Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix (Part 1)

We’ve featured Citrix on the blog before. This time, we’re going to discuss the wonderful things that Citrix is doing in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Elizabeth. Let’s start with a bit of your personal background as well as what Citrix is doing in the area of cloud-based support.

Elizabeth Cholawsky: Right now I am the general manager for the IT support line of business at Citrix, which includes all of the GoToAssist branded products. I took this position a couple of years ago, but when I first joined Citrix, I was the VP of product management and client services. Client services runs through my career for the past 20 plus years. When we decided to focus on IT support, it was a natural segue from running our contact center operations and support operations to managing the business for these products.

SM: What business line are you responsible for? What does it cover?

EC: It’s all of the GoToAssist branded products. That’s two main product lines. One is called GoToAssist Corporate. That’s the first product that was produced by the startup Expert City, which has become the online services division for Citrix. GoToAssist was the first product on the market that allowed a support professional to be able to do screen sharing and remote access of PCs over 10 years ago. We made the market in the IT support area. We’ve grown that product and added to it, and we now own the majority market share for remote support worldwide. We have about 38% market share. The GoToAssist Corporate product is focused on the support of people, live support of people. It’s used by huge contact centers from companies such as BT, Verizon, Dell, and FedEx, all the way down to SMBs that find the need for sophisticated support of people in a live environment.

In the past four years, we added a product platform. It’s branded just GoToAssist, and it’s a modular platform. If you are a GoToAssist customer, you can buy just a remote support module or a monitoring module. We added that to the support capabilities a couple years ago for alarming, alerting, and monitoring machines that might be unattended. The GoToAssist platform is an integrated set of cloud-based tools for supporting both people and technology. You’ll see in the next few months, other things that we will add to that in a modular fashion to provide the tool set for support for a small company. That product has close to 30,000 customers using it today, primarily SMBs.

SM: What’s the difference between the second product and the third one?

EC: Let me clarify. The GoToAssist Corporate product is remote access and is focused on support of people, a live session. That’s one product. The second product is GoToAssist, and it has different modules on it. So, there are just two product lines. Some of our clients just use the GoToAssist monitoring modules. They want to keep abreast of what’s going on in their networks, if a machine is on or off or filling up disk space, get an alarm or alert on it. It also monitors network capabilities to make sure that the network bandwidth is as it should be and things are running smoothly.

SM: Let’s start discussing the competitive landscape. Whom do you compete with?

EC: We have 38% of the remote support market share, and the competitors in that area are WebEex with their support center product and LogMeIn with their rescue products. Then there are a number of smaller players such as TeamViewer, NTR Global, which just got bought by ASG, and Bomgar. IDC and Frost and Sullivan are the main analyst houses that measure the remote support market. They’re the ones that make it above a certain critical mass. And there are plenty of small startups that have small amounts, but nothing that meets the market share for analysts [to cover them].

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Elizabeth Cholawsky, General Manager of IT Support Product Line, Citrix
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