Amazon Web Services Inc. finally got it. Organizations will not move 100% of their workloads to the public cloud. There are workloads that need to remain on-premises due to lower latency transfers or data processing that needs to be done on-site. The answer to this reality? AWS Outposts. It extends the AWS cloud infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to users on-prem. 

As one of AWS’ long-time partners, Citrix Systems Inc. embraces Outposts to give its customers the power of choice. As a fast and smart move into the hybrid cloud strategy, Citrix ADC VPX, an advanced web and application delivery services, is one of the first appliances to get validated for AWS Outposts. Citrix ADC users are now able to deploy their applications on-prem and in the cloud. 

“And for Citrix overall, it’s three pillars, right? One is the end-user experience that’s always got to be stellar. And number two is giving the customer a choice of which environment they want to work with. And lastly, it’s providing security,” said Marissa Schmidt (pictured right), senior director of product management at Citrix Systems. “They can use the on-prem solution with Outposts and put the Citrix ADC VPX on Outposts and provide that solution for hybrid customers that want to have the enterprise-grade on-prem and cloud.” 

Schmidt and Matt Lull (pictured left), managing director of global strategic alliances at Citrix Systems, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. They discussed the AWS and Citrix partnership, Outposts and ADC validation, the future of AWS WorkSpaces, and security as a business differentiator. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Marissa, let’s not bury the lede any further. There is some hard news that dropped today. Help us understand.

Schmidt: It started yesterday at the keynote with the Outposts announcement. Then we have the ADC validation with Outposts. And then we also have the ingress routing that also was announced yesterday, and our solution integration into that. And then we had a press release this morning that talked about our AWS Quick Start for Citrix ADC, as well as the rest of the instant site that now we support. 

Miniman: So I’d love to dig in a little bit on Outposts if we can. 

Schmidt: For AWS, the focus is for some of the customers that have more application-centric that is on-prem that has regulatory compliance requirements and for those customers that really want to do that hybrid with on-prem and cloud. This is the best approach for them.

Lull: I look at Outposts as more strategic than just a conversation on a new piece of hardware and some new Nitro Hypervisors. This is Amazon’s first move into the hybrid cloud, which we’ve been doing since the beginning. When you look at where Citrix ADC is already deployed, it is … in the corporate data center, in the DMZ, protecting the corporate assets. So now we have a situation where we’ve been helping Amazon with the hybrid for a long time. Now they’re moving their infrastructure onto premise, and we’re starting to combine our on-premise footprint with their on-premise footprint.

Miniman: There was a little product called AWS WorkSpaces that was announced [in 2013] and everybody was like, well, it was nice that Citrix had a long relationship with Amazon. I guess we won’t be seeing them next year. Well, here we are 2019, a strong partnership. Help us understand how that dynamic works out and how you worked through some of these coopetition environments. 

Lull: We run into coopetition across the board. We have some in the networking arena with core load-balancing services that exist in all the cloud platforms. And we have a variety of startups in the DaaS land. And when I look at WorkSpaces, it’s a quality product for a simple user that needs it now and needs a small quantity. Some of the larger enterprises are looking at it for simplicity.

So we have actually probably more Citrix WorkSpaces users on Amazon than on any other cloud. And we know customers appreciate the combination of the two. [But] at the same time, we’re moving beyond [that market]. It is still a core part of our portfolio, but our investments going forward are in delivering those applications into the intelligent workspace regardless of where they originate. 

Miniman: What is different now about the application landscape, and how Citrix is working with customers than it might have been a few years ago. 

Schmidt: What’s different now is definitely the more modernization of the apps. And as we do that we need to help our customers adapt with the applications that they do have, whether it’s the legacy apps or the more adaptable, flexible apps that can go to the cloud with Kubernetes and that container environment.

But what makes Citrix unique is that we do have a single code base for Citrix ADC that can run in the traditional apps, as well as now the east-west traffic for all more modernized applications, which is critical. And with the Citrix overall solution where Workspaces from an end-user perspective and the apps closer to the applications with the Citrix ADC together provides that end-to-end solution for our customers. 

Martin: What’s an example that you think … really articulates the value that Citrix delivers, enabling a business to truly transform so that regardless of the application infrastructure, they’re able to harness the data, extract insight from it, and use it as a business differentiator? 

Lull: Twenty years ago we talked to the desktop team, and we were a solution about getting client-server applications on the desktops, which was a big problem 20 years ago. It’s not as much of a problem today. But even as you move to browser-based environments, security and governance are more important than ever, right?

So, increasingly we’re seeing companies come to Citrix and saying, ‘We need help with governance compliance and security.’ And increasingly we’re marrying the unique networking capabilities that we have with the unique workspace or application desktop virtualization capabilities to create new and improved solutions.

Miniman: There are so many announcements that Amazon talked about. People want to be able to plug into these environments either natively or through hybrid environments. Where does that play into your discussions with customers? 

Lull: You can take for granted that we’re consuming a lot of [AWS] cutting-edge capabilities as we build our cutting-edge capabilities. We’re not necessarily directly exposing something like Amazon machine learning as a button in our environment. 

So I do see the things that they’re innovating becoming relevant to us in ways that are more than just about the infrastructure as a way to power servers, storage and networking for Citrix environments, but also becoming rich content, both Amazon-owned rich content and their SaaS ecosystem that’s built on Amazon.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Citrix Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Citrix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE