 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante at wikibond.org and I'm here with my co-host, John Furrier. We are live at Citrix Synergy in Moscone West. Synergy 2011, we're hearing lots of themes on cloud, mobile, consumerization, and the simplification and orchestration of all sorts of IT services. And we're here right now with Mike Stringer. Mike is the MD of support at Citrix and we're gonna talk about services. Michael, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Glad to be here. Good, and so we are here at Synergy Live, Silicon Angles Continuous Coverage, The Cube, the Worldwide Leader, and Tech Coverage. And Michael, support services, services in general, it's something that's sort of an afterthought, but a lot of customers that we talk to, that's where the value is, right? I mean, it's all about reducing risk for CIOs. It's about getting value from the technology. So what's your take on services? What's Citrix's party line there? So I basically based my career off services. I've been at Citrix for over 13 years and always been in some kind of, I've been fortunate enough to be in a customer facing or partner facing position. And we've seen it change quite a bit over the years. It went from a very tactical, I need a hot fix to how should I deploy, what are best practices, what are other people doing and how can I get data about what the industry is doing as well, per vertical even. And so we're building a lot of tools and capabilities that we can help with a customer like healthcare. Healthcare always says, hey, I know you have a lot of healthcare. Why are we having problems? Why aren't the rest of your customers having problems in that vertical? Now we have the capabilities of going, these are the things that that vertical's doing. This is why they're doing it. This is what you should be doing. You could do that for financials and education and whatnot. Is that a big change? I mean, what has changed in services over the last, say, 10 years? So like I said, I feel like it was real tactical at one point. Closer? I felt like it was much more tactical. It was an afterthought. What do you mean by that? Something's broken, come and fix it? Something was broken and then you got the call. But that's expensive, right? And as you become a company that's in enterprise environments, you're in critical environments, you're in hospitals, you're in trading floors, you gotta get in front of those type of issues and you've gotta build scalability and manageability into your servicing offerings. Meaning being more proactive? Yes, absolutely. So give us an example. Today, we're actually developing a tool and doing usability studies with a tool here at Synergy. And it's called Citrix Tools as a Service. It's an initiative out of the support organization that really is focused on information gathering, taking and auto-analyzing that information and then providing back tailored results to the person that's uploaded that data. Oftentimes that's a partner or an end-user, an end-customer administrator. And by tailored, I mean it's based off your environment and your configuration. So you know exactly what you're doing and why you're doing it. Because change windows are hard too. Everybody wants uptime. So you only want to change for items that you have to change for and you want to change ahead of an outage type scenario. You know, John, we've been talking about the services angle for a while now and really services is where the rubber meets the road, isn't it? Yeah, I mean Dave, storage is sexy last year at EMC where we talked about storage is sexy but this year services is sexy because I mean a lot of money's being made and a lot of on the consultancy side certainly delivering services and a lot of investment on the IT side has been made on supporting and doing delivering services to customers. So in this real-time web environment this is a new hot innovative area because there's a serious money on the line, dollars that affect the business and to the user experience is affected by this. So what I'm interested to know is what are you seeing in terms of innovation around services? Obviously, the social web with mobile gives you new capabilities, you have new data sources, virtualization is a big part of that, you mentioned healthcare. I mean, the iPad, some say might even revolutionize healthcare in and of itself with desktop virtualization, some of the apps that you guys are showing here but I'm interested more in the support side. You're going to still support this stuff, your automations key and also the processes around support. So what's changing with support relative to the process and what are some of the innovation areas? There's two areas of innovation, part of its process and part of it's actually a development effort. On the back end, support organizations today have a lot of different initiatives and one of ours is called supportability. So taking all this data that we have and support has a lot of data that's never used, taking all that data, massage it and being able to feed it back to the product groups so you can work with your usability, you can work with that user experience and significantly improve what your customer's experience is with the product. So those are huge initiatives that we have within Citrix from a process and information side. And then mentioned earlier, developing new tools and new services, online services, cloud-based services that can centralize all the tribal knowledge of Citrix but more importantly, the tribal knowledge of your entire community in a location where all your administrators can get together. Walk us through that scenario because that's a cutting edge scenario. You're basically taking all the new data in because you have access to data. Take us through that tribal knowledge, how you're aggregating all that because it sounds like a lot of automation, a lot of technologies involved. A lot of data. It's a lot of data. You know, it's not that much different than the idea of crowdsourcing or even forums, right? The mini to mini type ideas and even a knowledge center in general. But what we wanted to do was customize it so it was based off how people were using the product, what features they were using of the product and what their environment looked like. And so we built a backend infrastructure that we call known-issue plugins, right? And we have a saying in Citrix the first rule of known issues is tell everybody about known issues. The second rule of known issues is tell everybody about known issues. We want to share that across the entire industry. So we built this infrastructure so you can build a known-issue plugin without any scripting ability or any kind of coding ability as the end user. Or if you want to, you can build your own scripts, your own