 Live from Vienna, Austria, it's theCUBE, covering .next Europe 2016, brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome to a special presentation of SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, here from the Nutanix .next conference in Vienna, Austria to Nutanix's first European conference. And it's actually the first time that theCUBE is broadcasting in Austria, so thank you to our audience for joining. I am thrilled to have as my opening guest, Christian Riley, first-time guest on the program, but some of them I've known for many years. Christian is currently the Vice President and CTO of Workspace Services with Citrix. Christian, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me, Stu. It's been a long time coming, thank you. Yeah, it's, we always say on theCUBE is, we like to pull those kind of smart notes that we know, take those conversations that everyone have in the industry and help broadcast them out there. So you were part of the morning keynote this morning. Well, we'll get to kind of the Citrix and Nutanix part, but I guess I wanted to start. You and I met when we were all starting to talk about this thing we call cloud. And there's always been the battle of, it's the enterprise way of doing things versus there's the cloud. There were many early on that it was like, there's only one true way to do it and it's public cloud. You work for a company, Citrix, that has an interesting play across public enterprise, lots of enterprise experience. You came from enterprise IT. You were doing some really cool stuff on the enterprise side and now on the vendor side. So just, yeah, maybe for our audience since you're the first time on, just give us kind of the thumbnail as to kind of what you're doing, what's your passions. Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, as you said, I came from enterprise IT and I think going back to 2006, 2007 was the first time that I came across this thing called the cloud. And it was kind of accidental. It was a refresh of the entire IT infrastructure of the company that I work for at the time. And we were looking just to find ways to do IT better. And so I guess we were pretty early in that. And of course it was very interesting to be in that because it was a significant paradigm shift. And then as you quite rightly said, there was this conversation about, is it public? Is it private? People with an investment in the public side wanted to continue to drive that message. People with a vested interest in making it private cloud. And I think over time, common sense prevailed. So when we used to talk of this a lot and say, what is it that we would advise people to do? And it's run the workload where it needs to be run, whether that's public or private or hybrid. I think common sense prevailed in the end to say, look, all these workloads are going to be around for a very long time. There's lots of different ways to deploy them. So pick the best one, either for performance, for cost, for data sovereignty, whatever that is. Yeah, I think back even the first couple of times I talked to you, it was that focus on what work needs to be done. Because the whole discussion of VDI, something near and dear to you, it wasn't about taking my Windows image and putting it somewhere else. It was how can I do something cool? You showed me early on, it's like, here's how we enable mobility and have a mobile workforce that might be in an industrial environment, needs to be able to handle a tablet and touch something with his nose to be able to get things done. What was the story you told me early on? So what are the challenges? What are the big things you've seen from kind of the enterprise? And how do they decide what goes where, what they own, what they don't? I mean, it's a big question. We don't have time to get into any of it, but all of it. Sure, it's interesting. I'm very privileged in the role of having Citrix now, because I talk to a lot of customers and I can talk from, obviously, my experience and knowing what we're doing on the product side going forward. And everybody, Stu, has got the same problem. No matter which industry we talk about, every customer, large or small, has got the same problem. They want to do more for less. And they're looking at ways to embrace new paradigms, whether that's different people coming into the workplace, consumerization, impacts of mobile, of course. They want to be able to do things bigger, better, faster. And what's really driving a lot of the conversation is simplicity. We talked today in the keynote about the fact that enterprise IT is hard. I think we've said all along that adding more technology for the sake of technology actually adds to a productivity paradox and things become more difficult over time. So people are beginning to reset and looking at simplicity and saying, what is it that we really need to do? So there's a famous phrase that Clayton Christensen has about jobs to be done and really understanding what the jobs to be done are and then taking a systematic approach to delivery. Yeah, I love that Clayton Christensen piece of it. We've been, since I joined Wikibon, it was understand what's core to your business and also understand what you suck at. It was like, we wrote years ago, my CTO wrote about mega data centers and said, really the people that want to own data centers, they're called REITs. They're like real estate investment groups. Even the likes of Amazon and Google don't own every single data center they have. They're understanding the land of it, the cement, all that piece of it, certain expertises. So it's a complicated world, but from our standpoint, we look at public cloud, like two thirds of that today from our numbers is SaaS. We say, if you can SaaSify something and just focus on kind of what you need, that's great. Then there's certain things that probably make sense to go public cloud and then there's certain things that we're kind of left with. Is that, how do you think about it? How do your customers think about it? So it's interesting, I think what's happening on the customer side, certainly, is that the line of business people are becoming much more vocal in terms of driving the demand. And so just a few years ago, I know from where I came from and then in talking to customers, it was all about replacing homegrown apps with commercial off the shelf. And that was an on-premise discussion