Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Infrastructure as destiny — How Purdue builds an IT support fabric for big data-enabled IoT

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer IT infrastructure thought leadership case study explores how Purdue University has created a strategic IT environment to support dynamic workload requirements.

We'll now hear how Purdue extended a research and development IT support infrastructure to provide a common and "operational credibility" approach to support myriad types of compute demands by end users and departments.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To describe how a public university is moving toward IT as a service, please join Gerry McCartney, Chief Information Officer at Purdue University in Indiana. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: When you're in the business of IT infrastructure, you need to predict the future. How do you close the gap between what you think will be demanded of your infrastructure in a few years and what you need to put in place now?

McCartney: A lot of the job that we do is based on trust and people believing that we can be responsive to situations. The most effective way to show that right now is to respond to people’s issues today. If you can do that effectively, then you can present a case that you can take a forward-looking perspective and satisfy what you and they anticipate to be their needs.

McCartney
I don’t think you can make forward-looking statements credibly, especially to a somewhat cynical group of users, if you're not able to satisfy today’s needs. We refer to that as operational credibility. I don’t like the term operational excellence, but are you credible in what you provide? Do people believe you when you speak?

Gardner: We hear an awful lot about digital disruption in other industries. We see big examples of it in taxi cabs, for example, or hospitality. Is there digital disruption going on at university campuses as well, and how would you describe that?

McCartney: A university you can think of as consisting of three main lines of business, two of which are our core activities, of teaching students, educating students; and then producing new knowledge or doing research. The third is the business of running that business, and how do you do that. A very large infrastructure is built up around that third leg, for a variety of reasons.

But if we look at the first two, research in particular, which is where we started, this concept of the third leg of science has been around for some time now. It used to be just experimentation and theory creations. You create a theory, then you do an experiment with some test tubes or something like this, or grow a crop in the field. Then, you would refine your theory and you would continue in that kind of dyadic mode of just going backward and forward.

Third leg of science

That was all right until we wanted to crash lorries into walls or to fly a probe into the sun. You don’t get to do that a thousand times, because you can’t afford it, or it’s too big or too small. Simulation has now become what we refer to as the third leg of science.

Slightly more than 35 percent of our actual research now uses high-performance computing (HPC) in some key parts of it to produce results, then shape the theory formulation, and the actual experimentation, which obviously still goes on.

Around teaching, we've seen for-profit universities, and we've seen massive open online courses (MOOCs) more recently. There's a strong sense that the current mode of instructional delivery cannot stay the same as it has been for the last hundreds of years and that it’s ripe for reform.

Indeed, my boss at Purdue, Mitch Daniels, would be a clear and vibrant voice in that debate himself. To go back to my earlier comments, our job there is to be able to provide credible alternatives, credible solutions to ideas as they emerge. We still haven’t figured that out collectively as an industry, but that’s something that is in the forefront of a lot of peoples’ minds.

Gardner: Suffice to say that information technology will play a major role in that, whatever it is.

McCartney: It’s hard to imagine a solution that isn’t actually completely dependent upon information technology, for at least its delivery, and maybe for more than that.
Right now, our principal requirement is around research computing, because we have to put the storage close to the compute. That's just a requirement of the technology.

Gardner: So, high-performance computing is a bedrock for the simulations needed in modern research. Has that provided you with a good stepping stone toward more cloud-based, distributed computing-based fabric, and ultimately composable infrastructure-based environments?

McCartney: Indeed it has. I can go back maybe seven or eight years at our place, and we had close to 70 data centers on our campus. And by a data center, I mean a room with at least 200-amp supply, and at least 30 tons of additional cooling, not just a room that happens to have some computers in it. I couldn't possibly count how many of them there are now. Those stand-alone data centers are almost all gone now, thanks to our community cluster program, and the long game is that we probably won't have much hardware on our campus at some point a few years from now.

Right now, our principal requirement is around research computing, because we have to put the storage close to the compute. That's just a requirement of the technology.

In fact, many of our administrative services right now are provided by cloud providers. Our users are completely oblivious to that, but we have no on-premises solution at all. We're not doing travel, expense reimbursement and a variety of back-office things on our campus at all.
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That trend is going to continue, and the forcing function there is that I can't spend enough on security to protect all the assets I have. So, rather than spend even more on security and fail to provide that completely secure environment, it's better to go to somebody who can provide that environment.

Data-compute link

Gardner: What sort of an infrastructure software environment do you think will give you that opportunity to make the right choices when you decide on-prem versus cloud, even for those intensive workloads that require a tight data and compute link?

McCartney: The worry for any CIO is that the only thing I have that's mine is my business data. Anything else -- web services, network services -- I can buy from a vendor. What nobody else can provide me are my actual accounts, if you wish to just choose a business term, but that can be research information, instructional information, or just regular bookkeeping information.

When you come into a room of a new solution, you're immediately looking at the exit door. In other words, when I have to leave, how easy, difficult, or expensive is it going to be to extract my information back from the solution?

