Citrix: XenSource fills hole in product portfolio

Considering the multiple acquisitions that Citrix has completed in the past few years (NetScaler, Orbital Data, Ardence, Reflectent Software and Teros, to name a few), what is Citrix's end goal and how do these technologies all relate?

We don't have time to walk through this all here today, but there is a clear strategy. Here is a couple of ways to think about. We see our business -- and this has been unchanged for the past several years -- as application-delivery infrastructure. We see this as what is the infrastructure needed along the line of sight between the data center where the apps live and an end user, wherever that user is. What is the infrastructure needed at the front door of a data center to initiate the delivery of an application, at the secure access point where users come in and get access to application, at the front door of the branch where more than half the users access their apps and all the way out to the end where the users live. If you think about our product line, Presentation Server or NetScaler, it's the same exact thing, one is for Web apps and one is for Windows apps, but they do the same thing. The key piece XenSource brings to all of this is an underpinning to all of it. If you have more virtualization baked into the core infrastructure, then you get an entire infrastructure in which these pieces can be moved around in a much more agile fashion.

What would be a next technology step for Citrix?

Our strategy can be articulated as follow the users, follow the apps. You can look at VMware and F5 and Riverbed and Cisco, and that's interesting, and you might pick up some clues. But if you look at the bigger trends like where are application going or where users are going. Things like mobility, offshoring, outsourcing, globalization, software-as-a-service, service-oriented architecture and XML will give you a much better shot of predicting what types of things we think will be needed in the infrastructure to enable that vision for customers.

What is Citrix's position on the open source angle of XenSource technology?

We find open source very appealing. You want to start supporting all of these virtual environments; you have hundreds of device drivers and things like that to support. We have the entire open source community with IBM, HP, Intel and AMD pouring a ton of effort into this so we can do this on almost no investment. If you do it in a proprietary world, you got to have hundreds of engineers constantly on top of those kinds of thing. It gives us huge leverage. We also are very committed to moving the oversight of Xen open source organization to more of a board of advisers that includes the big contributors to the project. XenSource had that planned already. And in order of contribution, obviously XenSource is a huge contributor. But also HP, IBM, Intel, AMD, it's all the big infrastructure players that contribute to this community.

How does acquisition relate to Citrix's application networking technologies, such as application acceleration and WAN optimization?

Today the news is going to be dominated by Windows-type capabilities because the immediate, predominant, hot use-case scenario for virtualization is for delivering Windows applications and virtualizing Windows servers and things like that. We are more committed than ever to continue to invest in the application networking space, especially as more and more applications move to the Web. The ability of Citrix to own the core assets of some of the best virtualization capabilities in the industry and use it creatively in our networking products is going to bring some great advantages there as well. We are not talking about that a lot today, but it's another area in which we can offer our customers great capabilities.