 and Thursday. And my first guest is Simon Crosby, who is the CTO of the data center and desktop divisions of Citrix. Simon Crosby is no stranger to sharing his opinion and extracting the signal from the noise. It doesn't mind rolling up his sleeves and punching at the competition, but more importantly is an expert in the field, great person to have on the Cube as our first guest. Simon Crosby, welcome to the Cube. Citrix is a company that has been powering the desktop, changing the desktop for over a decade. You were part of a team that brought virtualization to Citrix, and Citrix is again doing it again, yet we're living in a new era of an IT explosion, an economy that's turning around, LinkedIn's going public, the IPO market's open and the world's changing. So first, tell us how do you feel after all these years of tech, where virtualization has been this server geeky thing, and now we have this whole consumer revolution where apps can be deployed in seconds and minutes, cloud is now mainstream. What's changing in the marketplace and what are you excited about? How do you feel? Good question of cloud computing, and cloud computing is helping with the transformation of client computing because everybody is using apps which come from the cloud. And so these two go hand in hand. If you think about it, which is more powerful? The cloud in your data center as an enterprise IT guy versus the cloud that every one of us carries around in our pocket on our smart phone device, it's the latter, it's the cloud in your pocket that's transforming IT far more than just virtualizing your data center. The folks out there know about Amazon because Amazon has basically made cloud easy to understand, it powers a lot of apps we touch as a consumer, but the IT enterprises, the folks who lock their employees to a desk with a PC, who have all these fat applications, it's complicated. So what's the big theme for you here at Synergy? Look, Citrix believes in virtualization generally, right? Hypervisors are just a tool. The virtualization is really abstracting the user from the physical binding to a technology or a meeting or something. And so everything that Citrix does is about virtualization in the sense that we permit you to virtualize the desktop and the enterprise set of applications, turning it into a service that you deliver as an experienced and end user with hopefully with the idea of delighting them so that they want to use your apps and your desktop on any device. Why shouldn't users be able to consume enterprise applications on an iPad or an Android tablet? That's what they want to choose. So our whole mission here is to empower users and get IT from being a horrible burden which locks down experience and doesn't really change the security mantra of the enterprise into being far more service-centric, delivering services that really deliver delight to their end users. That's what we do. The big thing on people's mind is obviously they want freedom. They don't want to lock down to a PC or a desk. They want to have a blackberry or they want to have an iPhone. They want to have freedom. What users want is follow me apps and follow me data. That really is what constitutes most of your desktop. It's mostly about apps and data. There's a little bit of personalization which is your default font size and crazy things like that. But really people want, as they go between all their different devices, they just want the world to move with them. And so the desktop needs to be a virtualized concept rather than a physical device. We need to gather the business of installing apps. I mean how old is that? And so your world is the composition of you and a runtime context and we can build that on the fly and deliver it to you on any device. Every major revolution in technology has always come out of the open source. Not necessarily open source per se. Recently open source. But even going back in the 80s these revolutions have come from new not on the radar standards. And they're always broken through proprietary either stacks, network stacks or application stacks. So why is it so hard and why is everyone still clutching to that proprietary mindset? Locking in vendors. Oracle is a great example of that and others where they want to make it proprietary. And you said open source. I mean this is how Amazon started. You helped do that but where are we now with this open versus closed debate? I mean is there a debate? I think that the openness and the open source component piece of this is around rallying fellow travelers in your ecosystem around commoditization of a component that everybody agrees should be standardized in some sense. That everybody can take and put into their stack of stuff that they deliver to their customer. You know open sources was originally conceived in the kind of Linux vendor world which is all the bits are open and my only business model is to support those bits. That model is very tough. Witness Red Hat which is really the only vendor that has made a go of it. Nobody else has really made a good go of that. So the business of open source only and open source for open source sake that has really not gone very far. But open source as a tool for aligning the industry around core capabilities that have to be available to everybody that's going gangbusters. And one of the exciting stacks that I'm participating in building right now is something called open stack. It's a big infrastructure as a service stack. It started life as the NASA Nebula cloud. We work with Rackspace and it's now out and there are 50 vendors working to build it. Are you guys jumping on that bandwagon or what's really happening there? We know Rackspace was involved heavily and NASA was involved. Are you guys just Johnny coming lately on that open stack or are you really involved? No so we have a seat on the architecture advisory board and we own the blueprint for