My 22 years at Citrix - A real pleasure!

January 31st was my last day at Citrix. It has been an amazing journey and I want to thank everyone at Citrix for allowing me to stay on this ride for 22 years. It is the people at Citrix that have made my time here so memorable.

When I started in 1998, I was employee 350. I did not think my time with Citrix would span a lifetime :), yet the company had a big vision and went about executing it.

Customers and partners were also a key part of my journey, they loved our products and were effectively part of the Citrix family. I remember my 1st Summit in Boca Raton in 1998 when Microsoft announced Terminal Server and how all our partners rallied to ensure Microsoft understood we were all in this together. Also our first Synergy (Thinergy ’98), we had customers eager to provide input and direction to ensure their deployments were successful. I met with a long term customer (20 years with Citrix) yesterday at the IGEL conference, and he said he has built his career and educated his children because of his success with Citrix!

The culture at Citrix is unique, Citrix please continue!

I want to write about my time at Citrix. Below is the starting summary (8 minute read)?. I hope to add to it with more details (and photos) over time and as others help me recall all the great activities over the last 22 years. Please connect with me on Linkedin so you can follow and hopefully correct/add to my story.

Never say never – I hope to see you all again.

[email protected]

A summary of my time at Citrix

I had the pleasure to work in sales & services, business development, product management, product marketing and alliances. I was based in Sydney for most of my time, spending 10 years in Fort Lauderdale; and I did have a remote office in Hong Kong. In total, I have had 15 office locations in these cities. I would estimate I worked in a remote location (hotel/Citrix sales location) for about 30% of my time. I had the pleasure to work all 24 hours in the work day… not all the time :). I have kept all my boarding passes and lanyards (photos to come).

Most think of me as the Microsoft guy, as I worked with great Citrites and Microsofties to turn our business with Microsoft around a few times, yet I have spent long periods in sales, with partners and in product management.

The initial APAC years

I had been in the industry for 20 years when I joined Citrix to build the APAC business in 1998. Citrix had just acquired a Citrix partner, DataPac, founded by Martin Duursma.

DataPac had about 27 employees and focused on reselling and adding value to WinFrame. They did have a few really smart developers; for example Anatoliy Panasyuk and Anil Roychoudhry, who created many of the early really cool Citrix innovations. DataPac also had a sales/presales team; Bjorn Engelhardt, Tim Blumentals, Garry, Matt Old, Belinda, and Mark Snell; Finance/HR, Roslyn Lim, Sarah Bennett. Scott Kaplan had been brought in from Citrix HQ to help the DataPac team transition and build the sales/inside sales team. Phil Osborne was the 1st Citrix employee in Australia and become the director of marketing for the new Citrix APAC expanded team. Citrix 1st office in Sydney was at West Pennant Hills (north west of Sydney). We did move the office to the North Ryde technology park, were at the peak we had 2 large floors; over this time, we had Advanced Systems Engineering, APAC Support, APAC Finance, as well as the sales and marketing HQ for APAC.

In my first 2 weeks, Mark Templeton visited Sydney for the 1st time. I had the pleasure to host him and his beautiful wife Yvonne. We did the usual rounds with press, partners and customers. back then live press conferences were the thing and we able to formally introduce Citrix to Australian customers. I started to understand the amazing culture through the way Mark worked. His interactions with staff, partners, customers and press where amazing, I was not used to this type of intimacy, everyone felt Mark was a “friend” spending the right amount of time to ensure the audience understood the uniqueness of Citrix.

Our first 5 years at Citrix APAC were focused on developing the business. We recruited new partners; Silver, Gold CSAs, signed up larger SIs and built go-to-market programs with the key alliances at the time, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Compaq, Digital and Dell. We had both Mark Templeton and Ed Iacobucci (and their wife’s) visit multiple times to ensure we were aligned and shared the amazing culture.