That drives a huge part of any consideration, whether it's cloud or on-prem or whether it's proprietary or open code solution. When this product dies, the company goes bust, we lose interest in it, or whatever -- how easy, expensive, difficult is it for me to extract my business data back from that environment, because I am going to need to do that?

I'm quite happy for everybody else to knock the bumps out to the road for me, and I'll be happy to drive along it when it’s a six-lane highway.
Gardner: What, at this juncture, meets that requirement in your mind? We've heard a lot recently about container technology, standards for open-source platforms, industry accepted norms for cloud platforms. What do you think reduces your risk at this point?

McCartney: I don't think it's there yet for me. I'm happy to have, relatively speaking, small lines of business. Also, you're dependent then on your network availability and volume. So, I'm quite happy there, because I wasn't the first, and because that's not an important narrative for us as an institution.

I'm quite happy for everybody else to knock the bumps out of the road for me, and I'll be happy to drive along it when it’s a six-lane highway. Right now it's barely paved, and I'll allow other brave souls to go there ahead of me.

Gardner: You mentioned early on in our discussion the word "cynical." Tell me a little bit about the unique requirements in a university environment where you need to provide a common, centrally managed approach to IT for cost and security and manageability, but also see to the unique concerns and requirements of individual stakeholders?

McCartney: All universities are, as they should be, full of self-consciously very smart people who are all convinced they could do a job, any particular job, better than the incumbent is doing it. Having said that, the vast bulk of them have very little interest in anything to do with infrastructure.

The way this plays out is that the central IT group provides the core base that services the network -- the wireless services, base storage, base compute, things like that. As you move to the edge, the things that make a difference at the edge.

Providing the service

In other words, if you have a unique electrical device that you want to plug in to a socket in the wall because you are in paleontology, cell biology, or organic chemistry, that's fine. You don't need your own electricity generating plants to do that. I can provide you with the electricity. You just need the cute device and you can do your business, and everybody is happy.

Whatever the IT equivalent to that is, I want to be the energy supplier. Then, you have your device at the edge that makes a difference for you. You don't have to worry about the electricity working; it's just there. I go back to that phrase "operational credibility." Are we genuinely surprised when the service doesn’t work? That’s what credibility means.

Gardner: So, to me, that really starts to mean IT as a service, not just electricity or compute or storage. It's really the function of IT. Is that in line with your thinking, and how would you best describe IT as a service?

McCartney: I think that's exactly right, Dana. There are two components to this. There's an operational component, which is, are you a credible provider of whatever the institution decides the services are that it needs, lighting, air-conditioning or the IT equivalence of that? They just work. They work at reasonable cost; it's all good. That’s the operational component.

The difference with IT, as opposed to other infrastructure components, is that IT has itself the capability to transform entire processes. That’s not true of other infrastructure things. I can take an IT process and completely reengineer something that's important to me, using advantages that the technology gives me.
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For example, I might be concerned about student performance in particular programs. I can use geo-location data about their movement. I can use network activity. I can use a variety of other resources available to me to help in the guidance of those students on what’s good behavior and what’s helpful behavior to an outcome that they want. You can’t do that with an air-conditioning system.

IT has that capability to reinvent itself and reinvent entire processes. You mentioned some of them the way that things like Uber has entirely disrupted the taxi industry. I’d say the same thing here.

There's one part of the CIO’s job that’s operational; does everything work? The second part is, if we're in transition period to a new business model, how involved are the IT leaders in your group in that discussion? It's not just can we do this with IT or not, but it’s more can a CIO and the CIO’s staff bring an imagination to the conversation, that is a different perspective than other voices in the organization? That's true of any industry or line of business.

Are you merely there as a handmaiden waiting to be told what to do, or are you an active partner in the conversation? Are you a business partner? I know that’s a phrase people like to use. There's a kind of a great divide there.

Gardner: I can see where IT is a disruptor -- and it’s also a solution to the disruptor, but that solution might further disrupt things. So, it's really an interesting period. Tell me a little bit more about this concept of student retention using new technologies -- geolocation for example -- as well as big data which has become more available at much lower cost. You might even think of analytics as a service as another component of IT as a service.

How impactful will that be on how you can manage your campus, not only for student retention, but perhaps for other aspects of a smarter intelligent campus opportunity? [See related post, Nottingham Trent University Elevates Big Data’s Role to Improving Student Retention in Higher Education.]

Personalized attention

McCartney: One of the great attractions of small educational institutions is that you get a lot of personalized attention. The constraint of a small institution is that you have very little choice. There's a small number of faculty, and they simply can’t offer the options and different concentrations that you get in a large institution.

In a large institution, you have the exact opposite problem. You have many, many choices, perhaps even too many subjects that, as a 19-year-old, you've never even heard of. Perhaps you get less individualized attention and you fill that gap by taking advice from students who went to your high school a year before, who are people in your residence hall, or people you bump into on the street. The knowledge that you acquire there is accidental, opportunistic, and not structured in any way around you as an individual, but it’s better than nothing.