networking services which is an area which is of key concern in the enterprise segment to deliver multi-tenancy. But there are about 200 engineers who show up to work every day around the world to build open stack. Citrix puts probably 20 to 30 people on that every day and we're increasing that. And our goal is to deliver that to the enterprise for running private clouds or indeed to service providers who want to build an open stack style cloud. And our goal there has been to reduce the competition, hence commoditization, by everybody saying yeah my cloud is better than your cloud. Get the basic notion of cloud. Essentially what Amazon does with EBS, CC2 and S3, those core storage and compute services, make them commoditize and get everybody up this cloud ramp much quicker. And then from that you learn what standards are important, how to go about delivering value added components around that and build a real business for a very unique system. So you mentioned onboarding, basically onboarding, developers onboarding businesses to the cloud. EMC talks about the journey to the private cloud. Obviously they own VMware, which you're a fan of, obviously we know that over the years. We've done a few podcasts together. You have a lot of competing approaches in this mega cloud trend. Question for you specifically. Actually we don't. I mean let's be very clear, VMware is not built a mega cloud ever. I mean when I talk mega cloud I'm talking about something the size of Zynga, which is, you know, it's as big as EC2, plus it's at least 10,000 servers. VMware's Project Redwood, as far as I'm aware, doesn't span beyond 2,000 servers and that's very rational because most of their customers don't have that many. So, you know, there are no stacks, there are no proprietary stacks in existence that you can purchase today that would allow you to build a mega cloud. Okay, there is OpenStack, which is absolutely a work in progress. It will go into production in rack space towards the end of the year. It will run a very, very large cloud and that's how you know it will be real. And then VMware is coming along with VCloud. They're doing a fine job by the way. It's just that they've never built a mega cloud. In the service writing segment, for me mega cloud starts at 10,000 servers and I've never seen a VMware cloud that big. It just doesn't exist. Okay, maybe I should say on their journey to hope to build a mega cloud. Yeah, right. They have their own VMware. But you're dealing with this kind of proprietary extension approach that enterprises want. I mean, there seems to be a market out there where some folks who say that, hey, you know, we would like to have some proprietary extensions around our stuff. Yeah. Is that relevant? And two, the second question is, is that relevant to proprietary extensions? There's one question. The second question is, where's the battleground for the open source? I mean, actually, proprietary extensions. Absolutely, spot on. Look, it's all about differentiation. And so here's one of the biggest beef say here in the market from the service providers. If every service provider just gets to offer VMware as a service, they're all commoditized. And by the way, they're paying a ton of money to do so. So there's no differentiation there. They can't offer a better VMware service than the guy next door. So that's why 99% of the real revenue that's being earned in the cloud, it's on Zen because these guys are differentiating themselves, adding security services or whatever it happens to be. And there's a ton of differentiation out there. So people are making real money out of cloud or using open source or using Zen. And in the enterprise segment, really, the way to think about VMware and vCloud in the hybrid cloud concept, that's really about the enterprise finding a different way to buy their VMware licenses, consuming them on a pay-as-you-go basis from a former host who's now offering hybrid cloud. That's a fine way to consume it. I'm not digging it. It's just not cloud necessarily. It's basically a data center in the cloud private. The customer is purchasing a VMware license somewhere or another. They're either buying it to run on their own server. They're buying it. They're renting it to run on a server some other place. And that's okay. It limits innovation. And I don't like that. That is, I am 100% all over the idea that cloud is all about innovation. Just look at the amazing stuff that's coming out in Silicon Valley now. These people building phenomenal new apps on top of cloud. None of that's coming out of that traditional enterprise world. It's coming out of this big cloud world. And so what I've seen happen is that there are two kinds of cloud models emerging. One of them is the kind of IT ops centric. IT people managing VMs on the infrastructure. That's fine. But the other one is DevOps. And DevOps is Heroku, 150,000 apps. It's the apps on your iPhone, the apps on your tablet device. And that is growing phenomenally fast. It's growing like 67% year over year. Far faster than enterprises going down the path of increasing server virtualization towards cloud. Which is the skill set change for the enterprise. I mean basically what you're saying is cloud is the new development SDK. For developers. I mean you talk about DevOps. Well, the new DevOps is ideally, that's operations and development. I mean that's a development environment. Yes. Well, let's just be very clear. New apps are going on new devices. And new devices are, you know, they're typically these thin thinnish kind of clients. The app itself is scripty. So it's maybe a blob of Java or some JavaScript or something or maybe some cocoa. And behind it lives this scaled out elastic web service which needs to be able to scale because the number of users could explode dramatically, right? So look at something like Groupon. Groupon would not exist if they had to buy servers. They