 Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at AWS ReInvent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Amazon and Trend Micro. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live at Amazon Web Services ReInvent. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. When we go out to the events and extract the civil noise, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Stu Miniman, wikibon.org, and our next is Morgan Gehart, Senior Director of Products at Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, John. Thanks for having me. So, we've been covering Citrix, and we actually did in our first year, theCUBE's our fifth year as we did Citrix Synergy. Right. Big event. You guys have a huge ecosystem. Yep. You're not new to the cloud, and certainly you guys have been in the product business for a long time. Give us a quick update on what's going on here for Amazon for you guys. Why are you here? What are you doing with Amazon? What are your customers looking at doing? Absolutely. Well, certainly Citrix has tremendous presence in the enterprise across our entire portfolio, whether it's Zen App, Zen Desktop, Zen Mobile, or our Netscaler portfolio. And like pretty much all enterprises these days, they're looking to extend their data centers with the capacity that's available in the cloud and especially the capacity that's available in AWS. So, you know, our goal is to help our customers make AWS look like it's just a natural extension of their own data centers and their own data center capacity. And that's a combination of the ability to use Zen App and Zen Desktop to stand up farms in AWS, either in isolation or bridged back to the, bridged back to their own data centers. It's using Netscaler as an extension to extend the network from their own data centers into AWS and back with full security and full network extension from AWS back to their data centers. And that could be for delivering Zen App, Zen Desktop, but it's also, of course, just using Netscaler as a front end for the next generation of mobile and web apps that are being delivered out of AWS as well. You know, I was talking to Stu before he kicked off about our networking audience love, and for some reason networking videos get all the best views. Right. It's weird. I guess it's not weird. We love networking too. Right. But James Hamilton was on, certainly is a big draw, but what's interesting about Amazon here, normally when we do the, last year we did the Amazon show, everything was born in the cloud. Right. But this year we have multiple guests come on that are doing the hybrid thing. Yep. So, nice mix that Amazon's going down. That's in your wheelhouse for Citrix, this notion of hybrid too. Right. You guys are in that great business. So what is the key dynamic for being that hybrid? So, here's on premise, but I also want to do cloud. Being there, I probably agree. Right. What is the dynamic and what is the new formula? Right. Absolutely. So there's a couple of things that we see as key. So first and foremost, while the network is critical and obviously it's a big deal for me, it's really not about the network, it's about the apps. So first and foremost, you've got to keep the app and the app workload front and center. What we try to do at Citrix is make the deployment and the configuration of our stack as transparent as possible regardless of whether it's running on-prem or running in AWS. Because from the IT professional's perspective, they really shouldn't have to look at doing things fundamentally different to invoke AWS. It really shouldn't be about, for example, taking something and then having to quote unquote move it to AWS. It should rather be the perspective is, there's AWS, there's all that capacity. How can I make it look like a natural extension of my own data center? From a networking perspective, this is one of the big benefits that we see of NetScaler. NetScaler running in AWS does the exact same things that NetScaler does running on-premise. The configuration model is the same. It's actually literally the same binary. So as a customer is taking and looking at extending their data center with AWS, they have an application that is built in using NetScaler. They don't have to worry about whether the networking footprint that they use in AWS has to be changed because the networking footprint of NetScaler in AWS is the same as the networking footprint of NetScaler on-prem. I think the other big thing is that from the user's perspective, they actually shouldn't know whether they're running in AWS or the infrastructure is running in AWS or running on-prem. The application should behave exactly identical. And then, of course, the benefit is that by using AWS behind the scenes, the IT organization gets all the benefits of not having to stand up and tear down servers, being able to not only get capacity when they need it, but more importantly, to give it back, which is actually, from my perspective, a key part of the cloud. Growing is actually a lot easier than shrinking. The key thing is to shrink. So, Morgan, you made some great points there. It's really about making it simple and transparent for the users so that they don't need to understand it. Now, that being said, give us a little bit of insight as to how Citrix solves these networking problems because, obviously, it's a little bit different doing mobile enablement if you own the environment versus going to the cloud. What's involved in that? I'm not sure that Citrix really gets as much credit as it should for being a significant player in networking. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a good point. Our networking business is now significant. We don't break it out, but it is a... If you look back at some of our earlier earnings calls where we've made comments and things like that, it is easily a several hundred million-dollar business. So, it's a sizable and significant part of Citrix overall. From our perspective, when we break it down, I think the first thing is to understand the role that we play in networking. Our role within networking is not what we call transport. It's not routers and switches and pushing packets around. Really, what our networking portfolio brings to the table is context. We know who the user is. We know where the user is going, specifically within the application. We know time to first byte. We know time to last byte. And we can bring all of that context to an application that's running in AWS. So, what that gives the IT organization is the same visibility into application performance when that application is running in AWS as if it was running in their own data centers. So, that's obviously fundamental to standing a footprint up and ensuring that the user is getting an excellent experience. I think the other big thing is that, ideally, there should be the option to make the network extension itself as transparent as possible. So, with a net-scaler running on-prem and a net-scaler running in AWS, we can literally set up a network extension between the two and encrypt that network extension so that it provides security for data in motion and it even provides WAN optimization services on top of that to accelerate the movement of data back and forth between AWS and the on-prem data center. So, that, again, helps optimize the end user's