because a lot of applications in SaaS were not either ready for prime time or there were concerns around security, the usual things. I think over the last 18 months, I've seen a huge shift in strategies from customers. They're adopting SaaS first, wherever they can. And that's the typical things that you would see, your CRM and the travel and expense management, HR management. But that's really beginning to pick up pace, not necessarily just purely from a SaaS perspective, but bringing different concerns now about the overall workload. So you can't pick an industry paper up now without reading about another malware attack or another breach or another ransomware. So the more that the applications actually move to the browser, the bigger the concern is because of course, as you know, one of the most obvious target points for introducing malware is through the browser. So as these things move and efficiencies kind of gain in certain areas, more concerns, and it's not the concerns necessarily about moving the data to SaaS. It's the concern about how much of that application landscape is then consumed in a browser. So people are taking a very considered approach to not being scared anymore about security from where to put the data, but being concerned about how to consume the apps. All right, so Nutanix has this term they call enterprise cloud. About a year ago, Wikibon, we came out, we called it true private cloud. And the basic premise of it was most of what we've been talking about in the enterprise for on-premises environment, it's not cloud. It was virtualization, virtualization plus, it did not give us kind of the operational efficiencies, automation, obviously the thing we've been chasing for decades, but what we were doing in the past and what people were calling that private cloud didn't really cut it. So what's your take on that? What's your take on what you hear Nutanix talking enterprise cloud? We talked to our friends that have been talking about cloud for a long time. Does enterprise cloud hold water in your mind and maybe poke at that a little bit? Yeah, I think it does. Obviously I was a big advocate of private cloud from my background and my experience, but realistically I think if you as a customer or as an IT shop can find efficiencies in delivering services to your end users, whether you call that cloud or not, it's academic in many ways. I think if you can drive the efficiencies, you can drive things around automation, orchestration, and you can drive simplicity. The Nutanix guys today talk a lot about this one-click simplicity. I think that really has been the piece that's missing. Obviously the economics are slightly different. Do I rent versus do I own from a public and private perspective? But I think what they've done in terms of addressing the one-click is actually really powerful. I think the next thing that logically follows there and some of the things that we talked about today is the workload itself. Now not just VDI or virtual app delivery, but the general purpose workload. So I think the next frontier of that for people who want to remain in the position of deploying on-premises, then we've got to get over that on providing applications and workloads to the mix. I think it's a different conversation in public cloud to an extent, unless you're talking about migrations, which I still think is a very touchy subject. Not many customers I talk to are actually doing full-on migrations, but they are choosing public cloud infrastructures to build net new applications. So again, it's back to this thing about what are you trying to do? What are the jobs to be done? Can you find the best efficiency? Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I've talked about is when I first got involved in virtualization, gosh, almost 15 years ago, it was, oh wait, my operating system or my server might be going out of rev, but I don't want to change that application. So let me virtualize it. I can hold on to that. Changing that application, that's the long haul in the tent for the enterprise. We've talked for a bunch of years now about digital transformation, cloud native. Is there a hard transformation for companies? Changing those processes, changing the applications. But if I could simplify my base level, I kind of like what I heard from Nutanix this morning, is they said maybe the term chief Amazon officer isn't right, but saying I really need to simplify a piece of the environment, the stuff that we know we've been spending way too much on for years to try to run around, fix things, optimizing it, all our wonderful geek knobs and everything. If we start by homogenizing a certain piece of it and simplifying it, it will free me up to work on the things for, as you said in your keynote, that digital transformation really moving the business forward. Sure. You know, it's interesting, Shia, as I mentioned about that line of business demand. You know, the people that I talked to in customers who are driving digital transformation are not the typical Citrix customers that we would sell into. So they're not IT ops guys, they're not infrastructure managers. You know, these are guys who are in the business some way, you know, reporting to a chief digital officer or a chief strategy officer to really drive the business forward. So I think in line with that, as well as the move to SaaS, I think what we're seeing is a trend in smaller, more lightweight applications that are very process specific, as opposed to historical applications that have been very function specific. So you've got the huge monolithic applications versus these very small lightweight apps. And of course they do drive a very different application delivery paradigms. All right, so Christian, let's dig into where Citrix fits from the application standpoint. I think the first time we got heavily involved from the cube at Citrix was back in 2011, we said, you know, Citrix is kind of three main businesses gone through a lot of changes. A lot of people don't understand kind of where Citrix fits in. Maybe, you know, it's workspace services. What's that cover? What doesn't that cover? Where does cloud fit into that whole picture? Yeah, okay, great question. So, first of all, yes, there has been a lot of change. You know, we've got a new CEO who came in about nine months ago now, Kirill Tatarunov, came from Microsoft, so it's great for us to be able