C code, your own Perl, your own Python, it doesn't matter. We wanted the very easy for the non-coding group and then the coding group that wants to do a lot more, we wanted to make that. But we didn't want to only open that to Citrix. We wanted to open that to our partners and our customers. So the architecture is built such that not only can Citrix contribute but a partner or a customer can use their own sandbox and build their own plugins. Most customers and most partners have environments that are Citrix environments but they have very specific things in them. You could think of an Epic or a Cerner. They want to check more than just a Citrix DLL or a Citrix service. They want to know that my Citrix environment is running correctly. So they can build their own plugins, run those, and if they want to, they can share that with the community as well. So we think that many to many aspect will help build this type of known-issue plugin much more so than just a forum and just a sharing information. How has it been well received? So it's been really well received. We've done about 200 usability studies just in the last two days. We've got great feedback. Of course, we've got some really great ideas from some of our partners as well. You know, the problem I see in a lot of this area is using Google as a blunt instrument. And what I mean by that is when you're looking for an answer, a lot of times you just circumvent the forum and you hit Google. Is this gonna change that? So Google's a monster, right? And it's awesome for getting information. But it's very generic information when you get something from a knowledge center or from a Google type of appliance. What we want people, we want to take and customize, massage, you know, tailor that information to what specifically you need. So you don't need the latest and greatest hot fix or service pack or version. You need what you need to run your environment the best based off what your configuration environment is. How will you measure the success of this program? And what's your primary metric or two or three primary metrics that you're gonna use to measure the success of this? We've got internal and external metrics. So from an internal perspective, we want all the front end pieces of this built into the product. So you've got someone like Klaus Osterman who leads our networking and cloud division is building phone home into the NetScalers to be the front end of this service, right? Looking at those type of capabilities. But you also have the desktop director groups, you know, the Zen App groups. We want that front end built into the product. It's button push easy, you click one button, you get the information you need and we provide you back the customized results. So that's an internal metric. How we want to measure it from externally is the number of people contributing to the known issue database, to that analysis database. And not just contributions, but we also have a rating system. So we want to know that, you know, the plugins and the known issue database, each one actually resolves issue and has a high rating, you know, per known issue plugin. So we've built that in as well as there's hours and things that used to take a long time. We've built in some metrics just on hours saved and softer numbers like that. And will you track resolutions? I mean, because that's one of the problems I find with forums a lot as you go into the forums as well, this question wasn't answered. It was asked but not answered. So will you track resolutions and is that a key indicator? That's a great question. And resolutions are super hard to track in most systems because you go to a Knowledge Center article, you get an answer, you go do it. It may take some time to do it and that web browser isn't opening long. You don't go back and go, okay, I'm gonna be a nice guy and go back to their website and tell them it resolved my issue because nothing is resolved in a few seconds. In this case, you're uploading data and your data is housed there. So you may not go back on that first, you get that first analysis back and you go fix that. You may not be back for a little bit while to that page but as we update your plugins and known issues that we run, the best practices and common mistakes and known fixes that are coming out, we'll reanalyze your data that's up there and proactively alert you of new items that you're potentially susceptible to from that data. So you'll be back at that site in the same location and you'll have the same items that just get resolved or not. I don't wanna keep seeing these same things on my list so I'll click whether it was resolved or not. That's how we think we'll get better data and that doesn't happen in a knowledge center today. Sounds like you guys are using the KISS principle here. I mean, a lot of services organizations are getting very granular with the touch points and the channels that they use to provide support. There's chat, there's IVR, there's obviously phone, there's web, et cetera, forums. It sounds like you're saying, look, we wanna make the preferred interaction point, this knowledge management system through the web, web browser, keep it simple. We absolutely wanna do that and we want it to be as simple as possible and you guys have heard the theme over and over again at this event is easy, simple, simpler, more easy, more easy, more simple. Easy button. Push button easy. You've seen a ton of that and that's absolutely the case. What about complexity? I'll see you with the support data that you're getting, you're getting the phone in from the home as you're saying that they're working on. You're doing a lot of big data. What's your philosophy on the big data? Can you give any examples? Can you share with us how you're handling all this big data, new data, I mean, I got diverse data from your partners. How are you guys architecting that? Is there any insight there? The back end is mostly still SQL on the back end. We've got a lot of that. It's cloud-based, but everything in the architecture is running on top of ZIN servers with VPX in front of them. And we have that so we can easily scale up and down. With the ZIN servers, we can bring servers online. We can bring database storage online up and down as we're testing. So during this week, as a good example, we're doing a lot of usability testing. A lot of stuff is going through there. Then we're able to ramp up easily. And we've built architecture like that because as we get a number of users, we need to be able to scale that really easy. And it's fairly automated. I mean, that's what we sell, but it's really easy for us to use our own products. What have you learned over the past year and a half, two years around in the support changing landscape, also using your own products, ZIN servers, everything