There are advisors, of course, and there are people, but you don't know these individuals. You have to go and form relationships with them and they have to understand you and you have to understand them.

A big-data opportunity here is to be able to look at the students at some level of individuality. "Look, this is your past, this is what you have done, this is what you think, and this is the behavior that we are not sure you're engaging in right now. Have you thought about this path, have you thought about this kind of behavior for yourself?"
One of the great attractions of small educational institutions is that you get a lot of personalized attention. The constraint of a small institution is that you have very little choice.

A well-established principle in student services is that the best indicator of student success is how engaged they are in the institution. There are many surrogate measures of that, like whether they participate in clubs. Do they go home every weekend, indicating they are not really engaged, that they haven’t made that transition?

Independent of your academic ability, your SAT scores, and your GPA that you got in high school, for students that engage, that behavior is highly correlated with success and good outcomes, the outcomes everybody wants.

As an institution, how do you advise or counsel. They'll say perhaps there's nothing here they're interested in, and that can be a problem with a small institution. It's very intimate. Everybody says, "Dana, we can see you're not having a great time. Would you like to join the chess club or the drafts club?" And you say, "Well, I was looking for the Legion of Doom Club, and you don’t seem to have one here."

Well, you go to a large institution, they probably have two of those things, but how would you find it and how would you even know to look for that? How would you discover new things that you didn't even know you liked, because the high school you went to didn't teach applied engineering or a whole pile of other things, for that matter.

Gardner: It’s interesting when you look at it that way. The student retention equation is, in a business sense, the equivalent of user experience, personalization, engagement, share of wallet, those sorts of metrics.

We have the opportunity now, probably for the first time, to use big data, Internet of Things (IoT), and analytics to measure, predict, and intercede at a behavioral level. So in this case, to make somebody a productive member of society at a capacity they might miss and you only have one or two chances at that, seems like a rather monumental opportunity.

Effective path

McCartney: You’re exactly right, Dana. I'm not sure I like the equivalence with a customer, but I get the point that you're making there. What you're trying to do is to genuinely help students discover an effective path for themselves and learn that. You can learn it randomly, and that's nice. We don't want to create this kind of railroad track. Well, you're here; you’ve got to end up over there. That’s not helpful either.

My own experience, and I don’t know about other people listening to this, is that you have remarkably little information when you're making these choices at 19 and 20. Usually, if you were getting direction, it was from somebody who had a plan for you that was more based on their experience of life, some 20 or 30 years previously than on your experience of life.
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So where big data can be a very effective play here, was to say, "Look, here are people that look like you, and here were the choices they've made. You might find some of these choices interesting. If you might, then here’s how you’d go about exploring that."

As you rightly say, and implicitly suggested, there is a concern with the high costs, especially of residential education, right now. The most wasteful expenditures there are is where you do a year or two to find out you shouldn't have ever been in this program, you have no love for this thing, you have no affinity for it.
What you're trying to do is to genuinely help students discover an effective path for themselves and learn that. You can learn it randomly, and that's nice.

The sooner you can find that out for yourself and make a conscious choice the better. We see big data having a very active role in that because one of the great advantages of being in a large institution is that we have tens of thousands of students over many years. We know what those outcomes look like, and we know different choices that different people have made. Yes, you can be the first person to make a brand new choice, and good for you if you are.

Gardner: Well it’s an interesting way of looking at big data that has a major societal benefit in the offing. It also provides predictability and tools for people in ways they hadn’t had before. So, I think it’s very commendable.

Before we sign-off, what comes next – high performance computing (HPC), fabric cloud, IT-as-a service -- is there another chapter on this journey that perhaps you have a bead on that that we’re not aware of?

McCartney: Oh my goodness, yes. We have an event now that I started three years ago called "Dawn or Doom," in which if technology is a forcing function, if it is. We're not even going to assert that definitely. Are we reaching a point of a new nirvana, a new human paradise where we’ve resolved all major social problems, and health problems or have we created some new seventh circle of hell where it’s actually an unmitigated disaster for almost everybody; if not everybody? Is this the end of life as we know it? We create robots that are superior to us in every way and we become just some intermediate form of life that has reached the end of its cycle.

This is an annual event that's free and open. Anybody who wants to come is very welcome to attend. You can Google "Dawn or Doom Purdue." We look at it from all different perspectives. So, we have obviously engineers and computer scientists, but we have psychologists, we have labor economists. What about the future of work? If nobody has a job, is that a blessing or a curse?

Psychologists, philosophers, what does it mean, what does artificial intelligence mean, what does a self-conscious machine mean? Currently, of course, we have things like food security we worry about. And the Zika virus -- are we spawning a whole new set of viruses we have no cure for? Have we reached the end of the effectiveness of antibiotics or not?

These are all incredibly interesting questions I would think any intelligent person would want to at least probe around, and we've had some significant success with that.

Next event

Gardner: When is the next Dawn or Doom event, and where will it be?

McCartney: It would be in West Lafayette, Indiana, on October 3 and 4. We have a number of external high-profile key note speakers, then we have a passel of Purdue faculty. So, you will find something that entertain even the most arcane of interests. [For more on Dawn or Doom, see the book, Dawn or Doom: The Risks and Rewards of Emerging Technologies.]

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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Monday, August 1, 2016

How UPS automates supply chain management and gains greater insight for procurement efficiency

The next BriefingsDirect business innovation for procurement case study examines how UPS modernizes and streamlinines its procure-to-pay processes.

Learn how UPS -- across billions of dollars of supplier spend per year -- automates supply-chain management and leverages new technologies to provide greater insight into procurement networks. This business process innovation exchange comes to you in conjunction with the Tradeshift Innovation Day held in New York on June 22, 2016.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. 

To explore how procurement has become strategic for UPS, BriefingsDirect sat down with Jamie Dawson, Vice-President of UPS's Global Business Services Procurement Strategy in Atlanta. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What are the major trends that you are seeing in procurement, and how you're changing your strategy to adjust?

Dawson: We're seeing a lot of evolution in the marketplace in terms of both technology and new opportunities in ways to procure goods and that really is true around the globe. We're adjusting our strategy and also challenging some of our business partners to come along with us.

We're a $60 billion company. Last year, our total expenses were somewhere in the $50-billion range, lots of goods and services flowing around the globe.

Gardner: And so, any way that you can find new efficiency, new spend management benefits that turns into some significant savings.

Dawson: Absolutely.

Gardner: Now that you're looking for new strategies and new solutions, what is it in procurement that’s of most interest to you and how are you using technology in ways you didn't before?

Collaboration and partnerships

Dawson: One of the new ways is a combination or partnerships both with third parties as well as our own internal business partners. We're collaborating with other functions, and procurement is not something we are doing to them; we're working with them to understand what their needs are and working with their suppliers as well.

Dawson
Gardner: We're hearing some very interesting things these days about using machine learning and artificial intelligence, combining that with human agents who are specialized. It sounds like, in some ways, external procurement services can do the job better than anyone. Is that something that you're open to? Is procurement as a service something you're looking at? [See related post, How new modes of buying and evaluating goods and services disrupts business procurement — for the better.]


Dawson: Procurement-as-a-service has a certain niche play. There will always be basic buy-and-sell items, even as individuals. There are some things you don’t research, but you just go out and buy. There are other things for which you do a lot of research and you look into different solutions.

There are different things that will cause you to research more. Maybe it's a competitive advantage, maybe you're looking for an opportunity in a new space or a new corner of the globe. So, you'll do a lot more research, and your solutions need to be scalable. If you create and start in Europe, maybe you'll also want to use it in Asia. If you start in the US, maybe you want to use elsewhere.

Gardner: It sure sounds like, during a period of experimentation, that where the boundary was between things that you would buy by rote versus things you would buy with a lot of expertise or research is shifting or changing. Are you experimenting as an organization, and what is interesting to you as you look at new opportunities from those people who are in the procurement network space?
There will always be complex areas that require solution orientation more than just price. They need a deep understanding of industry, knowledge, and partnership.

Dawson: There will always be complex areas that require solution orientation more than just price. They need a deep understanding of industry, knowledge, and partnership. There are a lot of other areas where the opportunities are expanding every day. [See related post, ChainLink analyst on how cloud-enabled supply chain networks drive companies to better manage finances, procurement.]

Gardner: As you think about what you've done and been able to accomplish, do you have any advice for other organizations that are also starting to think about modernizing and strategizing, rather than just doing it in the traditional old way? What would you tell them?

Dawson: Two things. One would be within the procurement organizations to be open to new ideas. And second, get the rest of the organization behind you, because you're going to need their support.

Gardner: It seems that procurement as a function is just far more strategic than it used to be. Not only are you able to get more goods and services, but you can save significant amounts of money. Do you feel that your profile as an organization within UPS is rising or expanding in terms of the role you play in the larger organization? [See related post, CPO expert Joanna Martinez extols the virtues of redesigning procurement for strategic business agility.]


Don't have to sell

Dawson: I'm certainly aware that the knowledge of the capabilities and the demonstrated successes are now being recognized throughout the organization. And it becomes self feeding. You actually get on a roll and can further expand the capabilities once that knowledge is out there; you don’t have to sell.

Gardner: Last question, looking to the future, on a vision level, what’s really exciting to you? What are you thinking that might be more important to you in how you do business two or three years from now? It could be technology, suppliers, ecosystems, cloud enabled intelligence, that sort of thing.

Dawson: It’s a very interesting question, because it’s almost the same answer. Your greatest fear is the greatest benefit. I listened to what we just heard on the Tradeshift Go tool, and it’s crazy how exciting that this is. You heard all the questions in the room about how to adapt that to what you already have today? The world still exists as it exists today.
There's this huge transition period where we were bolting on these fantastic great ideas to our existing infrastructure. That transition into what's new and really embracing it is the most exciting of all.