just wouldn't exist, right? Because they serve zillions of people every day. What is the battle ground in cloud market right now? Because you have a dynamic Simon where you have people who have consumer stuff. Devices. And they use apps that are not related to the enterprise. Yet they show up for work and have to get into the IT kind of systems and do their job. Okay. And then you have new apps hitting the scene. Is it changing the dynamics of development? Is there a new criteria for or a table stakes for developers? I think it's about to change. It's still very early. So Mantra 1 is deliver the existing enterprise apps to that device. Okay. First of all, that device tends to work in first in the hands of a C-level exec. And he demands that he's going to or she demands that that app shows up on that device, right? And so that's job 1. Deliver the existing apps onto that device. And Citrix has been doing that for a better part of ten years and we're superb at that. The next thing is what will the enterprise do in terms of writing applications for that device form factor? Very early days. But what that application will look like is one of these scripty lightweight app front ends, which can easily change. And then the back end will be web services based. Kind of a mashup. The app itself is a mashup of a bunch of web services components to build the app. And so in my view, what you'll find is that enterprises will accelerate their adoption of that kind of technology back end. There will be a challenge, of course, because enterprises today write apps in legacy ways. And so we have a skill set challenge in terms of moving the enterprise developers onto new platforms. But I think that the attractiveness to the consumer in me of these devices is going to drive the enterprise app developers towards that platform much more quickly than we had all thought. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and SiliconANGLE.tv. SiliconANGLE.tv is the worldwide leader in emerging tech coverage. This is theCUBE, our flagship teleclass, where we go to events and on the ground cover all the tech athletes like Simon and get their knowledge and extract that and share that with you, sharing his power. That's our motto. We're here at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco, opening night, cocktail party. Simon's doing the floor, doing best in the show, talking about all the tech trends being on all these geek shows and traveling around, handshaking with everybody. You're a celebrity and very outspoken, very knowledgeable. And so thanks for sharing with us. To continue the questions, you talk about open stack, openness. There's always been the proprietary and open. I want to get back to that question. What is the battleground right now? And where is the battleground to stay open? Because you mentioned open is about innovation, creativity. So yeah, as the enterprise area of the stack in particular, as the enterprise adopts cloud, to my mind, it cannot afford to make a closed choice. That is, the enterprise is going to want to consume apps or infrastructure from multiple cloud vendors and it has to be able to do so, independent of the platform that they're running. So you might want to run your .NET apps on Microsoft Azure. Why not? You might want to run your stuff, run it there. You might want to run your test and dev on EC2 or some other cloud provider. And so the notion of cloud has got to be open. There's this boundary between the enterprise and the cloud and we have to facilitate absolutely open transactions there, otherwise we will never get anywhere. And the whole concept of cloud will fail. And no one vendor therefore can be preferred over another. You have to be able to make sure that your workloads can move from one to another and that you're free to adopt any service that makes sense given your criteria. So what are the challenges there? How do you take what used to be a closed data center and the employees that work for the enterprise and essentially explode it across all of these cloud applications? Well, one way to do that is to manage employee identities and manage data wherever it happens to be. So follow me apps, follow me data and bring your own ID are going to be a big deal. Follow me apps, follow me on Twitter at at Furrier and the folks are rolling in right now. All the folks that are coming in, they're your customers, they're your prospects. They're all concerned about the new tech. So the new technology and all this new stuff. And there's a big kind of conversation happening where we're talking about like the beta max of virtualization. Is there a worry around, am I locked in? Did I make the wrong choice? Especially around virtualization at the desktop. What's changing in virtualization at the desktop? And how do you talk to the fear of, well, if I buy or deploy VDI or virtualization at the desktop, I'm worried. What do I get locked into? And is it beta max is the right choice? And how do customers and partners vet that out? It's changing. Talk about the change and talk about the roadmap. Yeah, so let's be clear. You're locked into the Windows application and desktop experience in the enterprise for the foreseeable future. That's just because the enterprise apps run there. And so the charger has then got to be able to deliver that to any device. So if the user happens to want to bring in an Android device, that's fine. By the way, one of the cool things about that is Google's going to maintain it and you don't have to maintain it anymore. You don't have to maintain Windows on every PC. And so if the employer is walking in with a cool device, great. Let them do that. Let them expense that and let them bring their own device in. And so you end up with an openness then to the device. Previously, you actually bought the device, locked down the OS, locked down the user experience, locked down the apps and didn't