to rekindle that Microsoft relationship at a very, very high level. We actually, at the Nutanix Vega show, we had Mark Templeton on, so it was great. So we had a little bit of a history there, but yeah. Yeah, so, you know, we've been partners with Microsoft. Probably the most recognized partnership in the entire industry. So having Kirill come back in and rekindle that has been fantastic. You know, some of the things that we've announced strategically with Microsoft are really speaking to the depth of that relationship that we have. But you know, Citrix are across the board. You know, we took a look at the portfolio. You know, like any technology company, you have to be able to innovate and you have to be able to recognize that maybe sometimes acquisitions that you make that were made at a point in time for a specific reason, maybe don't work out for whatever reason it is. So, you know, we took a long hard look and it's very difficult to hold a mirror up. You know, there's a lot of emotion, there's a lot of religion involved in people's views of the technology itself, but you've got to take a really hard look at it and say, you know, the things that we're actually spending money on from an R&D perspective, are they meeting what we said they were going to meet when we did the acquisitions or we created that stream of technology? And in many cases, they weren't. So, we rationalized the portfolio, we focused on what we call the core now. So, in workspace services, it's made up primarily of Zen App, Zen Desktop, Zen Mobile and Zen Server. And then there's a couple of other pieces around that that are auxiliary to those. And then, of course, there's the Netscaler business, which is a huge business in and of itself. And then there was the go-to meeting business, of course, the go-to business. And as you know, we made a recent announcement to couple that business with LogMeIn. So really what you've got now is workspace services, which serves the core app delivery functions, and then the Netscaler business, which is serving the service provider and the typical ADC market. Okay, and now there's been a renaming to have Citrix Cloud, maybe explain what that is, where that lives. Yeah, so Citrix Cloud has been really interesting. About 18 months ago, you know, we launched the first version of it, and we didn't really make a huge fanfare, you know, because we looked at it and from dealing with a lot of customers, and they said, you know, everybody loves Citrix. Every single customer we talked to, and I was a big Citrix customer for a long time, everybody loves the technology, but I think there's a recognition that maybe it's a little bit too complicated, you know, it's hard to install, it's hard to operate. So we sat back and said, what if we could abstract all that complexity, but leave the choice of where to run the desktops or the app delivery to the customer? So whether that's public cloud, whether that's private cloud, any hypervisor, let's let the customers decide, because they know, back to my point earlier, about jobs to be done, they know where the workloads need to run, but all this management infrastructure, let's abstract that, and let's manage that from a Citrix perspective so that our customers can focus on exactly what you said to you, which is, you know, raising the bar internally, freeing up resources, and getting on with things that really matter. So the Citrix cloud strategy originally was for us to abstract that control plane. So think about it as a cloud-based control plane, and then the data plane is up to the customer. And then at Synergy this year, we announced a strategic move to begin to offer the full suite as a Citrix service. So that's, the sweet spot we see at that is really sort of the mid-market initially, where people want anywhere between, say, 300 and 500 desktops. So running that in a Citrix cloud as a full service makes a ton of sense with all the net-scaler gateway functionality from a security perspective. And of course keeping the choice which we had originally, which is, you know, where do you want to run the workloads? Do you want to run it in Citrix cloud, or do you want to run it on-premises or any other public cloud infrastructure? So that's always been the beauty of Citrix around choice, you know, giving the customer the choice of where to run. And we don't want to lock people in. You know, it's just, the world of locking people in at the vendors is long gone. And for that public cloud version though, it is sitting on Microsoft Azure, correct? It is, yeah. So at Synergy we announced a strategic partnership, again, as part of the renewed effort with Microsoft, that we would deliver all our cloud services on Azure as the preferred strategic cloud. And so that does a couple of things. One, it gives us great opportunity like we announced to take over what was Microsoft's Azure Remote App and turn that into what we've now called an App Express. We have an Azure 10 VDI offering which will be 100% Citrix Microsoft delivered. And that's for larger enterprise customers who have EAs and a subscription advantage. And then of course it gives us a great opportunity to be a more strategic partner with Microsoft over and above what we do today with RDS. But the customers that come in and avail of services from Citrix cloud then have the gateway to all Azure services as they begin to extend into their digital transformation. As you mentioned, a very deep and long partnership with Microsoft. Citrix also does partner with the other cloud solutions. I remember when Amazon came out with their kind of virtual desktop offering, there was a really big Citrix booth. There's a smaller booth now, but Amazon's still a partner for it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, huge partner, you know, on the net scale aside as well. But yeah, I mean, you know, we've had reference architectures for run-ins and apps and desktop either in the Citrix cloud model or purely 100% on Amazon for, you know, many, many years. We have a great relationship with all the public cloud providers. Yeah, Google, IBM, Oracle, all across the board. Absolutely. Anything, it's interesting. You know, you kind of think if, you know, Microsoft is the largest of your partnerships, you know, Microsoft's done a real good job. They have a number of applications. They have the partnership with you, kind of a natural affinity for many