So, there's this huge transition period where we were bolting on these fantastic great ideas to our existing infrastructure. That transition into what's new and really embracing it is the most exciting of all.

Gardner: Disruption can be good and disruption can be bad.

Dawson: It will be a challenging journey.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Tradeshift.

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Friday, July 29, 2016

How the Citrix Technology Professionals Program produces user experience benefits from greater ecosystem collaboration

The next BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion focuses on how expert user communities around technologies and solutions create powerful digital business improvements.
As an example, we will explore how the Citrix Technology Professionals Program, or CTPs as they are referred to, gives participants a larger say in essential strategy initiatives such as enabling mobile work styles.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more about the CTP program and how an ongoing dialogue between vendors and experts provides the best end-user experiences, we're joined by Douglas Brown, Founder of DABCC.com in Sarasota, Florida; Rick Dehlinger, an Independent Technologist and Business Visionary in Sacramento, California; Jo Harder is the Cloud Architect at D+H and an Industry Analyst at Virtualization Practice in Fort Myers, Florida, and Steve Greenberg, President of Thin Client Computing in Scottsdale, Arizona. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: We hear so much nowadays about user experience. You might say that you, as a community-based organization, are the original user experience provider. What is the CTP program as a user group and how ultimately does your user experience translate into improvements for the Citrix community and ecosystem?

Brown: I've been a CTP since the conception of the CTP Program, and within the Citrix Community since 1997.

Brown
What's neat about the CTP Program and the Citrix Community in general is that we're able to bring a bunch of great, talented people together, and then in return, take that combined experience and knowledge and share that with other people.

What was interesting and what got me into the community way back when, was the fact that there was just no information. You were just really out on your own trying to solve problems. And when we were able to then put that in the community, we all exponentially got better.

What I've found through the Citrix Community in general, the Citrix Users Group that Citrix has recently started, and the CTP Program is that you're always better together. That's the biggest takeaway for me from not just the 10 years of CTP, but 15 or 16 years of being in the greater Citrix Community itself.

Gardner: Steve, how well and effective does this advocacy role work? How much traction are you getting?

Greenberg: It's amazing how well it works. Doug referred to the old days. We had a 1997 to 2007 era, where you didn't have the feedback loop, and products evolved slowly. We'd see a new product release and ask why they did that. So, this passionate group, because of the Internet, because we're all kind of little freaks in our little neighborhoods somewhere around the world, all found each other and come together with such a passion.

Greenberg
We haven't calculated it, but it's in excess of 1,000 years of hands-on experience between this group of 50 or so people. It works, and Citrix has come to value it. Other companies are following the model and developing community programs. It's really invigorating to learn something from the true end user, the customer, and bring it back to headquarters and see the products evolve and change.

Brown: It's really a 360-degree type of program. It's not just for us; it also benefits Citrix, and then, of course, everyone, the customer and the end engineers, what have you.

Gardner: As was mentioned, we're in this era of social media, and people can be their own publisher and they can be an earphone and a megaphone at the same time. So Rick, do you feel like you're representing a large group, and how do they communicate to you what they're feeling?

Much broader audience

Dehlinger: I do feel like I represent a pretty large group, especially when you start wandering the halls of Citrix Synergy. It’s like a college or high school reunion that happens every year. I definitely feel like we represent a much broader audience.

We (the members of the CTP program) also have people who represent perspectives from various locations across the world, different industries, industry functions, different customer bases -- even different seats in the ecosystem -- the partner community, end user, customer, and other technology-provider companies.

Dehlinger
In terms of communication, some of the tools have evolved over the last 10 years. Steve made a good point. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we have two different eras. The era of the last 10 years has really been one of greatly increased communication and transparency, and that's one of the things that the CTP program is fantastic about.

[Interesting editorial note: shortly after the inception of the CTP Program in 2006, a couple of the founding CTP’s – Brian Madden and Rick Dehlinger – wrote blog articles essentially calling Citrix out for being closed off and not showing any thought leadership in the industry.

Then Citrix CEO Mark Templeton got the message loud and clear, and reversed the policy against Citrixites blogging. This was effectively the turning point between the eras Steve Greenberg mentioned, and the first big impact the CTP’s had on Citrix and the industry.]

Learn How the Citrix Technology Professionals Program Helps
Shape the Future of Cloud Computing  
Steve had mentioned that a lot of the other vendors are starting to use this (CTP Program) as a model to build their community programs around. This group of people is very passionate about Citrix Technologies and passionate about touching the lives of others. This combines the two of those (passions) and puts us behind a closed door with the opportunity to have a very real conversation and communication with the leaders, developers, product managers at Citrix.

We have impacted some very substantial and positive change in Citrix -- helped them stop going down some roads that were very disastrous and recover from some decisions that started to be disastrous or were dead ends -- and they ultimately improved it.
We continue to be inspired by what they bring out and put in front of us as a possible vision; it’s incredible.

