Virtual Coffee Break with Sridhar Mullapudi

Yeah sure. You guys can hear me okay? Absolutely good. Thanks Pat. Yeah, so I had product management for our workspace and cloud products and cloud services, broadly speaking. As you said, it does have an umbrella of cloud services, platform or workspace service, individual services like Virtual Apps and Desktops, endpoint management, gateway products — it's a plethora of products and services. Obviously our strategy has always been to build a platform in cloud service; that's kind of how we bring value to our customers and solutions, as well as a broader community who can extend the platform for us. So that's kind of my responsibility. I've been with Citrix a little over 20 years. I was in engineering for six years, I think six or seven years something like that, and in the last 14 or so years I've been in product management. I've been very lucky enough to pretty much work on every product or technology I own or touch, so pretty lucky I guess in that sense.

Yeah absolutely. And Workspace with Intelligence as well, which is obviously — I'm assuming everybody's familiar with the acquisition we made a few years back — that kind of covers the integrations and the business workflows and other things that are built on Workspace platform as part of the extensibility we have. Absolutely. Wow.

Yeah, it's a really good question, Sonny. I mean, if you take a step back and look over the 20 years, already the marketing names and the terminology and things we call might be different, but at the end of the day, we provide that kind of secure workspace infrastructure for delivery of different types of applications — whether it's virtual applications and desktops, or SaaS and web applications, mobile applications, or integrated workflows and business processes which, if you think about it, kind of tie different apps together in the back to create them for. And so with security, choice, flexibility as core differentiation, that has been true for almost the past four years if not more. Obviously the technology has evolved, the ecosystem has evolved, applications have evolved, the work has evolved — all these things have evolved and we kind of had to evolve as well, both from a company perspective (not just business models and other stuff) but also product and technology perspective. Using cloud as a platform, using workspace as a platform, building these solutions with the platform mindset, and not just internal platform, I'm talking platform with the uppercase P, like external platform and things like that. So it's been an evolution, but we provide that secure workspace platform for the last 20 years. You never called it workspace ten years back, but it's kind of the same concept.

Really good question, Pat. I would say yes, absolutely. To get into the details: The cloud as a service offerings journey started a long time back, almost three to five years back depending on technology. We saw a huge transition in 2019 as well. What happened in March created two things: the crisis phase. Everybody on-prem doubled down because you can't do transformations in a matter of days. Customers in cloud exploded; a one-year project became a two-week project. So a split happened: on-prem customers increased, cloud customers increased. And when I say cloud, it's always hybrid. Then six months later, with the new normal, customers who were pausing their plans now say they need a deal plan. We've seen that in our own cloud adoption and subscribers, some of this is public information. So the split kind of combined together into everybody wanting to move to the cloud, obviously at different paces. This put a sense of urgency for us to simplify tools for migration, new capabilities, certifications, and compliance. We had to hit the accelerator pedal because we didn't hope this digital and cloud transformation would have happened so fast, but it did after COVID, especially after the three to six months.

Yeah, it's a really good question. One, the traditional deployments that we've seen over the past five years I think they continued accelerating especially after the crisis phase is done. The second thing which was very interesting we started noticing is customers just want everything to be quote unquote managed as a service offering. They basically say 'I don't want to manage anything, not this piece, not that piece, not that infrastructure, everything needs to be managed as a service.' At the same time they want to have the same control, security, and compliance that they've been used to in their on-prem data centers residing in their own country and geo. So we've actually seen new requirements come up where they want a country-specific cloud or geo-specific cloud, and that has to do with the geopolitical climate and other reasons. So those kinds of things are starting to happen, and that's another new trend we've definitely seen. I think you've seen it with other partners like Microsoft or Google or others. So it has been an industry trend and it goes beyond technology, why that trend is happening.

Yeah sure. I think one — fundamentally as I said, our strategy has always been to provide that secure workspace delivery infrastructure, whatever terminology you want to call it, workspace platform and other stuff. And I would say, Sonny, there's been a tremendous need from our customer base to really accelerate a lot of our roadmap, help with cloud transition. That's a huge part of it. In fact, I would argue some things that we said maybe two years are becoming like 'how do we come up with a plan that's one year?' And obviously publicly we talked about how much Citrix is investing in R&D, engineering, headcount, product account, sales, everything else, so that's great news. So that's happening. Second, I would say in some ways we still need to constantly do a better job integrating some of our portfolios into a broader workspace story, whether it's networking, SD-WAN, ADC, and the workspace. Sometimes our customers and partners for right reasons look at them as two things that are integrated together, and so we have to make it really seamless, analytics bringing those things together, management and control plane, how you manage all the data traffic. So you'll see that acceleration happening. Obviously I thought Pat's question on new requirements — compliance requirements because of cloud, geo-specific performance coming in — all those are things that are going to keep coming. There's a lot of innovation coming as well, organic and inorganic, but I won't be able to talk too much about it just because it's not...

Absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, at the end of the day we provide that infrastructure. While there are simple solutions customers can do, they heavily depend upon our partner community — not just our traditional CSFs but also the new GSIs we are onboarding. We absolutely need the partner community because we don't live in an island. Customers have to take our infrastructure and connect with the Microsoft stack, Google stack, Amazon stack, VMware, or other stacks to integrate well. So partners are crucial for making that happen, including when moving from on-prem to cloud — the design changes, how you think about design and architecture, security, compliance, SLAs — those things change. Thanks to us doing this along with some of our partners over the past three to five years, we have that knowledge. Now it's about scaling, so you'll see a lot of enablement and readiness going into next year with our partners. As we see more adoption driving in cloud, that's an opportunity. Once you have customers who want to grow and go to cloud as well as grow in the cloud, it creates an opportunity base for our partners to build other services, integrations, and other things. The type of work is going to change, but that's been changing for the past few years.

Yeah absolutely. I talk platform as a broad platform and I think there's a lot of opportunities created. One we talked about: opportunity for partners to help design this for their customers, help with transition and migration. That's one opportunity. An opportunity for GSIs and partners who have scale because they build complete solutions for customers at really large scale takeouts, putting other technologies together to solve real-world business problems that are not possible just with Citrix because we need other technologies together as well. So that's one. We have partners who help extend the workspace broadly speaking, in terms of extensibility, customization, whether vertical-specific or other needs. That's another opportunity for partners. Some partners play all of them. It's definitely a huge opportunity and I strongly believe it's going to grow heavily as we go into next year and beyond.

I think I want to be pleasantly surprised. In the sense that I want the community to take the platform, make it their own, extend it in ways, stretch it in ways that we might not even have imagined, and kind of put good tension back into the product and engineering organization. Not just what is working and what is not — I'm not talking about just quality or debugging tools or how easy it is to build, that's obviously a core requirement. How fast you can go from zero to one is important, but also things we've never thought about. That's the beauty of community. I think we all want to be pleasantly surprised, saying 'Hey, why can't we do this and this customer need?' and feel 'Wow, we never thought about it that way but it's interesting' and bring that back into it. So that's kind of what I'm looking forward to. I think it's one thing to detail the extensibility layers we have and the use cases and build the tools and they do it, but the real step is maybe they'll surprise us and tell us the things we haven't thought about.

Yeah, Pat, just because of our legacy and huge base of customers who deploy Citrix when they say Virtual Apps and Desktops technologies, using other technologies and networking together. For most customers, especially medium to larger ones, their journey through Citrix could have been to Virtual Apps and Desktops. So in that sense, the first step for them is 'How do I transition this to the cloud?' Basically, go to Citrix Cloud, to the service. I think it still provides the flexibility and choice they need: 'I want to put the workloads where the applications are.' That's part of that transition. Instead of traditionally using Storefront to launch applications, go to the workspace service as step one because that gives the foundation. I think that gives the foundation for every customer to modernize and trade up. I actually call it 'modernize and trade up.' It gives them a step to modernize their infrastructure and operations and trade up to a better experience in the cloud, more value. Once they do it, it pays off dividends 10, 20, 30 times over the next years because now you've moved to Citrix Cloud and workspace as a platform. From there, turning on services, building extensibility for your customers becomes so much easier. So for me, step one would be helping your customers modernize their infrastructure and move to cloud, just to be on the latest and greatest. It's so much better in terms of quality and other aspects. Granted, I understand there's work for us to do in terms of features and others, ongoing roadmap, but it's the right path for them to first transition to cloud and workspace and then tap into all other new things they can do for their customers.

Open source route for Workspaces? It's an interesting question. I think internally we talked about making it easy for somebody to start a workspace without having to rely on their ID — how do you self-start it with a really simple, drive-by kind of experience. So yeah, we're definitely thinking about that and building a few things. Again, not under NDA, so I can't talk too much about it, but we're thinking in that direction. It's not BYO workspace; it has to be administered through the company, which is what it is today. That's one. Regarding open source, I think there are certain tools and things we can leverage, we can contribute back. Obviously extensibility of workspace and other things — we kind of contribute some things back into the community today, but there's definitely something we probably could do more. We're maybe early in the exploration right now on both those areas: how do you enable somebody to get started in a workspace without their ID, as well as what is your view on open sourcing some aspects of it. That could be things like certain integrations could be open-sourced on GitHub where you take it, expand, and use it as you want. So there's active work going on there. I wouldn't say anything completely finalized and ready to go, but that work is already going on in different parts of it. And Citrix has a broad culture of open source, thanks to XenSource and Citrix (?) and everything else, so we kind of know how to handle open source community and build the community.

Yeah, I think the big ask beyond all the things we talked about is basically take this to their customers. The magic happens when technology and customer use cases come together. That's where partners can not only help customers and help us build the right solutions, but also shape the product roadmap. That will be the most interesting thing for me: go back, deploy these with customers, understand the challenges from both customer perspective and our own product and platform perspective — what it does, what it cannot do — and bring that feedback back to us. Really in some way influence the product roadmap. That would be one of my asks, as they take this into their customer base. So we're really looking for this community to be a two-way street. As much as we bring information on technology and the roadmap, we're really looking for that feedback on how it's working now and where we should be going next.