We're here at Citrix Energy 2017 and I'm speaking with PJ Hock who's the senior vice
president of product for Citrix.
Can you tell us a little bit about your role and how you came to become part of the Citrix
family?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's great to be here and it's great to get to meet you guys.
I joined Citrix last year.
I had spent most of my career at Microsoft over 20 years.
I had worked on product at the office team and also in Visual Studio and actually helped
both of them through the transition from on-prem to the cloud.
I'm here running product at Citrix.
Recently we reorganized inside the company from independent business units to a unified
engineering team and a unified product team and I'm leading product.
As we go through a similar transition to the cloud also here, so it's exciting times to
be at Citrix.
Absolutely.
I mean, one thing that we noticed is that there's a much more defined focus on security.
Can you tell us about that shift?
Yeah, I think for customers familiar with our products, many of them have attributed
security to being one of the main reasons that they've deployed it.
We haven't necessarily always talked about it as a core capability within our products,
but whether it's Zen App, Zen Desktop, securing application delivery to endpoints or Netscaler
securing your network or features that we have in share file to do with rights management
and document protection, there's been very strong capabilities in all of our core products
for many years related to security.
As you know, in recent times, security really has come to the forefront with our customers
and it has become much more of a dialogue with them about what is our long-term strategy
with regard to security.
In some ways, what we're doing is acknowledging the needs in the marketplace that our customers
are expressing with regard to security, but beyond that, clearly there's more that we
can do and we really are redoubling our efforts to increase our investments in security in
our core products.
You mentioned the transition to the cloud.
What does that look like?
Yeah, I think it's different for every company and so certainly I'm getting to borrow from
some of my previous experiences and efforts that I've done in the past, but there's some
unique opportunities here at Citrix and moving to the cloud.
First of all, we know that many customers want to manage their enterprise infrastructure
more and more from the cloud and not from their own data centers.
That trend is happening whether they're moving to a public cloud or they're moving to SaaS
applications in the cloud.
They're also moving our workloads to the cloud.
The steps that we're taking, first of all, starting about a year ago, we moved the management
control plane for all of our Citrix properties into the cloud and we've continued to partner
with the large public clouds, Azure and Amazon in particular, but all of them with regard
to helping people move the individual workloads to the cloud also.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is we are building new services.
The analytic service that we announced yesterday is a great example of a service that would
be cloud-based.
That doesn't mean you have to move everything to the cloud to access it.
We're definitely going to allow you to build the analytics service as an extension of your
on-prem deployment of ZenApps and desktop, for example, but there are many advantages
to building that service in the cloud.
It's going to scale.
It's going to need resiliency.
It's going to need a footprint across the globe.
All those things would point to us building it in cloud first and delivering it through
the cloud.
That's a great example of us building this hybrid experience where we combine the best
of the on-prem capabilities that customers know and love today and connecting that up
to new capabilities that we build exclusively in the cloud.
What is your most exciting product that you're really excited about?
Let's talk about the analytic service as an example.
I think there are obvious baby steps that we can take with analytics.
We have a lot of insight into what's going on, whether it's network traffic analysis
that we can do with NetScaler or with SD-WAN, understanding of the files that are moving
around your organization through share file, understanding what's happening to your endpoint,
your phone, your tablet because of receiver and ZenApps and desktop on all those endpoints.
We know that there's a lot of insight that we can already garner from that information.
If you look at the advances that have occurred in AI and machine learning, we know that getting
more of that data into the service, training our models on more of that data will allow
us to help customers detect anomalies much more easily.
Particularly in the area of security, but I think that's just the first of many areas.
I think performance is another one where that analytic service could really have a big impact
for our customers.
Those talk about the secure browser, but we didn't really get a good explanation as to
what it is.
Can you elaborate a little more on that?
Yeah.
Well, we already have capabilities with regard to secure browsing in ZenApp and Zen desktop.
You can do this today, effectively publish a browser as a secure application that runs
in VM in the cloud.
What we've decided to do is actually carve out that particular scenario, that unique
scenario that people have with regard to secure web browsing and host a dedicated service
in Azure that is VMs running a browser remotely that any user can connect to and isolate all
of their web browsing traffic from their device, from their desktop.
Think of it as a special use case for the general purpose ZenApp publishing model, but
optimized around web browsing.
We know that there's two things that we know today about security that are worth remembering.
The first one is most breaches are a result of credentials getting stolen.
It's very high, I think over 70% of all significant breaches occur because of credential theft.
The second thing is the most common attack vector is still the browser.
If you want to actually spear fish or zero day someone, the best way to do it is through
the browser.
We're going to do lots of things to work on helping customers manage identity, helping
customers use multi-factor authentication, etc. in their applications, but we're also
going to work on browsing as a particular use case where we know customers are vulnerable
and it's tough to keep up.
One of the things that we'll also do in that service is we will take responsibility for
maintaining a current version of the browser instance that runs in that service.
It will always be the latest one, it will always be fully patched, and we know that
even that can be a challenge sometimes for customers to just maintain their images in
a current state.
I guess where do you see the future going?
Is it going to be more security and more cloud based?
Yes, so let's talk for a moment about the sort of the biggest announcement we made yesterday
which is the new unified work space, the secure digital work space.
That really is the culmination and combination of all our products coming together to deliver
at that new user experience.
In the context of delivering that new user experience, we see lots of opportunity to
make it more integrated with what users are trying to accomplish, support more devices
and more platforms, include more applications, and really be the complete experience.
That's I think the first step.
The second thing is we see a continued need for integration of my digital work space with
my physical work space, and so whether it's my phone knowing what kind of meeting I'm
attending or responding to the physical room I'm in, my digital work space on my computer
recognizing that there's a large display that I could cast it to in order to share it with
other people, my environment being aware of who else is around and if I need to contact
them.
So that whole idea of marrying together the best of the digital work space with the physical
work space, particularly with IoT as the bridge between those two, I think that's a huge area
for us to explore.
But of course, as you rightly pointed out, security is going to remain.
Security reliability, I would say, are going to remain at the center and the more we take
on the responsibility of running services on behalf of our customers, the more important
it's going to be for us to really have enterprise-grade security, reliability, performance that allow
customers to run mission-critical businesses, which they do today on our platforms.
Great.
Thanks, Peter, for taking the time to speak with VMBlog, and we wish you a great rest
of the conference.
Thank you very much.
This has been very enjoyable.
Thank you.