Greenberg: And to Doug’s 360-degree comment, we continue to be inspired by what they bring out and put in front of us as a possible vision; it’s incredible. Just so you understand, we're usually locked in a room for two full days, approximately 10 to 12 hours, a couple of times a year, and it gets deep. It’s like an inside family having a family discussion that gets real hot, but it's two-way.

Perhaps at first, it was us saying, "You have got to fix this stuff," but now it's inspiring to see what comes out, that they touch the community and say, "We're thinking about this; how would that work?" It's really, really cool.

Brown: I like the fact that Steve mentioned it’s really two different eras. Prior to the CTP Program, and I was around when they started this, we really had to push something like this for Citrix. A typical corporation back then was not about outside feedback per se. They did not blog; there was no social media. It was a very controlled message.

Nowadays, obviously they need to control the message, but it’s just wide open. It’s a wide -open world out there today.

Interactive, wide ranging

Gardner: Jo, you're like a focus group in a sense, but interactive and wide-ranging in terms of your impact and getting information from the field. So as a focus group, what did you accomplishing recently at Citrix Synergy 2016?

Harder: Let me step back and say that we're under NDA with Citrix. These closed-door discussions that Steve mentioned are very private discussions. The product managers go into what's happening, what they're thinking about for future products, and that's really the basis for those discussions.

Harder
I never really thought about us as like a focus group, but we are. It's really great that we can give feedback to each other. Because we have such varied experiences and expertise, there are some products that I know really well that the person sitting next to me might touch once a year. So we have complete variety in the group. It's really great to be able to have those discussions as a focus group, if you will, and to be able to provide that feedback to the folks at Citrix and really to each other as well, because we do learn a lot from each other.

Gardner: Because Citrix has so many different lines and different products, they have inherited things through acquisition, they have built things organically, no one user consumes them in the same way. What are you seeing in terms of adoption? What would you say is the most interesting part of Citrix’s solutions in this particular day and age?

Dehlinger: The most interesting thing for me and in our little focus group is community representation. I tend to be one of the ones that advocates very heavily for the cloud, and for increasing the pace of evolution, helping drag the traditional Citrix enterprise customer base further into the new world that we live in. For me the most exciting stuff has definitely got to be the cloud.

The evolution of Citrix’s Cloud Services, now called Citrix Cloud, and all that stuff underneath it, is fantastic. It’s monumental, not just for the consumer base, but also for Citrix, because it gets them into the world of rapid prototyping and rapid evolution, consistent, evergreen products and services, and also starts to put them into a different world, where it's cloud-based consumption and pricing.
Every day, every week, every month, every year, you have to continue to prove your value and improve your value service.

Every day, every week, every month, every year, you have to continue to prove your value and improve your value and provide a high quality level of service. If you don't, you're cut off; the customer has the opportunity to walk away.

One of the things that's most exciting about that for me is the opportunity for Citrix to evolve into the cloud first world alongside Microsoft. If you look at any of the traditional enterprise technology vendors that are out there, they've been selling based on a capital-expenditure model into the enterprise.
The customers go spend all these big bucks up front; these vendors’ entire ecosystems - their sales teams, even their product development cycles - they’re based off these big buys and long deployment processes. There's so much of a company (that revolves around up-front capital expenditure and long deployment cycles), and the entire ecosystem gets tied to that.

Then, you look at the polar opposite end of that; that is the cloud, where it’s consumption-based pricing, the attributes that I mentioned a little bit earlier.

Adoption patterns

Gardner: So it could be quite interesting on adoption patterns. We could be seeing all sorts of new models popping up, and that could be interesting for companies as well as the end user organizations.

Dehlinger: In my mind, it increases the transparency on both sides. Citrix knows and understands who is using what, and what they are not using also. The customer has an opportunity to vote with their dollars, not just once upfront when they are seeing all the stars of the sales pitch, but on a monthly or a yearly basis.

That's actually the most exciting part to me, because Microsoft has made that pivot now, with Office 365 and Azure and all that product family. They've brought their ecosystem around and they're showing the world now that it's possible to evolve from being a traditional enterprise software/ technology vendor to being a cloud service provider.
What I see as the future of Citrix and of the community is Citrix getting over that hump themselves and really getting into it. They have reinvented themselves many times over the years.

So, it's exciting for me. What I see as the future of Citrix and of the community is Citrix getting over that hump themselves and really getting into it. They have reinvented themselves many times over the years.

Gardner: Steve, thin-client computing, always an interesting solution, but tying that to any device, any cloud -- what do you see are some of the most interesting developments?

Greenberg: To me, it's that push forward, and it’s the new CEO Kirill Tatarinov making a strong statement that we're going to the cloud, as Rick says, taking it forward. But the most exciting thing for me, because day in and day out I architect and implement design, is to take this suite and to fit it to the organization. Every organization is different, and the best part of my job is going in and learning a new organization and what it is they do and how they do it. Inevitably, something Citrix is doing makes that better.

Now, as Rick said, we just have more options. If this organization needs cloud, it’s the best delivery model. Perhaps they're distributed around the world or some other factor, and now they can do it. They have Citrix behind them casting the vision.