let them configure it. You can go down this path of really liberalizing the employee's access to applications in the enterprise, giving them some delight back, making them actually want to work for your company without having to get rid of or rewrite all of your apps. Your apps are the legacy apps. They will be there forever. We know that. Like SAP, right? Like an SAP app. How would someone deal with SAP? Right. It'll be there forever. But even productivity apps, they will be there forever. And by the way, some of those will be in the cloud too. Right? You might use Office 365. So your legacy will remain your legacy. It will be there forever. The job of virtualization is to wrap that up in a supportable container forever. Yeah. And then to really leverage new technology to deliver delight to the end user in a user experience that they actually want instead of this horrible enterprise PC environment, which everybody absolutely hates. And by the way, which isn't secure. Let's talk about a topic that's very trendy right now in big data. So big data, you have Hadoop. You have a lot of other approaches. Yeah. Hadoop, obviously an open source. Yeah. Which we're big fans of. We're support in cloud era and the folks adhering to the Apache standard. What is big data from Simon Crosby's definition? And how does that translate into the value proposition that you're evolving into as a company? You mentioned follow me data. What does big data to you mean? So most of the many new apps written for cloud assemble vast amounts of data about me or about something that they are learning, whether that's a Zynga game, three billion row updates per month, right? Three billion. Billion. Yeah. Huge. Phenomenal. I mean, you've got hundreds of millions of daily returning players, right? So, or whether it's crop, you know, crop measurements from the field somewhere out in Asia. There are vast amounts of data. They need to be arranged in ways which are not traditionally SQL based and they need to be able to be processed in order to glean information from them in some useful way. So big data is the application of new forms of storage and data organization to facilitate that. These big new apps which can learn about me, learn about new things that we've never dealt with before. They require phenomenal amounts of storage and phenomenal amounts of scalability in order to perform. And so it always turns out that you do this in a scaled out cloud. That is, you can't do it just on a, you know, couple of servers and hope for the best. You know, large big data stores, you know, you're looking at hundreds or thousands of servers, each of which owns part of the data and a new way of doing queries. So that's what big data is. It's often confusing to the enterprise segment because, you know, right after big data comes NoSQL, right? And everybody in the enterprise knows about SQL and when you say NoSQL, they say, well, that's not for me. And so I think that the NoSQL guys, the best thing they could do is just rename it. Like, not call it NoSQL or just put a SQL interface on top of it and it would be useful for the traditional enterprise segment. So today, most big data apps are things like Facebook, right? Or other things like Groupon and various other, you know, things that Google does. These are big new web apps. Making big data useful for the enterprise requires us to refactor it into today's application data storage requirements and interfaces like SQL. And that's coming. Here at Citrix Synergy, an opening night with Simon Crosby, the CTO of Data Center and Cloud Division at Citrix and we are SiliconANGLE.tv, the leader, worldwide leader in emerging tech coverage. I'm John Furrier, the founder, located in Palo Alto, California. We go on the ground with theCUBE, our flagship teleclass, we go out, extract the knowledge from the smart nodes like Simon and share that with you. Final question for you is next five years, you've seen a lot in the past 10 years. Yes, in your career. Next five years out, what kind of change, what kinds of things will we see in the next five years? I think, so one of the most dramatic changes really is that in the last year, we showed up with this new form factor device. So at the end of the day, it's us that is driving the change. Us as consumers, the consumer has new choices. And the enterprise IT department is under a pressure that it has never been under before. So I've seen two big things in the last year. One is these new form factor devices, new expressions of delight on the face of end users, and everybody wants one, right? And at the same time, I'm seeing these incredible attacks on people like Sony, on people like, you know, well, actually every enterprise, you know, RSA hacked, WordPress hacked. And so cloud brings us this opportunity both to liberalize, but also this really incredibly scary concept of everything's open and it's very insecure. And so the next five years brings us a radically new employee application experience. People will bring their own devices to work. They will use whatever they want and they will use whatever apps they want. They will buy apps and they will use them on corporate data. And corporate data will get out of the corporation. It will have to be encrypted at risk. It'll have to be able to go there. But it's going there anyway. What is the state of security? I mean, you brought it up. You and I have talked privately about the security cloud. Obviously you mentioned those hacks. We've been covering the place. Look, security is broken. Security is broken. Look, MusLaw has done so much for me that it is now provable that you cannot track the bad guys. You have to adapt. You can't see MusLaw faster than you can ever detect them. So that business of trying to decide if something is good or bad, it's finished. It's finished. It's finished. The traditional endpoint security game of McAfee, Symantec and