Facilitating the seamless movement of workloads among on- and off-premise environments is only the first leg of the journey toward the hybrid cloud, and that creates an opportunity for vendors such as Citrix Systems Inc. to fill the gaps, according to Morgan Gerhart, the senior director of products for the desktop virtualization powerhouse’s cloud and networking business. In an appearance on theCUBE at Amazon.com Inc.’s recent re:Invent summit, Gerhart shared his perspective on how his company fits into that picture with hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman.

Whereas rival VMware Inc. offers a homegrown infrastructure-as-a-service portfolio to users of its on-premise software, Citrix bases its cloud strategy on third-party platforms and in particular the market-leading Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our goal is to help our customers make AWS look like a natural extension of their data centers” as opposed to merely another silo, Gerhart said. Fulfilling that need requires addressing every aspect of the challenge, from delivering the applications to handling the back-end infrastructure, all of which the virtualization giant claims are covered within its portfolio.

“That’s a combination of the ability to use XenApp and XenDesktop to stand up farms in AWS either in isolated or bridged back to on-premise and using NetScaler to extend their network” into the cloud, Gerhart detailed. The latter solution serves as the foundation for the whole lineup, providing a common interface for managing demand that allows organizations to handle an application running on AWS no differently than if it were deployed on-premise. That’s also true the other way around, he noted. Users can move NetScaler-backed workloads outside the data center without an excessive amount of tweaking.

“What we try to do at Citrix is make the deployment and configuration of our stack as transparent as possible regardless of whether it’s running on-premise or in AWS because IT professionals shouldn’t have to do things fundamentally different to invoke AWS,” Gerhart said. NetScaler can eliminate barriers that have traditionally kept organizations from taking full advantage of what the public cloud has to offer, he said.

“Our role in networking is not transport, it’s not routers and switches and pushing packets around,” Gerhart said. “What our networking portfolio brings to the table is context: Who the user is, where the user is going in the application and we can bring all that context to an application running in AWS.”

That functionality allows organizations to optimize resource consumption and pay only what is necessary to support usage, not only when it comes to compute and storage but also network capacity. NetScaler’s built-in data reduction capabilities help in that respect, and information is also encrypted as it travels to and from the cloud.

All of that adds up to form a unique spin on the software-defined data center paradigm that shifts the focus from the infrastructure to the user, mixing in a good dose of public cloud resources for increased operational efficiency. “What’s driving us is the concept of the software-defined workplace, which is fundamentally built around the fact that when a user is accessing an application today, they’re gonna be accessing that application from at least three devices over the course of the day,” Gerhard elaborated. “Ultimately, it’s not a technology conversation, it’s a user-centric one.”
Watch the full interview (14:49)