experience, but also, more importantly, it can... Actually, it's not more important. What's ultimately most important is the end user experience, but almost of equal importance is it helps cuts down the cost, the transit cost. All right, so, Morgan, I have to ask. Last year at AWS, we had kind of those gas moments when Amazon announced workspaces. A bunch of us came kind of running over to the Citrix booth, which was the largest partner booth at the show. I said, what does this mean? So, we've had a year to let this sink in. Amazon's talked about great growth in the environment. I haven't had a chance to talk to too many customers using workspaces. What has that done to the relationship and talk about the importance of the relationship and how a bit of change over the last year? So, obviously, Amazon is a very strategic partner for Citrix. We're platinum sponsors. We've been platinum sponsors since day one. We offer Net Scaler and other aspects of our portfolio via Marketplace, Hourly, BYOL, and the new annual options. We do a tremendous amount of business with Amazon standing Zen App and Zen Desktop in AWS. We still are seeing a tremendous demand for Zen App and Zen Desktop in AWS because of the flexibility that it provides. It's an interesting industry. My personal take is, and like I said, I'm a networking guy, I'm from the networking side of the business. There's better people than me to get into the nitty gritty of workspaces versus what Citrix does on that side of the business. My personal take is, the valleys and ITs, it's an interesting industry, right? Any two vendors that are over $100 million in revenue are almost guaranteed to have areas where they overlap. That's just kind of part and parcel of doing business in the industry these days. We don't let it slow us down. Our take is that we stand by our products and what our products deliver. We focus on investing in those and we think that that differentiation wins out in the end. If it doesn't, that's a Citrix issue. It's not an Amazon issue or anybody else's issue. I got to ask the hard question. The hard question is something that probably won't be hard but it's really the question that is on the minds of people out there. There's a lot of fun in the market. We're pretty close to Citrix. We've been following you guys, great company. Certainly got great tools like GoToMe, which we use all the time. But Cloud, you've got Chops. You've got Chops and Tech. There's a perception out there. Is Citrix winning? OpenStack thing went down. A lot of Cloud stuff is settling in. Just clarify that for you. Is Citrix relevant in... I'm sorry, you're worth a Citrix. Yeah, but because we're out there looking at all this noise. What is... Clarify all that noise and bring the signal to them. What's going on with Citrix? Certainly, if you look at Citrix and our growth, it still pertains. We're still growing. You can look at the financials. I mean, you can take a look at what independent third parties have said about and the industry analysts have said about all of the Citrix products, whether it's NetScaler, ZenApp, Zen Desktop, or Zen Mobile. Leaders in all categories with numerous awards around. It's a technical culture. Yeah, exactly. It's a technical culture. It's probably innovation. Focus on the innovation. Customers out there, CIOs, tech geeks. What's the innovation that you guys are doing? So fundamentally, what's driving us is the concept of what we call the software-defined workspace. The software-defined workspace is fundamentally built around the precip that today, when a user is accessing an application, they are going to be mobile. They're going to be accessing that application likely from at least three, if not more, devices over the course of the day. But ultimately, it's not a technology conversation. It is a user-centric organization. It is a user-centric issue because in the end, it's the user interacting with the workspace, not just the technology. So as we're innovating and bringing all of that together across our portfolio, both the front-end or the client-facing components that the users interact with on a daily basis, but also the back-end infrastructure, whether it's the networking infrastructure or the cloud platform infrastructure that's used to deliver that to the user, it's bringing all of that together in a cohesive portfolio that the user can deploy in their own data centers or in cloud data centers, or like you said, increasingly in a hybrid environment, a combination of the both. And the goal is, again, to make sure that the user's getting the same app experience, again, regardless of whether it's one of these, a phone, a tablet, or in the end, it's going to be all three of those, if not more, over the course of the day. And what's the current things that you guys are writing right now? Because the virtual workspace or the workspace is apps. I mean, we're like in a social world now. It's all about, like, collaboration, social business, stand up some of the cloud, pay as you go. It's a good strategy. It hangs together. What are the key milestones you guys are doing right now to say, okay, look it. We're knocking it out of the park. We're solid here. What are the key solid grounds that you guys are building on? Certainly. So, you know, if you look at ultimately what we see happening is, as a user interacting, I need to access virtualized apps out of my data centers. At certain cases, at certain times. At other times, I may need to access an entire virtualized, I may need to access an entirely virtualized desktop. At other times, it may be a native mobile application. But it may be a native mobile application that is delivered out of my company's data center. If you will, private mobile application. I'm going to need to have access to the data that is supporting all of those applications, regardless of how I'm accessing it. And I'm going to need it from a combination of trusted devices and untrusted devices across trusted networks and untrusted networks. So, when we look at our milestones, our milestones are all about bringing all of that together. And this is what we call the Citrix Workspaces Suite, which brings all of that package together. And again, the goal is that there's the user that's in, sitting in the middle of that circle of all of those services around it and making it transparent. They want a consumer experience. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, we appreciate it, Morgan. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Quickly, put the bumper sticker on the show. I'll give you the last word. Right. What's going on at Amazon? Why is it relevant? What's going on on the show? What's the big vibe here? So, obviously, the big vibe, I think, as we saw, was hybrid. We expect this coming year to be the year when enterprises really start to make the move on the production side of things and really start to bring things forward. We're tremendously excited about it. We're obviously very, very excited to have partnered with Amazon in going back several years. And we're looking forward to continuing to work with them to drive business going forward. All right, Morgan Gijard here from Citrix inside theCUBE. We'll be right back. More live coverage wall-to-wall here in Las Vegas for Amazon re-invent. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.