 from the Wind Resort in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back everybody. Jim Luna is here, he's the Senior Director of Global Alliances at Citrix. Jim, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having me today. So yeah, we were just talking off camera. Citrix, we love Citrix. We did Citrix Synergy back in 2011. Great show, Mark, amazing speaker, and just coming off Synergy, so a lot of action. Absolutely, we just had a fantastic Synergy here in Vegas as well, about a month ago, and it was an opportunity to present our new CEO, Kareel Teterinoff, leading the organization, but also the refocus of Citrix, having had some changes recently, right? And the focus on our core products, and desktops, and app, share file, Netscaler, as well as some of the surrounding products that enable that business like Sense Server and Citrix Lifecycle Management as well as Citrix Cloud. So can you talk a little bit more about that, because back when we were doing Synergy, it was all about, so what's now called end-user computing, but virtual desktop was the sort of term, and everybody hated that term, but so you've evolved that. You guys are a leader in that space. You've got tremendous SaaS business. Talk about the update, or give us the update, on your business in a little bit more detail, if you would, what's happening at Citrix? So our apps and desktop delivery business continues to be a strong business for us, right? Thus to say also that our networking business is growing quite strong. Netscaler as an ADC in the marketplace is very robust, it continues to gain market share out there as well. From a Zen desktop and Zen app perspective, we've had tremendous feature development in the last year. In fact, the number of features I think we've implemented in the last year almost outpaced what we've done in the last recent years. There was tremendous reinvigoration in the product set and the product line, right? As well as continuing to build out both our channel initiatives and our partner initiatives to make that ecosystem more robust. So talk about, go ahead Stu. I was just going to say, here at the Nutanix show, when most people think about Nutanix, VDI is kind of the early use case, and Nutanix has an interesting relationship with VDI because they've got a robust business, lots of customers, but they go out of their way to prove that they're much more than just that piece of the environment, general server virtualization. So can you talk about the relationship? Where does that fit VDI and beyond? Absolutely, we have a great relationship with Nutanix. We in fact have a strategic alliance with Nutanix, right? And it goes back a few years, right? But it hasn't been until recently that we've made more pronounced announcements of some of the things that we're doing, right? A lot of that centers around technology innovation, technology integration, and bringing our teams together so that our respective technologies combine, provide greater value to the customers, right? Some of the things that in fact we announced a center of synergy was this concept of an instant on VDI with Nutanix, right? The idea behind that was to really drive to a sweet spot price of a sub $500 cost per user that includes the infrastructure, the software license, and the endpoint, right? So together with Nutanix and the instant on VDI, we were able to actually come out with a solution and offering, essentially, that almost provides that easy button for the customer and the channel to be able to take out to market, right? To enable those VDI deployments more easily adopted in the marketplace, right? That typically starts at a three-note configuration from Nutanix, 100 users per box, so you have a 300 user starting box, and then it scales as you go. So you're talking about a partnership with Deeper Integration, so John Furrier always talks about Barney deals. You know, I love you, you love me, let's do a press release, and then nothing ever happens. This is not a Barney deal, right? So what makes a good partnership generally and specifically the partnership with Nutanix? What makes it deep? What makes it substantive? I think it's multiple pieces of that, right? One is really having that product alignment and integration where we're aligned in terms of what we're trying to bring out to the marketplace, but also having the execution and follow-through to see that product into the marketplace through the alignment organization of our respective field sales organizations, as well as our channel, right? There's tremendous interest both in our channel, our field sales organization, as well as from Citrix corporate business units in our alliance organization to drive a cohesive message to the marketplace, right, in terms of what we do. So shared vision, you know, pull through demand from the channel and from the Salesforce. What about engineering? Is it, does it get down to that level in this case? Absolutely, some of the things, the fact that, you know, we recently announced here today was about the integration of MCS, machine integration services on, on, send desktop through Nutanix and enabling that whole process to be a lot easier, right? That's one of those pieces where Nutanix has differentiation and unique advantage of others in terms of the engineering and the integration that we've done to make that one-click provisioning and scaling process. What's the pricing model for the offering? So with Instanon VDI, it's a $500 price point. It's $415, which essentially includes the