 Live from San Francisco, California, it's the Cube at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Welcome back everyone, live in San Francisco, this is VMworld 2014, day 3 of wall-to-wall coverage, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Anions, I'm my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org, our next guest is Gunner Burger, CTO of Desktop & Apps Group with Citrix. Welcome to the Cube, appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having me. You guys are certainly a big player, first of all we use all the go-to meetings all the time because we love, you guys certainly are doing a great job at the desktop level, end user computing is no strange to that. A lot of changes going up and down the stack, so I want to get your perspective on the under-the-hood requirements for now, this top-of-the-stack pressure, right, you're seeing it at the top, the apps, what's going on from your perspective Citrix, and how are you guys dealing with all this activity in the marketplace today? Well there's obviously a lot of changes happening structural-wise, leadership-wise, we had Mark Templeton out for a bit, he's come back now and he's committed now to, you know, be at Citrix as the as the CEO, Sudhakar's been there about a year and a half who's running the whole enterprise service vision and then my boss, the GM of DNA, Rakesh. So lots of changes going on just as a company, but I think, you know, Mark coming back is just huge for us, I think just as the core of the company and as an analyst, I mean, you know, just covering this industry as an analyst is, Mark is really the heart of the company, so I think just coming into it, it's like I was very, very happy to see that he's coming in there because I just think that he's the heart and you see that in synergy when he comes on stage and he's doing that happy thing and all this kind of stuff, he just brings that that joy into it and so a lot of things just going on leadership-wise that I think that are now becoming a lot more concrete and so of course that then turns into product, right, in the end you want to see product and so, you know, within my group DNA there's massive, massive changes going on, so DNA stands for desktops and apps, so Zen app, Zen desktop, the major change that we're up to is the whole CWS strategy, the Citrix Workspace Services strategy and that strategy is taking, think of like taking Zen apps and desktop and turning it into a SaaS application, so you log into a simple SaaS app and say I want, you know, terminal service type sessions, I want full VMs, whatever it happens to be, but the whole idea of this eniness that you hear Mark talk about, that it's not about us, right, we have a lot of customers that love Zen app, they love Zen desktop, but it's not just about us and what cloud we can sell you, it's about what cloud works best for you and so we look at, you know, Azure of course, this is the choice question, yes, and it's all about where do you need your stuff to be and you're going to choose AWS, potentially your platform, you could choose Azure as your platform, you could choose Google and it's called for the best user experience you want to put your apps, your data, everything as close together as possible and so wherever that workload lies, we too want to move your workload with Zen apps and desktop into that, so that's what CWS is all about, CWS is more than just DNA, but I'm just a CTO of DNA, so I kind of focus there, but for my group specifically, that's what we're working on. So the dockerization trend certainly highlights kind of where you guys have been pointing to as the future, which is, okay, you have apps that should run anywhere they want to run, developers should have ability to develop apps, how does the containerization trend, the notion of open stack, and then everyone having their own little differentiation underneath that play into what Citrix is doing. You kind of get into areas that aren't really my forte, we have the cloud platform group and I think that's more of a question for that group versus the group that I live in. Containerization of Windows is still something that honestly gets me to another conversation that will take us into another rathole, but I think of Bromium, I was talking to Simon Crosby about Bromium a little bit that I actually think that he did that for Windows when he invented Docker, but I don't think when he invented Bromium, but I don't think that was his intention and he actually disagrees with me a little bit about that, but really he's the one that that product actually goes all the way to the Windows kernel, basically hacks it and creates multiple instances of the kernel, and if we're talking about containerization of that, you're really getting outside of my scope of expertise. So Gunna, when you think about what you guys have done in your sweet spot, in your area of expertise, I was very strong affinity with Microsoft, I've talked to a Citrix customer in your world and they're Microsoft customer, many of them, and you mentioned Azure, how is that, and I remember when we did Synergy, we had the Cube at Synergy a couple of years ago and totally agree with you about Mark, great leader, we were asking, okay, as Microsoft moves to the cloud, what does that mean for sort of the VDI business, the desktop virtualization business at Citrix? Can you talk about how that affinity with Microsoft has translated into the cloud? You mentioned Azure, AWS, Google, is it beginning to bifurcate and you're having to change your strategy, I wonder if you could just address that. Yeah, cool, that brings me right into CWS, that works out perfectly. If you think of where did Citrix, where were we born? We had access to the Microsoft code and they basically invented terminal services, right? So then you have Microsoft doing RDS and then now XenApp sits on top of that and that's how we have a lot of happy customers. So you look at the future, where's Microsoft going with this? We see remote app Azure, and so we're putting everything into this Azure SaaS-based plane and where does Citrix sit in that picture? And so that's where CWS comes in. Here's this layer that Microsoft's giving us with remote app Azure, with Azure pass, and there's a way for us to kind of have that magic of the pass where we can layer on top of it. And that's something that we actively talk to Microsoft about, I won't say on a daily basis, but definitely on a weekly basis with them, that we want to get a lot of that synergy that we've had before. And what do you make of, for instance, something like Amazon WorkSpaces, how does that fit into the whole competitive dynamic? It doesn't. You just don't see it? No, no, no, it's just they're giving you an empty shell of a desktop and no one wants that, right? So it's just not viable? It's not. As it stands today? It's completely not. I mean, you're going to have DevOps probably in there testing because it's, you know, it's simple. You log in, you get a checkbox, you got some infrastructure. But in the EUC space, it's so much richer, it's so much more difficult. This is why server virtualization was pretty easy. Desktop virtualization, extremely complicated, right? So Amazon's out there, they have an IaaS play and so they say, ah, we can do desktops too because it's IaaS. That's how they kind of approached it, right? Here's a VM shell of windows, you know, a copy window server that looks like a desktop and they're like, okay, we're done. It's like, but that's not it. Look at our stack. Look at the rewretches that we brought into all layers of the stack, all the things that we do, the bells and whistles of ZenApp. It's like, all of that's missing. In fact, Microsoft was quite a bit smarter in their play saying, I'm not going to give you just a shell, but I'm going to focus on application. So Remote App Azure is actually a TS play, terminal search play, and they're just giving you the application. So I just look, when I see Amazon, I just see a structure that, you know, from a CWS perspective, you want to use it as an IaaS play? Go for it. Go for it, right? But if you actually want to do a full stack of EUC, they're really missing the ball. So the point you were making before is to serve a virtualization and desktop virtualization, it's like two different worlds, completely different workload profiles, and you guys understood that early on, and you got to the point where your desktop experience with your product was equivalent to one, you know, the virtualized desktop was equivalent to one I'm using, you know, standalone desktop. And that was sort of the big knot hole that you had to get through. And then it seems to me that that allowed you to really dominate that market. And you had some competitors and a lot of people thought VMware was going to do really well because their server virtualization, I think they misunderstood the dissonance between those two market spaces. It seems like, okay, so VMware brings in Sanjay Poonan, they make an acquisition of AirWatch. Is your lead intact? I wonder if you could give us an update, again, competitively, on where you stand. Well, you're kind of leading into something I'd like to address there, which is, you know, getting the performance of a virtual desktop, so as, you know, fighting with your MacBook Air there. Right. I think that there is a dam in the whole VDI market that has yet to be breached, and it's something that's near and dear to my heart, which is cost. And so right now, a lot of the VDI things where you kind of see it, think, you know, coming, put my Gartner hat on for a second, that we see it about, they saw it as about 5% of the total market. So, you know, you got 95% of the market that's physical, and it's physical because physical is cheaper. And that's really what you're fighting, is you're right. Citrix has got to the point, we're now with 3D app workloads, and we can do some really amazing stuff. I got YouTube videos that you can watch me doing some fun games and stuff like that on YouTube just because it's fun to show off. But really, the problem has been that you have to make this whole play about OPEX, and you have to talk about, well, yeah, it's going to be more expensive on CAPEX, but OPEX will make sense over time. And the thing is, when you were early adopters of server virtualization, you did the same thing. Right, you were doing OPEX, you were doing stress testing, and can exchange be supported on this, all that kind of stuff that you just have to do as an administrator. Right. But then as server virtualization went along, you stopped doing that, right? You stopped asking the question of, is it cost saving? Because everyone just knows it, right? You make the argument of, why do you need physical now, right? You have to make the reverse argument. If you want physical, you got to make an argument. Right. And right now, desktop virtualization is in that market where it's just kind of teetering between, on that CAPEX cost, where it's kind of in there fighting for cost. But I think that dam is still there, and that's something that, in my role, I want to just completely destroy that dam. Okay, so except in niche applications, like a call center or claims or something like that where it makes sense, you're saying that's the next way for you guys. Well, I mean, you always have the 80-20 room between terminal services, still does a great job for those kind of niche applications, as you say. And then you have the 20%, which is the VDI. And I'm kind of talking about the VDI specifically, that that was just kind of been locked up due to cost complexity. And I think that we can kind of, I really think that we have some more room that we can do to just knock that out of the market. Connor, thanks for really appreciating your coming on theCUBE. You guys certainly brought up the Windows. You guys know that Windows space, but also I want to give you the final word on the Linux Zen app, Zen desktop. Give the quick, quick update, and then we'll end the segment on what's going on with Linux. So talk to the camera on this one? Sure, very uncomfortable with that. If you guys go to your email and your Twitter, I will address the camera. I will hang with you. Okay, I'll just talk to you. I feel so much more comfortable talking to somebody. So Linux VDAs is something that, when I came on board, you know, as a CTO, you started learning all the cool stuff. Like as an analyst, I thought I had like access. Like I really thought, man, I got all the knobs. This is cool. I get all the, you know, NDA stuff. But then you come on board as a CTO, and you really see this stuff that's, you know, much farther out there. I mean, we do stuff that we'll never see the light of day, because it's just, it's meant to be a prototype. It's meant to show just crazy innovation, right? And so we see this stuff, and then Linux VDA was in there, and there's a lot of conversation internally going on about Linux VDA. I was like, guys, we're doing it. I can't tell you who we're doing it with. Release it. I was like, yes. We're doing it. Let's put it out there. Yeah, awesome. Let's just put it out there. Let's show that we are an innovative company, and it wasn't anything we had to write. It was done. Yeah. It's in use. I can't tell you where it's in use, but it's in use, and well, we'll figure it out. We'll follow you on the phone. Maybe a lot of trouble if I did. But it's something that's already out there. It's already in use, and it's just, let's put it out there. Let's show, let's show some innovation here. And so we did. And really, I mean, I actually just looked at the list of all of you who signed up for it, and it's very long. Gunnar, we're getting the hook. Oh, I'm sorry. We really appreciate you coming on the Cube Citrix with Linux now. It gets the mass, taking names. It's the Cube. We're right back at this short break. Thanks a lot, man.