 Inside of Cetrix is as he's been called so um, so Chris I have to ask you so You know we had a lot of talk about bring your own right so if I have this like my own Nirvana helmet Can I bring that and does that work? Talk about you know tell the people what I'm talking about. I guess you've been googling Yeah, I saw the Nirvana helmet. This is a very cool device. It's got virtually everything you would ever want on it Right, and you certainly can bring your own I presume to the party you'd be the life of the party if you brought that Yeah, so that that's a bit of an exaggeration But but the concept actually is actually something we've been talking about for a long time that that evolves around taking a device like a smart phone and Getting to the point where that's all you need you can plug it into a large display use a full-size keyboard and mouse and basically run everything off in a hosted environment and You know the really cool thing is that you know We've been talking about it for years and years and conceptually it always kind of made sense But the technology wasn't really ready. The devices weren't really good enough and you know this year I think you know we've cleared that hurdle earlier in the year Motorola came out with a device called the atrix and I don't know if you've seen that or not It was demoed on on stage yesterday and literally you can plug it in to a full-size high-res keyboard display mouse and Run a virtual desktop and and it just works. So we're there this year is is definitely the year This is the year of Citrix and and virtualization. I mean for mainstream I mean Citrix has been playing in this area obviously an open source side and on the desktop side with all your products But take us through the Citrix I don't say aha moment because you've been kind of doing a lot of you know desktop Innovation for a decade right or two You know I'll see the iPad comes out and we've been following your blog and your blogs in general huge community Not all of them, but I mean for the most part, but you saw activity around Hacking the iPad and the iPhone right through those early days. We're kind of receiver clicks in we go. Wow This is a goldmine right is a game changer Shifts and we saw a lot of shifting with Citrix right kind of moving the troops like we have a winner Right about the mware Citrix, but it's a whole nother game take us through that sure and what and when was that? Well, so, you know, it's interesting you talk about following the blogs as an example One of one of the things that we did different when we back when the iPhone came out When you consider like the traditional product roadmap kind of scenarios you talk to your big customers You build a roadmap you kind of turn the crank on you know what you plan to do And if we were to look and then you talk to analysts and you know, what are they projecting and what do they tell you about their cut your customers or your market size and Back at the time when when the iPhone came out if we had only listened to the analysts and our big customers What they would have said is that you know, it's blackberry You know, like don't don't spend your resources on the iPhone So not everybody but you know early on you know very blackberry and especially if you look at our customer base You know, it's like they're the big companies and they're concerned about security and they're concerned about locking things down and so forth And and what we did was simply like put it out in a blog post to say hey, would you want this? Are you are you interested and oh, yeah, so that that one post generated something like 800,000 views and hundreds and hundreds of Comments where people were describing like how they want it why they want it how they're gonna use it and Worked wonders in terms of short circuiting the whole, you know business case of like okay This means a research call some guy up who's like six months behind the times You know, okay market share kind of because the research firms Dave and I talked about all the time because he runs one of the Most progressive research firms. It's really real time and open source. They're all looking in the rear view mirror Right like okay So if you take that example Everyone tells you blackberry. Yeah, you put out a blog post like similar to Chuck Halls at EMC His most popular post he told us that emc world was the post he read about how the iPad has become a toy for his kids Have all his posts of thought leadership right that post. Yeah generated the most action. That was about that was a year ago Right, but what does that say about market intelligence? Are you getting crowd source open source? Right market intelligence? Yep, I mean that's classic and that changed right change things and one of the things that did is it also Changed who was talking to us because traditionally we talked to the IT guys like the guys that are here, you know for the most part the people that are giving us input are the You know might be the admins might be the IT directors might be the CIO, but it's all IT guys and what what happened with the iPhone that changed things is users were starting to talk to us more and directly and sometimes skipping the IT guys and In fact even going back to the same post where we got you know Probably half of the hundreds of comments were from end users and they were from like I'm a doctor and I need this and I need it Tomorrow and you know I could see more patience. I could be more effective. I could have better outcomes I mean and then the next person say you know wait I'm a lawyer and I want every contract that I ever wrote and I want to be able to have it with me whenever I Want it, you know that kind of goes down I have to say so you're talking about you know real-time research and you know I just got to put in a plug. So we have a wiki. Yeah, we use a media wiki So you can go back and look at the history So I went back and looked at our original iPhone analysis, which was June 2008 I guess okay, and and Basically the title of the article was Apple's brilliant strategy or why the iPhone will take over the known universe Okay, so all right there you go pretty Notre-Dame Okay, but it