This is a guest blog post by Seshu Kumar GV ,General Manager & Practice Head – VDI, Cloud & Infrastructure Services, Wipro.

Wipro recently received the honor of being recognized as GSI Worldwide Partner of the Year at Citrix Field Kickoff 2022. The announcement was the culmination of a year marked by the challenges of the pandemic and was a celebration of the achievements we’ve seen in helping our customers evolve to the new normal.

As I reflect on the last year, a few achievements in particular stand out. We saw 100 percent subscription bookings and closed major deals worldwide; almost half of our multi-million dollars in bookings were from new cloud deals totaling a 32 percent year-over-year growth; and, we demonstrated stronger alignment and commitment to partnering than ever, working with our strategic partners for enterprise cloud transformation.

What was the key to these successes? I believe it all boils down to our approach. We invested in understanding and improving the user experience as it evolved, we focused heavily on security as a critical component of the solution, and we continually sought to innovate to solve our customers’ needs.

Investment in the User Experience

The rapid shift to remote and hybrid work models resulting from the pandemic put the importance of the employee experience into clear focus. Environmental factors such as poor network connectivity from employees’ homes were compounded with increased reliance on a variety of collaboration tools, which further constrained computer memory and CPU. All of this was exacerbated by the challenges faced by IT support in troubleshooting problems remotely.

Offering a seamless, secure end-user experience — and doing so quickly — was critical for our customers, especially those in the financial services and healthcare verticals, which have complex compliance and security requirements.

Before diving in to address the challenges created by the rapid shift to remote work, we recognized the fact that these challenges were unprecedented. We started by really analyzing the issues that our customers, and their end users, were facing. Then, we invested in developing our unique IP to address whitespace opportunities around user experience and performance.

We also shifted our support model from reactive to predictive, including consistent monitoring of application performance. This allowed us to address and remediate potential issues before they impacted the employee experience, and set us up for long-term success.

Finally, we worked with customers to centralize endpoints and move applications to the cloud, making them more accessible to the IT team to address issues. We have deep expertise in large-scale cloud transformation, and our virtuadesk offering, designed around Citrix Cloud, provides customers with a highly engineered, high-quality, end-to-end virtual desktop service. Building off this knowledge and our more than 10 years working with Citrix, we were able together to enable secure remote work solutions for customers quickly and at scale.

All these changes served to deliver better app performance and ultimately improve the daily experience of employees working from anywhere. In some cases, we were able to implement cloud-based virtual workplace capabilities for an initial 500,000 users in as little as four to six weeks — allowing customers to realize a faster time to value and transformation of their remote and hybrid work platforms.

Hyper Focus on Security

The security component of the remote work journey cannot be overlooked — it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. Prior to the pandemic, organizations’ security posture was much simpler. They traditionally had security tools such as antivirus and DLP solutions installed onto laptops, and IT support staff in-office to help address any issues. Now, with remote and hybrid work, it’s hard to keep security tools up to date and to maintain compliance.

To address these security concerns, we again began by evaluating the situation thoroughly with a complete assessment, then leveraged virtual desktop technology to move workloads from laptops or desktops to public or private cloud environments. The result was that we were able to provide complete visibility and control of these virtual desktops, significantly increasing the organization’s security posture.

Innovating for the Future

The events of the last year forced massive change in how employees around the world work. One of the impacts of this shift was increased cloud migration, in an effort to enable remote work models and improve the user experience. Working with Citrix helped us to standardize architectures and automate deployment processes to make this a repeatable platform, ultimately reducing implementation time and costs, and making the cloud migration process more seamless.

The last year reinforced the importance of building a solid foundation of technology and processes to enable a secure, reliable workspace no matter where work happens. As I look ahead to the next year, while I’m certain there will be unexpected events, I’m equally sure that we’re well positioned to weather any challenges. Wipro’s GSI Worldwide Partner of the Year win confirmed we’re on the right track, and I’m excited to see what we and our partners will achieve together for the benefit of our customers and their employees — when we succeed individually, we all win.

Learn more about Wipro and see the complete list of Citrix Partner of the Year Award winners.