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So it’s the flexibility, it's the power and excitement that you get from moving at the speed of the business. It's not IT saying no, not IT saying, "Well, I can't do that new product line because our system is blah, blah, blah." If we need to move quick, throw it in Azure. Let’s get on to that new offering.

Harder: Say "yes."

Gardner: Jo, virtualization has never been as prominent as it is now. What do you see from the virtualization perspective with the new products and the new embrace of virtualization at multiple abstractions?

Tying in security

Harder: I'm looking at it from the banking sector, because that's what I live and breathe. I'm looking at it from security, compliance, everything that comes along with the finance industry. I look at that probably a little bit more cautiously than most, but what I find pretty interesting is that Citrix is really tying in security end-to-end.

Some of the sessions here at Synergy have talked about the whole security piece. You want to be progressive, but you have to do it very securely. That's one of the pieces that I'm really embracing from a virtualization standpoint.

From the standpoint of finance, there should be no data on the workstation. If somebody were to walk into a bank and steal that client device, they should not be able to walk off with any Social Security numbers, no non-public personal information (NPI), nothing of that sort. That's what excites me about virtualization and tying that together, the way that Citrix has all the moving parts.

In the future, the next step for the banks is getting into wireless, getting into mobility. Citrix is very well-poised for that. So, the future is bright.
In the future, the next step for the banks is getting into wireless, getting into mobility. Citrix is very well-poised for that.

Gardner: So, security was the original big use case for VDI, nothing on the client. But now clients are everywhere. So it's really, “How do we get the data from the edge and to the edge securely.”

Douglas, what are some of the key points from your perspective in terms of the Citrix product line and how that impacts users that you represent?

Brown: That's a good question. I'm a XenApp baby. I see the cloud as the real, true information highway. It's the enabler to allow us to bring things to market quicker. XenApp is that ultimate tool to then give access to the applications anywhere, any time.

I don't care if it's 2016, with all the stuff that we do today, or if it's 1999, at the end of the day, I have never met an end user that comes into the company and says, "Gee, I can't wait to use Windows 10," or "Gee, I can't wait to use that new Cisco Core Router they just bought." They don’t come into work and say, "Oh no, I have to do a spreadsheet today." They don't even talk about Excel.

With all these different technologies we're bringing around, be it the cloud, or mobility, or whatever, back to the user experience piece, Citrix is able to give the end user a better, faster time to market for them. At the end of the day, they're able to work better from any place, any time.

I've been living a lot in Sarasota, but also I commute to Berlin, Germany. It’s sort of an interesting commute, but it doesn't matter where I live, and this is the same story that we've said for 15 years.

It's not about a new story; it's just about bringing more components to make that, to fulfill that destiny of a better user experience. What's IT there for? It’s to enable the users to do their jobs better, and ultimately, that's what Citrix is about. Everything else is just fluff. Everything else is just the machinery.

Network intelligence

Gardner: Rick, when we think about changes in Citrix over the past couple of years -- and there have been a lot of them -- one of the things that strikes me is that they seem to be much more interested in strutting their stuff as to what their network intelligence capabilities are.

There's a lot more discussion of NetScaler and how that integrates to mobility, security, big-data analytics, and cloud. Do you agree with me that the NetScaler and the intelligent networks component are more prominent, and how does that play into the future?

Dehlinger: NetScaler was, by anybody's measure, one of the best acquisitions Citrix ever made. They got some fantastic technology and brilliant talent. Some of the things that we've been able to do with NetScaler in our tool bag, as we're out solving problems and helping customers take things to the next level, is just mind-boggling.

I'm thrilled at the change. It seems like they finally started to figure out a better way to both communicate what NetScaler is and its role in this whole game. You asked me about the Microsoft-Citrix relationship a bit earlier. Some of the stuff that Citrix is doing now (in that partnership) to start incorporating and leveraging the NetScaler and its unique layer of visibility between the user and the applications - will enable some some really amazing new capabilities.
NetScaler was, by anybody's measure, one of the best acquisitions Citrix ever made. They got some fantastic technology and brilliant talent.

I think it's fantastic that they finally found the language. NetScaler is starting to get its feet underneath it, although you could argue it already has its feet underneath it; it’s been a billion dollar-plus business for Citrix for a couple of years now.

Gardner: Jo, how about you in terms of security and in the banking sector in particular, intelligent network services, something really impressive; important or what?

Harder: Just to expand on what Rick said, I think what Citrix is doing with NetScaler is great. Some days, I feel like I don’t fully understand, and I'm immersed in these technologies, but then you learn something else that NetScaler can do for you. There is more, there is more, there is more. It’s in there, and it’s a matter of finding out exactly how to best use it, and then going ahead and using the products. With NetScaler, I totally agree with Rick; the sky is the limit on it.

Dehlinger: Well, NetScaler used to be the realm of the packet trace junkies. Load balancing is the easiest thing that people can use to describe what NetScaler does, but that whole world was just fraught with massive acronyms, crazy technology, terminology, standards, and stuff that (for the normal human being or the business person in particular) was just mind-boggling and baffling.