wasn't I back to the point and then we write to an IT audience And we told that I says a legion of iPod owners upgrade to the iPhone iPod touch Apple's gonna create the first true mass market network handheld Users and IT departments are gonna have to accommodate them right at the end I mean it was so blatantly obvious from the people we talked to because you know what it was is CEOs in our community said I'm getting one. Yep, and I don't care if they don't support it And that was the real-time intelligence so disruptive to because it like it breaks every single known IT process and rule Yep, right. It's like it's so amazing how that one product becomes a flashpoint, right? I mean the iPhone in particular, but now the iPad just is more jewelry for the tech jewelry, right? I mean originally tech jewelry cool hip, but now it's relevant And is that the tipping point for for virtual desktop? Well, I think it it's a tipping point But it it's just the tip, you know, I just the tip of the tipping point Exactly I just had through a session with in the Geekspeak live Just two hours ago and had a room full of folks and asked the question Okay, how many here support a bring-your-own program and you know, they're 100 plus there and I think they were like four hands that went up How many of you have support blackberry? Everybody's hands went up and I'm like they're frowning and this is Citrix said and these are the Geekspeak guys. I'm thinking wow. This is interesting It's really just the tip. There's a lot more to take a suit So first of all to go social media case study for the folks out there who are not understanding what social media is about What Chris is describing with that post to me is what we believe in and we say in terms of social media is the Key to success and that is not trying to force social media You actually just talk to the audience go direct now get real-time information get real data Right apply that data to business value hence a strategy change, right? I'm sure you guys didn't move mountains, but from from what I understand you take me through this So you go oh wow we have we hit a nerve we hit a rip current, right? This is new data right data comes in the company's not going to just make sweeping changes There was some hacking going on right so take us through the hacking that went on from there So what happened next you must you must have heard some of the inside stories I guess huh not following you guys for I've been following as an as a blogger and an analyst for you guys for years Okay, going back to the early days and when you have acquired Zen Yeah, so so you know one of the things that is more effective again Well having customer feedback is great, you know and having people ask her things is great But what what really makes a difference as well is having a prototype having something that works Because you know you can PowerPoint things to death But if you can you know put it in your hand and say wow this works and this works better than I thought You know that's really changes things. In fact, that's one of the things we did internally was You know, we were able to get some some unofficial resources like where we didn't skunk work So so so we had some some really ambitious folks one of me saw on stage yesterday Cuspinto, you know where it was like hey, I'm gonna go we're doing this fun of C for fun I mean just taught himself objective Z and went out and took the initiative to make it happen And you know then then we had some other groups within engineering that that also provided the the ICA stack and and the components to you know put together a good prototype and quite frankly, you know You you get a good prototype together you start showing it around you show it's something like Mark Templeton We got to do something about this. Yeah, and that happens and when did you pump in an app store? So I see when you put it into the iTunes app store. Yeah, you get instant feedback, right? So go back to your original kind of you know changing strategy posts with that you get the data But now you cannot deny the real-time analytics right how many downloads you get. Oh, yeah You go okay real-time, you know, and we hit number one in the free business app You know as soon as we so with the iPad receiver that came out first day and you know, so we're not allowed to talk about it, but obviously we had some Some help from not just ourselves to be ready for that first day And you know we made it to the top of the list and since then, you know, we're always you know, two three four five Whatever we're phenomenal success. Now, you know, you do get some critical comments there And one of the things that we find is you know, either it works or it doesn't work So we've got like this big dichotomy of we got like a whole bunch of five stars This is awesome. And then a handful not just handful. We have some one-stars to where Depending on how your your Citrix environment is configured It may work with no work or it may take it to do something and If you know users are really impatient as you know as we all are right Yeah, and if it doesn't work, you know right away. It's like this sucks At least it's free Well, but so we were talking to an earlier guest about the sort of you know philosophy of the way in which IT organizations Deploy Citrix. It's not dogmatic like it is, you know, say the VMware environment It's gotta be done this way. There's a lot more flexibility and that's a two-edged sword, isn't it? Well, that's true. Yeah, the fact that we have lots of security scenarios in terms of different type of gateways and Different authentication kind of scenarios that gives customers flexibility for how they want to manage their business What that does does do is it causes situations where you know Somebody buying you know downloading the app out of the out of the marketplace or you know for Android or the iPhone Whichever it may just it may not work out of the box unless you know IT set something up For you know some instructions, but that's not by accident, right? I mean that's a conscious decision on your part to allow that type of flexibility Well, I think it evolved. Yeah, okay It was more than 