 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to the district, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we extract the signal from the noise we're here. This is day two of the Nutanix .NEXTConf hashtag. NextConf, Chris Shue is here. Sorry, Calvin Shue is here. VP of product marketing at Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So, you're up on stage earlier today, right? Lot of good action here at the show. Talk about Citrix and what you guys are doing here. Yeah, so I think Citrix, Nutanix, we've had a partnership going back for quite a while. I think what really brought us together were customers that were actually trying to solve this issue of how do I implement VDI, and how do I do this better, right? There has to be a better way. And it's funny, we were just talking a little bit before about how many different infrastructure pieces and how many different components there are to learn in order to do VDI. And that was one of the things that always kind of stood as a barrier to adoption in some of the early days, going back, I don't know, several years now, and it would say, well, you got to be an expert in networking, you got to be an expert in storage, you got to know all the server-side infrastructure, the virtualization goes with it, and then you got also know the desktops and the app parts of it and how to manage all of that. And in my experience, it was all that technical knowledge, but it was also the people, right? So you also had to bring those people to the table. You would have one VDI project, go and talk to a customer, and we're going to do a pilot for 200 people to start. And there'd be 20 people in the room because everybody had different areas of responsibility. And so as Nutanix has evolved and the whole idea of hyper-converged and HCI has come around, that's really been some of the basis of where VDI is kind of getting that second booster of its life cycle here. But they're realizing that, you know, it could just be a few people that are responsible for that HCI infrastructure can deploy the VDI. And now they have a more simple, reliable way of implementing that solution. So we'll get it. I mean, that's kind of what we even want to go back to the converged infrastructure world. VDI was the one like foothold use case with V blocks in the early days, and HPE stuff or HP then. And you know, I have to say, I have to ask both of you guys, because you know this business really well and you're obviously a VDI expert, but when you talk to customers, they get really excited about VDI. They're like, hey, this is a great use case. We're doing VDI, VDI, VDI. It was a big, big project effort. When you talk to analysts, they're like, ah, VDI is so boring. What is it about VDI that there's this bifurcated opinion base, right? Analysts, ah, okay, but customers eat it up. What's going on? What unpacked that for us? Yeah. And then analysts don't necessarily feel the day-to-day pain of managing a desktop, right? And that's what it is, right? So for them it's a, it's a, it's a, well actually, I know some analysts that actually did that job. And so they're the ones that are still excited about it, right? But in general, like once you get past the idea of, you know, that consulting a client on the complexities and, you know, how do you choose a vendor? And then it comes down to a few basic things. It's which one's going to deliver the best employee experience with the solution? Which one's going to be the best, you know, operationally to manage? And then sort of their job is done. But then, you know, from an IT admin perspective, it's like they're still, every day, they're managing a new application update, a new desktop image, and it doesn't end, right? And that's dozens and dozens of hours out of every week, every month that you spend. All right, Dave, it was called VDI Fatigue. Every year was the year of VDI, you know? I think we've gotten beyond that because I tell you, from my viewpoint, it was wait, it was this mess of a stack and we're going to fix that. Oh wait, now storage is the mess. Yeah. Now flash is going to solve that. Oh wait, mobile adoption is the, you know, the barrier yet the opportunity, you know, how do we modernize our application? The changing workforce, mobile workforce, there were always the next, the next, the next, the next thing. And it reminds me of our conversations with DeRos. You know, it was like, you know, we're never finished. And a lot of it was, it was this big category of, you know, to talk about the user experience is I think what Citrix is focused on. And how do we make that simpler? And you know, so many analysts, the other thing from an analyst is most analysts focus on a piece of it. And this is very different. I know some analysts focus on like, you know, user experience and let's look at the application that's probably closer to where VDI is than, right. If you ask the storage guys, they're like, ah, VDI. If you ask the, you know, the desktop people, they're like, wait, my fine place is fine. So, you know, it's that, it was a really complicated problem, but it's very different today than it was. And I have to think that with Nutanix, it must have changed a lot in the last five years. Absolutely. Well, I think the other thing that's funny is thinking back to like 2008, right? Analysts called the VDI game really early. So, that's what they were saying, every year was the year of the VDI. Before anybody was deploying it in any sort of size, you know, they were already saying, you know, it's a, you know, ex-gazillion, billion dollar market and that, and I think it's taken a while for the customers. The customers are still just trying to deal with some very basic desktop management issues today. And, you know, they're probably lagging behind the industry and analysts by three to five years, I'd say, right. But what I hear now is Windows 10 is coming around the horizon. How am I going to manage Windows 10 updates? I've got an Office 365 deployment project on my hands. How am I going to get this all out? How am I going to get the functionality that every one of my end users needs? And it comes around, it's like, VDI is a great answer for that. It's a great way to solve that issue. Calvin, one of the things that we hear from Nutanix customers, they love the kind of one-click simplicity, one-click update. And I hear about, you know, Windows 10 is like the rollout of the next thing and where things break. How are Citrix and Nutanix working together to solve some of these challenges? Yeah, I think that approach of one-click, the automation, you know, that both the blueprinting types of technologies that we're pulling together, all that sort of automation is really important for this type of environment. You know, I think we're both willing to pull together solutions that really then drive that simplicity for both the infrastructure and the management ongoing of that solution. It's like, for