Propalms VPN, an enterprise grade SSL VPN product. An exclusive interview with Mr. Vijender Yadav, Director and CTO, Propalms Network.
1. What has been your prime focus in Indian market?
Propalms globally and in India is focused on making it easy for enterprises to deliver a highly efficient workspace to their users. This would include the LAN full time users, branch office users, mobile users, partners, extranet users, consultants, etc. We have been doing that globally over last 8 years now and since last 5 years in India. Desktop computing infrastructure in India is still very legacy and there is a great opportunity for Indian CIOs and IT managers to directly migrate to next generation workspace environments directly delivered from data-centers.
2. You claim your solution as a viable alternate for Citrix solutions. What has been the response from market on this basis?
That’s very correct. As far as Application Delivery is concern; in current scenario Propalms is the best alternative to Citrix available in market. We are the only vendor, other than Citrix which provides a complete end to end virtual computing solution for all type of users. If you are a SME, you do not have to choose Citrix for LAN and WAN users, but go for VMWare for VDI, Cisco or Juniper for remote access and RSA for two factor authentication. We provide all those features in a Single Bundled solution. That’s a great value to customers as they do not need to buy, manage, maintain and renew multiple products from different vendors.
We are now coming up with thinclients and zero clients, so we are bringing the last pience of the desktop computing on the table; the end points. Even Citrix does not have that today. With all coming from us, we make virtual computing a hassle free task.
3. Secure Remote Access has been on high demand on the eve of increasing security threats globally. What has been Propalms’ commitment in this regard and where does Propalms stand today in Indian market?
Secure Remote Access is certainly needed of hour. With the ever increasing Cyber Threats it is becoming very critical for any organization to strengthen their remote access security infrastructure for more than one reason. For Indian SMBs and many of the SMEs, the customers take very reactive stance when it comes to security. The reason being the complexity and cost involved with setting up and maintaining multiple security solutions. Propalms products are simple, one click deploys and does not require complex configuration, which keeps things simple and gives more visibility to customers. With the combination of Virtual computing we bring a whole new approach to how data is delivered to users and how it’s secured when the user is working on the data. We have been able to provide unified secure remote access solutions to many of the customers spread across various industry segments.
4. What was the rationale behind acquisition of Thinspace and how does it strengthen security part of remote access with this acqusition?
The one big puzzle for customer is choosing the right endpoint with the backend infrastructure they have. ThinSpace completes our end to end application and VDI delivery platform. It helps customers to lock down users to bare minimum interface on the endpoint so that everything the user does is on the secured remote servers and virtual machines and nothing on the end devices.
5. Application security has been a major concern for almost all CISOs. How does Propalms address this issue?
Applications are not designed keeping security in mind. They provide a basic model of access control but nothing close to user security, data security or protection from all kind of nasty attacks that can happen. That’s why it is important to use trusted industry grade security gear when exposing the applications to users, whether employees, partners or extranet users. Majority of the security issues originates from the internal network because of carelessness of the employees, virus attacks or deliberate misuse of information. It is important to have right access controls in place to implement role based access and encryption to ensure right people gets just the right data. We provide solutions that help CIOs achieve that with our OneGate and TSE solution suite.
6. How strong is the Propalms’ R&D activity to address increasing security threats and advanced attacks?
Our products are designed to provide security right from the user PC to the user. Any feature that we do has to pass the strict security design criteria. We test our products regularly against the latest vulnerability reports issued by various organizations like CERN. Some of our financial customers run monthly vulnerability tests and provide their feedback to us.
7. Where do you want to see Propalms by 2015?
Our vision is to become the market leading single stop shop for all and any user computing needs. We continue to build our partner network and want to be the most trusted brand among partners as well as customers.