Take Five With Tom Fenton

They Said It (About Citrix, That is)

What some folks (folks being Chris Wolf, Simon Bramfitt, Greg Stuart and Citrix's own Simon Crosby and Mark Templeton ) have to say about Citrix.

• By Bruce Hoard
• 05/01/2011

This issue's cover story on Citrix provided me with a handful of great quotes from a gaggle of really smart people. For your reading pleasure, I packaged the quotes with brief bits of information about their sources.

Take 1
Simon Crosby, CTO, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix. When it comes to unbridled bravura, Crosby is your man. His default setting is "Citrix can do it all," and when you listen to him, he makes a very compelling case for his claims:

"Our goal is to securely deliver the enterprise presence to any device that the user wants to pick up and use. And so the phenomenal growth in mobile, the spiking in traffic, the enormous number of devices that are getting shipped there -- this is all driving toward what Citrix would think of as the right Infrastructure as a Service, which is, how does the enterprise securely deliver access to its employees on a device."

Take 2
Mark Templeton, president and CEO, Citrix. Talk about a successful CEO -- this guy just keeps bringing home the bacon year after year, dating back to 1998. During 2010, the price of Citrix stock nearly doubled with him at the helm:

"Playing well with others is our DNA. Going back to day one, trying to connect different types of devices to a multi-user Windows system meant that you had to play well with Microsoft, with networks of all types, and devices of all types, including devices that would help invent things like thin clients, which we helped invent in collaboration with Wyse. So it sort of got in our DNA because of the customer value that we envisioned, that we were founded around, and I think that when something gets into your DNA, it really controls your behavior incrementally around everything you do. It's worked out well from a business point of view."

Take 3
Chris Wolf, research vice president, Gartner. My kingdom for a permanent key to this guy's thoughts. Wolf has a perfectly organized mind, and despite the fact that it's overstuffed with good information, he always answers questions concisely:

"From a bring-your-own-PC perspective, VMware View Local Mode can touch a lot more devices today than what Citrix can do in terms of getting a virtual desktop locally on a user's system."

Take 4
Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst, Entelechy Associates. Bramfitt kept good company as Chris Wolf's former stablemate at Burton Group before going off on his own:

"Being able to deliver Windows applications to almost any platform is a very important part of Citrix's value. When IT is no longer controlling the preferred mobile platform that its business users bring to the table, you have to have a very broad range of options to provide your preferred endpoint on. From that perspective, Citrix has got the most complete vision of any of the server-hosted desktop virtualization vendors."

Take 5
Greg Stuart, systems/network administrator and author of the vDestination blog. Stuart has been around the block a few times since he started in IT nine years ago. He moved up the ranks from the help-desk phone service to his current position with an IT consulting firm in Phoenix:

"Citrix Systems was born from the idea of unlocking applications from datacenters, and employees from the office -- changing the way IT and people work. Today, this is the promise of virtual computing, and Citrix is at the epicenter."

What's your take on Citrix? Let me know what you think at [email protected].