20 years doing this and we've got lots of customers with Varying requirements, you know from really tight lockdown security like we talked about this morning You know with the you know defense department back in through, you know the good enough security scenario So to accommodate that, you know, we've had to you know allow different types of authentication and different types of Chris We know we got tight you got a tight schedule and want to just kind of jump into some couple final questions here Because we can talk about social media all day long But then just we live and breathe that's what we do for our our platforms, but let's talk about Citrix I mean you're involved in the road map you do talk about road map You engage the research to tell you market share numbers, but right now you guys put out a pretty compelling story here Citrix synergy, you know, you got the personal cloud on one end, right? Which is the user and then you got the public cloud right and then you kind of sandwiching this private cloud Which people are saying there's not a lot of meat on the bone, right, which is okay It's emerging and yeah, right different data. So you got a nice little enabled open strategy there, right? And then you got net scaler underneath it very compelling I think f5 has got to be I think shaking in their boots if I'm f5 I know I got to be scratching my head going Exactly got pole position. So you guys are poised for success and you get the kind of the triple threat there going on What do you need to do to be successful? Some have been saying storage has been kind of an issue we talked with ziotech and v3 systems Right partners like that seem to be coming in right I mean everything from cloud when it gets down through Oh, yeah, I'm all you know smoking the peace pipe of greatness right apps, etc You got you know that you got to get to the Nuggets and that's compute network and storage, right? How do what do you guys need to do to be successful to execute that vision and then how do you deal with all this underlying? I don't say legacy, but you know core infrastructure, right? Well, you know, there's no single answer no silver bullet wish wish there was but certainly You know from an ecosystem standpoint, we've got a embrace and and and collaborate with the big players out there So, you know the Cisco's and HP's and and the storage guys that you know own some of these environments Obviously, we have to do a good job You know collaborating with them and coming up with solutions that work for customers when you look strategically or longer term What what's certainly in our favor and what Simon talked about this morning is like, okay? This this private cloud is sort of like this interim step. Okay, you did virtualization now You want to potentially do this private cloud thing? But the real economics gain are you know and cloud economics translates to when you, you know Utilize a public cloud and be able to bridge to it and and you know create this hybrid environment And we think that you know strategically that's in our favor and certainly from a market share standpoint, you know, okay We're not there from a virtualization in the enterprise standpoint But from the virtualization platform in the public cloud, you know, we're there You know, so so, you know, we're like moving into that space in effect or rather, you know that that's still out great Competitive strategy, but I guess maybe I'll drill down a little hone in on that What white spaces do you see that's innovative for either partners or entrepreneurs to play in because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out There who are in the similar boat that Citrix was in there playing around their prototyping and right I don't want to know, you know, where can I play without getting rolled on by Citrix, right? Well, so actually when it comes to the cloud There's there's actually a lot because first of all Zen is free and open source So you can go in there and and we're encouraging folks to you know build on top of Zen server Now you've got open stack and you know again an open source initiative that Again, I think is going to enable a lot of white space a lot of Solutions around this hybrid cloud enable and you know, we're not looking to be the only provider there We're looking to you know be certainly a leader, but we want an ecosystem. We want to have, you know Multiple security options. We want to have multiple storage options We want to be able to you know have a platform that that can be supported and you know creates opportunity for startups that That can add value about that Hybrid cloud Templeton yesterday had his manifesto the five points right and he gave reference examples Yeah, and Dave Cahill on wikibon wrote an article about the Zynga hybrid cloud I mean, I thought that was a pretty good reference example. Yeah, you know it is and a real Hybrid cloud here a lot of talk about hybrid cloud. That's your real hybrid cloud, isn't it right? No, that's a great example, and you know even with you know my own team You know I I can't remember last I used to buy servers every time I had money left over in the budget for every quarter Just buy servers because always needed them, you know no matter what you're always buying servers Because you got to do a prototype you got to try things out And you know ever since certainly don't spend the money on people who told you blackberry was relevant So so now it's just a matter of we just trying to turn the dial up, you know it at the public clouds and you know We have no limitation now for building prototypes and building solutions and showing demos and so forth So, you know, it's been you know really effective on multiple levels Chris Fleck here He's at his Twitter handles at Chris Fleck your active prolific blogging. You guys have a great social media Campaigns you've always got going good great content coming on. We love your knowledge content We've been following it and we support it We link to it often appreciate you coming on the queue would love to spend more time with you But we got to get to our next guest, but we really appreciate you coming inside the queue. Okay. Thank you. Thank you