applications. Amazon has, you know, certain applications that they're very good at, very strong on the developer piece, you know, Google has their analytics piece. Do you see them fragmenting in that space or, you know, will we end up with kind of the big three and everybody else and it'll be a little bit more different? Yeah, I mean, if you remember, when we first started talking, you know, every telco was trying to scramble to build an infrastructure as a service, right? And then people realized, look, you know, the jigs up here, right? It's going to be, you know, the guys that you talked about, it's going to be Amazon, it's going to be Azure, it's going to be Google, it's going to be IBM SoftLay, it's going to be Oracle. And that's pretty much it, right? And I think, you know, the Oracle cloud will drive certain workloads that are in Oracle's sweet spot. Microsoft, of course, really after bringing all their enterprise customers into the cloud era, Google for very different reasons, you know, they found a very nice sweet spot. They were a little bit late on the infrastructure side to market, as you know, but, you know, the huge opportunities in Google for big data analytics, you know, the machine learning, the things that people are looking at in sort of the mode too, as Gartner would call it, of digital transformation. So we actually sit in a very interesting position, sort of in the middle of all that and being able to be, you know, a broker, if you like, to those services. So one of the things we're working on very, very strongly at the moment is, I think, called Workspace IoT. So I can give you 30 seconds on that. So, you know, we acquired a company called Octoblu about 18 months ago and it's been in somewhat of an incubation mode inside Citrix until fairly recently. You know, everybody was scrambling to figure out IoT. It's the next big frontier, you know, guys like Intel saying, we're going to be an IoT company. We're not going to do, you know, server and laptop chips anymore. We're going to be an IoT company. And so, you know, the great thing about what we've got from the Octoblu technology is it really enables any device to become IoT aware. So it does all the negotiations around protocol. It will just allow you to very simply connect anything to an IoT-style network. So if you add that to some of the other technologies we've got in Zen Mobile for managing devices as if they were mobile phones or tablets, you know, for securing those transactions through the Net Scaler. So you begin to see a very interesting picture of where Citrix fits in IoT. But we're calling it Workspace because we firmly believe that we can bring some unique value to our existing customers rather than try and build an entire IoT business on the side. Before we run out of time, we want to make sure we bring in kind of the Citrix, Nutanix partnership. You've got a cool shirt on, you know, highlighting, you know, what's happening there. But yeah, where does it fit? Why, if you're so heavily on the application level, does Nutanix even matter? Yeah, so it's a great question, you know. I mean, hyper-converged, as we heard in the keynote today, I mean, every technology partner that we work with has got a hyper-converged play. And they're at different stages of development, different stages of go-to-market, different stages of maturity. But you know, we've had a great relationship with Nutanix from the very early days. And as I said in the keynote, I think the key differentiator is that we have an engineering level relationship. So, you know, we don't just do reference architectures, we have groups working together day to day. And you know, some of the things that we talked about a little bit, or Sunil talked about, around Zen server as an example. So, you know, we find it strategically important inside Citrix to keep investing in Zen server. It's a fantastic hypervisor. It's part of the Zen family, as we now call it. So Zen desktop runs better on Zen server than any other hypervisor. And think about that in terms of workload management for hyper-converged. You're going to want to avail of things like GPU virtualization. You're going to want to avail of the deep, you know, connections that we have with Nutanix to be able to do things like offloading all our typical Zen storage functions into the DSF from Nutanix. So it's critical that we have that deep relationship. You know, and frankly, it's a great sweet spot for VDI. You know, I know that the Nutanix guys won't thank me for saying that. They're obviously an enterprise cloud company. But you know, what we see over and over again is VDI. And you know, what better way than to have a partnership with these guys? Absolutely. Or Christian, want to give you the last word? You know, just you look at the marketplace, what's been exciting you, give us the final word. Yeah, so I think we're entering this new world of application interaction. And you know, I think about, I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, what is it that customers really do or really want? And they want information. However it's delivered, however they get it, they want it faster, they want it more accurate than ever before. So when we think in Citrix context about where this is going, when we're talking about, I think all the workspace of the future. So bringing together physical and virtual assets, but also thinking about how to deliver apps and the information in those apps differently. So, you know, we're focusing a lot in the lab's environment on looking at natural language process, in looking at AI. You know, a couple of videos we put out recently show some interactions in healthcare, where as a patient you can actually talk to a virtual assistant that acts essentially as a physician. So those kinds of things we're thinking about, how to augment the application delivery that we have today and figure out what it means for tomorrow. All right, so Christian, you haven't logged in a bunch of years. People want to find out more. How did they find out about you? Yeah, so the citrix.com forward slash blogs. There's a few blogs in there, so CTO futures. And yeah, we're going to be ramping that up with a lot more noise in the coming weeks. All right, well, Christian Riley, so glad we finally got to have you on theCUBE. We'll be back with lots more here from the Nutanix conference in Vienna. You're watching theCUBE.