example, you know, we're working together on the Citrix workspace appliance, right? And for us, it's not a product name, that's really a program. It's a way of defining a HCI infrastructure like Nutanix and jumping on board with this to be able to point that thing at the Citrix cloud and then download all the resources that it needs in order to run a Citrix workload on it. So it's a very automated way of getting stood up so that not only is the deployment of the infrastructure automated and simple, but placing that workload on it and getting it set to manage and then even running it and operating it is more like running and operating a cloud service than it is even operating, you know, a local infrastructure for it. One of the things, David Foyer from Wikibon has done a lot of analysis saying if we can get to, it's basically a single managed entity is where he calls it. So I can have the entire thing, you know, comes out, you know, not just the infrastructure, but all the way through the stack, you know, not only does that really help, you know, your deployment, but you know, the overall kind of time to value, you know, customer experience is, you know, just tremendously improved. Tell us, you know, how you're helping to kind of reach that vision. Yeah, well, I think it's time to value, but it's also making VDI accessible to more customers, right? And more segments of the market. The types of things that VDI solves, you know, security, manageability, those aren't just enterprise problems, right? Even mid-sized companies, they have security concerns and for them, it's actually probably even more dramatic. Like they have a breach there and it's catastrophic for the company, not just, you know, we're delayed by a few hours. And so it, you know, having that simplicity and making that whole thing easier to deploy and faster, but not just easier to deploy, but on day two, it's easier to manage ongoing. Those things are, you know, getting attention again. So for years, I remember I've been to Citrix Energy, been a bunch of VMware, you know, VMworlds, talked to customers, and it was always a two-horse race between those two companies. And Citrix was like secretariat, and VMware was like, devil is due. You've probably never heard of devil is due. Pretty good horse, but not secretariat. And you guys, Citrix was the dominant player in that marketplace. What's the competitive situation today? Seems like, you know, VMware's made some acquisitions, has maybe caught up, maybe has some advantages. How do you see them as a competitor? So I think where, it's interesting, is I think that what really happens in the competitive space now is that it becomes less about VDI versus VDI and like what features are in each one. Although, you know, I've talked for hours, I think there's still a bunch of differentiation in there. You know, earlier you talked about user experience. I think the way we're looking at this market and what's happening to it right now is less about sort of user experience in the sense of a classic protocol versus protocol sense and a technical sense. And more about, and I'll use the term more and more often about employee experience. Right, so it's not just what is the performance of my virtual desktop when I'm on X, Y, D device over a certain network. It is what happens that first time I give an employee a resource or a virtual desktop or a mobile application or access to a SaaS application or an internally hosted web application through a virtual browser and they go in and they want to get work done, right? So the experience of that employee is now not just one of these technologies, it is what we refer to as workspace technologies. It's everything I need from the applications to the files that I want to use, to the workflows that I want to kick off. And I think that will be the new area of differentiation. Again, that's where we want to move very far forward. Calvin, what should we be expecting to see from Citrix and Nutanix going forward? Long partnership, how does it improve even more for customers? I think the stuff that Nutanix has announced here with the whole hybrid cloud strategy, I think that very much is in alignment with our philosophy on the hybrid cloud approaches for customers. So I would expect to see a lot more in that collaboration area. There's lots more that we can do on the net scale side of the business from networking and enabling the reliability of a lot of these network connections as people become. I love that concept of the core, the distributed and the edge cloud, right? And all that's going to need connectivity and security and reliability. And more the same on making VDI simpler for all customers of all sizes. I think we're just at the cusp of, we've got this automation plan going in, we're creating the workspace appliance and simplicity there. I think there's a lot more we can do, again, from day two perspective, operationally. As I keep going and I'm growing this thing and I'm managing my images and I'm managing applications and growing the infrastructure, increasing performance, taking on different types of workloads. There's lots more we can do in that area. What is the all-cytric stack workplace appliance? Right, so it's really the, Nutanix has announced support for Zen server. And for us, Zen server, we've really done a transformation of that technology over the last couple of years where we've taken what was a general platform a virtualization solution. And we've really specifically targeted at our workloads, at ZenApp, ZenDesktop, Netscaler, and making it the best virtualization platform for our solutions. Why did we do that? We did that because there's going to be certain things that we need out of that layer from an innovation standpoint, whether it's supporting graphics, which we were the first to do across all the major chip vendors, virtual GPUs. Coming up with new security paradigms like being able to do deep hypervisor introspection and identify day one malware attacks before they even infect any other machines. Those sorts of innovations become really important that we can drive and having control over Zen server we're able to do that. And so through the partnership with Nutanix and getting their support on that as well, then all the joint Nutanix and Citrix customers could take advantage of that innovation. So now they also have the disposal, everything that Nutanix is putting into AHV, everything we're putting into Zen server and being able to manage it that way. So in the workspace appliance reference guide for building this, one of the things we focus on is the Zen server component of it and being able to have that innovation coming from Citrix as part of that solution. Great. Calvin, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your time and insights. Yeah, it's great to be here. We'll see you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from .next. Hashtag nextconf, this is theCUBE.