else, virtualization, you have mobility. These are massive trends out there. Have you learned anything you can share with us in terms of how you're putting this all together as it's a changing landscape? What's the key things that you can say that you've learned from these areas? So having been in support for a long time and really been a part of some of the acquisitions and have moved out to the Bay Area during the NET Scaler and NET 6 and our orbital acquisitions, I was able to work with the hardware teams and the software teams and really combine the thought process together. How are we doing health checking in software? How can we do that from NET scalers? Where can we push the products to integrate better? And if you see what our partners are selling today and what environments look like, you see actually the software teams and stuff pulling in the network teams and pulling in a lot of networking equipment. And so we've turned much more into a networking company than we have in the past. And as we, one of the big shifts that I saw was as we went to the VPX platform, right? That made it so easy for people to step into the networking and get all the benefits of a NET Scaler in a software package. So we see that exploding. We're using it in-house for many different items, whether it's health checking or just GSLV and better experience for end users. Mike, I call it the services gene. There's something in services people, DNA, that makes them want to be services people. You've been in the services business for a while. Some people just love it. They love interacting with customers, helping customers solve problems. Have you seen the skill set requirements change for people out there who want to be in that services business, who have that services DNA in their system? Or is there a new skill set? Yeah, what's changing in terms of the skill sets that are required? It's a good question and it's really interesting. So it's not as easy. So I started in support and I had one product. I had to know about one product. This is easy. You know, at the time it probably didn't feel that way, but working back. You were really innovative if you could do software and network traces. Today's guys, they have a pretty difficult job because they have to jump across so many products and they all touch each other and they all interact with each other. So having that broad base and that good background is definitely beneficial. What we see though is a big shift is people coming out of school with computer science degrees and IT degrees want to go into support now. It's easy to recruit these type of people into services organizations. And before everyone's goal was to go into a development organization and build a product. Now we have developers and our development teams moving to our teams. They want to be in front of the customers. They want to know how people use what they've built and what that experience is. Yeah, we were saying downstairs that it's an end user experience market we're living in. All the computing, all the technologies about end user experiences and you're seeing that with touching the end point with virtualization of desktop. But you're looking at them on the consumer side of the cloud and you guys talk about consumerization of IT, it's cool to develop apps fast. So you've got a new development environment where the mindset's different. Also you guys talk about open stack as well. So the new developer, the young guns coming into the market are like, hey, I want to go where the action is. So you got to move quickly in this new stuff coming down. So you're saying that that's a robust environment for development. Yeah, and if you look at services organizations a lot of times it's agile development. It's quick. It's getting that feedback. It's interaction. And you're not stuck on one part of the product for a year and a half. But if you do good, it's obvious, right? You help solve problems. Customers increase sales, save sales. I mean, you can see real proof in the puddings when you do stuff. Absolutely. So Mike, obviously you got to get this new system up and running, perfected, this sort of anticipatory knowledge management system, self-service system. What else is on your to-do list? What are customers saying to you? I mean, what's next after that in that sort of midterm horizon? I got a couple guys on my team, Stuart Kennedy and David McGow. And they're really focused on the overall online experience. So we're building this tool and we think this tool will really drive a lot of that experience. But we need to be able to open cases easier. We need to have chat. We need to be able to, nobody wants to call anybody on a phone, right? I never want to call anyone on a phone. I want to answer without anything. If I can't find that, I chat, I look for it. But I don't want to call anyone. And so we want to make that experience as good as possible. So nobody has to call support. That's the goal. We are here live in San Francisco, California, the Moscone Center. We're at Citrix Synergy 2011's going on. We're at theCUBE. We are, this is our flagship telecast from siliconangle.com, the worldwide leader in tech coverage. We go on the ground, we talk to the experts. We talk to the thought leaders, talk to the domain experts, extract their knowledge and share that with you. We're live here. Final question. What's your crystal ball for how technology like virtualization and now versus the desktop, net scaler, all those cloud gateways, all this kind of convergence. How is that going to change how people are supported in terms of your clients and then your customers' customers? I think support and services in general, and it sounds like you guys agree with me, we'll play a critical role there. But even with the service we're building, it's cloud-based, right? We don't care if you're in the private cloud. If you're in the public cloud, we don't care where you're at, right? We want the information and we'll provide you feedback back. We'll also help you transition. So I see services starting to automate and help you transition. So you want part in the private, part in the public, make that easier. That's going to be the big push over the next couple of years of how do you have that mix? Or how do I move? Or in DR scenarios, how do I instantly go back to the cloud and then back in-house? And probably most people that go to the cloud wouldn't come back in-house afterwards. Excellent. Mike Stringer, MD of the support area, support group of Citrix. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing with us your knowledge. And good luck with the new system, rolling it out. We'll be watching. And hopefully you can come back and give us a progress support down the road. I really appreciate the time. Thanks guys. All right.