It’s great that Citrix is finally finding some language to be able to demystify a little bit of that, and show that underneath all that mysticism and the support for all these crazy new fancy TLAs and acronyms, here is some really amazing powerful business value there just waiting to be unlocked and leveraged.

Gardner: Steve, mobile work styles as opposed to mobility or device or bring your own device (BYOD) -- how far do you feel that your community contacts have gotten in that direction of a mobility style change rather than simply doing something with a smaller device in more places?

Transforming organizations

Greenberg: That's a great question, because I think this particular group has been at the core of this for some time, and we have taken some very notable large organizations and completely transformed them.

People work from home. People work on a multitude of devices. I can be sitting at the desktop in the office, grab a laptop and go jump in a cab, take my phone, and there is that seamless experience. We really are there. At this point, it’s just a matter of getting it more widely infiltrated, getting people aware of what they can do.

To this day, although it seems old to us, I still go into new client sites and opportunities and say, "You could do this," and they say, "Really? I didn’t know I could do that." It’s there, but now the society is catching up, if that makes sense.
Now that you can transmit data securely, when it hits your phone, you're working on it natively.

Gardner: It also seems that some of the file-share demonstrations and announcements show the benefit of the whole greater than the sum of the parts, when you can integrate with cloud, with devices. Any thoughts about the power of an integrated file share rather than just the plain vanilla one-size-fits-all type of cloud-based file share?

Greenberg: That's the final layer that makes this mobile work style a reality. Before, if you could remote in the XenApp style that Doug was referring to, you could get your job done. But now that you can transmit data securely, when it hits your phone, you're working on it natively.

I go into the subway and the signal drops. Well, that file is there and I can edit it, sign it, get my signal back, and go. It has taken that virtualization mobility to a level now where it can travel and it can be seamless.

Gardner: And that’s an intelligent container. So, if your requirements around privacy or security mean that you have to have control over what that session is and does, you can get that.

Douglas, how important is that intelligent container when put in the context of an intelligent network?

Brown: Extremely important. It's important from every aspect of the business. Nowadays, we're able to do those things where we have never been able to in the past, at the level they are at now.

It can’t be understated how important those components are. It comes down to maturity. The technology and the vision have been there -- or the vision has been there, and the technology is coming around. Now, with technologies such as that, it's matured, and then we're able to achieve all of our goals, from business, and to end users.

New capability

Greenberg: Citrix demonstrated at Synergy 2016 a new capability that wasn't there before. We're all familiar with the Dropbox model, where I can send a file, but once you send it, it’s out there in the wild. What they showed today was sending a file and then changing its status. So, even though that person had received the file and looked at it, when the status changed, they could no longer see it. That’s the home run. That’s the piece that was not part of this capability before.

Harder: I tweeted this morning that this new capability really propelled Citrix ShareFile into being the file-sharing solution for business. There are a lot of other solutions out there, but they're really not suitable for business. They don't provide that level of security and a signature signing that enables. Think about the security impacts of that, the legalities. They have it covered. There's a lot more coming. Once some of the states start to add how the digital signature can be incorporated as the notarized signature, wow.
This new capability really propelled Citrix ShareFile into being the file-sharing solution for business. There are a lot of other solutions out there, but they're really not suitable for business.

Gardner: Many business processes really do get that mobile style of work as a result, and rather than just repaving cow paths, you're really doing something quite new and different.

Before we sign off, I would like to allow our listeners and readers to get more information on the Citrix Technology Professional Program. If they're interested in learning more, maybe taking some role themselves, where should they go?

Dehlinger: Definitely start with the CTP page on the Citrix website. That's a great place to find out more about this group and what they do. However, look at the Citrix User Group Communities out there. There are a lot of fantastic people present. We (CTP’s) are blessed by having the opportunity to be able to represent a big base, but in a lot of localities around the world, the Citrix User Group Communities have been doing some fantastic things, and making a difference locally.

Gardner: Sort of a federation of groups around the world.

Dehlinger: Absolutely.

Greenberg: I would add, blog, tweet, turn out for user groups, come out to Synergy, come out to Summit. If you're one of the reseller partners, make yourself known.

We 're a community of almost-crazy enthusiasts. We have a ridiculous level of interest and passion. We have a tendency to find each other, and we're always amazed to see new people come from a place, a country, or a business we never heard of with new solutions.

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A great event happening today is the Geek Speak tonight. We have done a GeekOvation program, where people submit their projects and their work and come up and get recognized for it and have a little contest. There are endless possibilities. Just get out there and start communicating.

Dehlinger: Participate!

Harder: And have fun.

Brown: In a couple of weeks I'm going to be going to Norway with Rick for one of the best and oldest Citrix User Groups around the world, but that advocacy, is only halfway done, programs and other things for people looking to get into the CTP Program or just sharing knowledge in general.

Start up a blog, have some fun, share knowledge. I've always said, knowledge is not power; power is in dispersing that knowledge.

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