infrastructure. It includes the Citrix license. That's per user, right? Per user, correct. As well as an endpoint, right? And one of the things we announced at Citrix Energy was a Raspberry Pi endpoint, which is a $100 endpoint device that brings that, collectively, that price point below $500 as a whole. That becomes the sweet spot, particularly for mid-market companies that are looking to get started, that do not have a lot of the IT management expertise, that want to be able to deploy it rather quickly and easily, that want to be able to manage that environment, right? Those are all the aspects that the solution provides. Together with the technology and the software enablement that Nutanix provides with Prism and be able to manage send desktop through that management console, making that environment easier for that end user to adopt, deploy, manage, and support. Jim, what have you seen in terms of some of the business impacts? Maybe you could talk about some examples, maybe some customers, I know it's early, but... Yeah, no, in fact, though, we've had a few deployments already. Some of the ones that I'm able to talk about was St. Luke's Hospital, where is a large VDI deployment that's happening. They actually started small, right? They started a very small configuration environment, but as they saw that the environment was stable and it was providing the right performance, they scaled to thousands and thousands of send desktop environments today, right? Another one would be Yahoo Japan, right? Has they deployed a synapse configuration as well? So, this is some of the initial examples. There's very many others, some of them which are not able to talk about publicly, but we found that the interest out there from a channel and the customer perspective has been tremendous, and our channel partners are actually very receptive to working together to bring the solutions out to market. Any, I mean, are there particular industries that pick up on that solution? What lends themself well? Yeah, good question. Some of the leading ones are certainly healthcare, right? Education, a lot of education and engineering schools, for example, are adopting VDI to enable their students to be able to log in and have access to those desktops, right? Certainly financial services is another one because of the security aspects that are involved with that, similar with healthcare, right? So some of those, and government would be the other one that certainly, because of similar considerations with regards to security, government is another one of those major players that has been leading the adoption of the market. And early criticisms, of course, were the ability to replicate the end user experience, the cost factors. I mean, this goes back almost 10 years ago now. Those are gone, right? I mean, and especially with mobile, you're really able to create, I mean, I've seen demos that are just awesome, right? I mean, to create that desktop experience or that laptop or that mobile experience, native. We know, absolutely. I mean, certainly the technology's come a long ways from a citrus perspective in terms of net new feature functionality, right? But also from an infrastructure perspective on Nutanix. And then don't forget we have Net Scaler, which are our ADC controller that really has access to our ICA protocol and send desktop and fine tune and optimizes those packets, right? So that the end customer or the end user is receiving the best experience possible. All that together we bring part of our broader portfolio to market. So when you talk to customers about this offering and the partnership around this event, what are they asking you? What are their, you know, Colombo questions? What are their skeptical questions? What's the dialogue like? You know, a lot of the customers, especially here at the show, are interested in deploying VDI. And their first question is how do I get started, right? What's the, almost what the easy button is to get started? And they're typically looking at a small deployment, you know, 300 users to get started, right? Which I think it validates what we're doing with the instant on VDI solution, right? And that that, the whole idea of that offering is to make that easier for the customer to adopt and scale, right? But a lot of those questions are about how do I get started? What are the pieces that I need to be considering? What are my users' considerations, right? What are the needs from an application perspective, et cetera? Any highlights from .next you could share? Fantastic momentum. I think, you know, the fact that Citrix has been a prominent player and a partner throughout the event and certainly at the keynotes this morning, it is a testament to our partnership, right? And so it goes to the power of our partnership together. Tremendous show. It's great to see the momentum and the excitement and the number of people that are here this year. And we can only expect this to grow and go even bigger in the next year. Excellent. Well, what should we look for from Citrix in the next, you know, six months, nine months, 12 months? Well, we're still continuing to innovate together with Nutanix, right? On the engineering front as well as on the commercial side. So keep a lookout for further things to come, probably in the latter half of the year. Great. All right, Jim, Luna, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Appreciate it, thank you. All right, keep it right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from .next. We'll be right back.