CA and Trent, it's done. It does not work. So security changes to a new paradigm where you have to say what you know about the world. You say, I know that this workload has not changed since I created it. I know that the code has not been tampered with. And the hypervisor can help with that. So one of the big trends that's going to come in the hypervisor world is the hypervisor is going to start actively participating in a testing to the known state of the world. It's going to prove that it itself is correct, that it hasn't been modified, and that the workload has not been modified either. How do you handle that in an open source world? Handling the security when it's always open? Yeah. I mean that's the whole point, right? So one of the great things about Zen is that the security modules in Zen were written by the NSA, right? That's the wonderful thing about open source. It's more secure than proprietary. Why would you ever trust one vendor to do it right? You cannot trust one vendor to do it right ever. And open source gives you this ability to innovate and let people who have the incentives to make something secure, secure it. And you also have this other wonderful incentive which is you always want the bugs to be out there. You want them to be found. You want the code base to be there at any point in time because right behind one bug lives another one. And so you want this model of the best software is there and every one of our reputations is on the line every day based on that. So security is a redo. We're redoing security totally. We have to. I totally agree with you. We have to. What steps does an enterprise need to take or a small, medium-sized business? I mean they have to start changing. Is there a roadmap for them? Is there baby steps they can take? Is there specific consultancies or methodologies and accelerated learning paths that they could go down? Look, I think you have to go down a path of, in the cloud context you've got to understand what cloud means and you should start using it. By the way, for things that you don't care about there's no reason to ever buy another server. You might as well just rent it from somebody, right? So just any test and dev workload or anything like that just put it up in the cloud. There is no excuse not to do that and it's a lot cheaper. For anything which is elastic, use the cloud. Put your DMZ in the cloud. There's no reason not to put your DMZ up there because what's in the DMZ is stuff you're prepared to lose anyway, right? So these relatively stateless front ends. Keep your data at home for the foreseeable future. But there's no reason why you can't have an app where the app is in the cloud but the data is at home. That's what the rest is all about. You can do this stuff. So start to experiment, start to get used to it and start to understand what these technologies can do. Empower your users. Empowering your users is about not making them the enemy of IT so that they take all your proprietary information, jam it into Dropbox and put it in the cloud whether you liked it or not. So empower the users with a better user experience. It's happening no matter what. They're going to put it in Dropbox. The more you try and lock them down the more they'll go around you. So what you want to do is empower them, give them a better user experience and try and retain control of what you care about. You need to retain control of the data. It needs to be encrypted at rest always using keys that you own and you need to be able to wipe it if they leave. And if you start to consume SAS-based services what you need to be able to make sure is that if the employee walks out the door that they no longer have access to SAS-based accounts to walk out with your data. So you have to be able to instantly deprovision that. So all those capabilities exist and you need to be able to take your legacy application frameworks forward into the next generation. And for the legacy world I think Citrix has got that cooked. I mean we can deliver any app to any device on any network anytime. And that's what Zen App and Zen Desktop is all about. Well I guess my final, final question given that we asked five questions since I said we're going to be one final question we're here with Simon Crosby, the CTO at Citrix with Data Center, Debt Cloud Divisions. Final question, personal note what gets you excited these days in tech? I mean this is not a Citrix question but just in general I mean we got some mega trends that we're seeing, ubiquitous networks we got low cost compute and storage we have applications emerging the economy is kicking up again I mean these are mega trends that are fueling all kinds of innovation. What gets you excited? So here's a little thought we all live in linear time right? You and me we have watches and we live in linear time and we develop software in linear time like you know it's three years between windows releases or whatever it is right? Mozilla is still a doubling curve and a doubling curve like that rips apart companies every two years. Okay I'm telling you in the next five years major players in the industry that we trust today will go down. They will go down because their value proposition based on a former notion of what Mozilla could do is now bankrupt. So the security problem is done right? But the storage industry has it's up for radical reshape because flash is now on my server. You know what is that hard disk vendor have to say to me about that? What is my array vendor have to say to me about that? Have you seen a sand in a cloud? No, you haven't seen any of this stuff. So big players are going to see a complete rewrite of their business models and it's just getting more and more fun and that's just Mozilla. Okay thank you Simon Crosby coming on theCUBE this is theCUBE on SiliconANGLE.tv we're live at Synergy Synergy 2011 in San Francisco California I'm John Furrier your host.