Building the business in Asia was a key goal, hiring people in New Zealand, Singapore, Honk Kong, Korea and India. I also made a few trips to Japan, to help them build the business as we had all new people starting Citrix Japan (and I have 6 month Citrix experience at this time ?). We invested in direct sales management, hiring a director of sales – Moheb Moses, and a great team of sales/presales and marketing Citrites; Phil Dean-Jones, Anil Menon, Malis Selamat, Karl Verhulst, Carl Terrantroy, Deepa Swaminathan, Gabrielle Seacy, Michael Abel, Michael McGrath, Sally Riordan, Andrew Cashmore, Angela Head, Bradley Anstis, Sean Walsh and Michael Dillon. We hired Lee Laborczfalvi, Michael Harries and Steve Parry in engineering. Andrea Stone moved from HQ to work in HR, we hired Richard Parnell and Andrew McPherson in support; and Eric Felipe and Wayne Masters in finance. We brought over Stuart Driver from the UK to run IT.

Of all the APAC regions, India was the hardest area to recruit new employees, the market was hot and each time a candidate accepted and was about to start, they would call and advise, ‘sorry another job came thru’, even on their start date. So we decided to do an acquisition, buying a small systems integrator, Boca Powertel, to accelerate the business in India. Immediately we had a team in India, with 35 employees. We quickly educated them on Citrix and the India business started! From this acquisition we got Vishal Khare who stayed at Citrix for 20 years. We hired Souma Das to run our India business, we had offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi. This was a few years before we acquired NetScaler and started India R&D.

We build a great channel all over APAC and also closed some very large direct sales deals. Our first million dollar deal was the Commonwealth Bank, closely followed by NRMA. The ANZ enterprise business was a highlight with many of the large ANZ organizations buying into Citrix. Today we continue to have a very large share of enterprise customers in ANZ using Citrix.

When Citrix renewed their development agreement with Microsoft in the late 90s, China was opened to Citrix APAC. I was the 1st Citrite to visit China, getting the business off the ground with distribution and aligning with the key alliance partners; Microsoft and IBM. During my first visit in 1999, I had a (non IT) translator helping me with these meetings. I had so many meetings in my frist visit, by the end of this trip the translator was so comfortable explaining the Citrix business, he would answer the questions partners/press were asking without my input… I really did not know what he was saying ?, the business did start and we started to invest in China.

While working hard in APAC, we had a great team in corporate HQ supporting us. Jose Carrejo, David Jones, Bill Burley, Denis Rose, Marisa Steller, Stephanie Reise and the then leadership team, Mark Templeton, Roger Roberts and Ed Iacobucci.

Thank you to the early APAC team!

Moving to Fort Lauderdale - Corporate HQ the 1st time.

I moved to the US in 2002 into business development to specifically manage Microsoft. The Microsoft terminal server product group had decided to try it alone and was getting competitive with their messaging around terminal server RDS(Bear Paw). Mark Templeton and David Jones asked me to move to corporate to see how we could resolve this completive threat. We tuned around the situation and became the 1st Microsoft partner of the year in 2003 and have won this awards many times since. We elevated the relationship with Microsoft getting Mark T invitations to the Microsoft CEO conferences. On many occasions Microsoft called Citrix their best partner and referred many other developing partners to Citrix when they asked Microsoft how can they improve the relationship! From 2003-2011 the Microsoft relationship was very healthy. There is a whole chapter in one of the channel books on the uniqueness of the Citrix/Microsoft alliance.

I was then asked to stay in the US and lead the PM/PMM for XenApp product for 2.5 years, getting the XenApp business to over $1 billion. Product health/quality was an issue. We put more process/testing into engineering/development, built a ‘suite’ strategy, creating the Platinum edition and did a few smaller acquisitions. The highlight for me was getting Citrix IT to deploy XenApp tech preview internally. We had over 700 users running the tech preview and found some serious bugs before release! Once released, larger customer orders started to happen as many customers standardized on XenApp as the best way to deliver their applications and windows desktops.

(more content to come)

Returning to APAC/APJ.

When I returned to APAC, in 2008 (a family decision to go back to Australia), my focus was business development and GEO product growth. I spent a lot of time in the emerging regions; India, China, and Asia. We got the ANZ business even more focused on enterprise sales closing some very large deals. I had the channel teams report to me in the initial year, then we hired a fulltime channel lead. I spend time with customers, partners and internally as the APAC product lead, education Citrix corporate on APJ and ensuring new/updated products addressed the needs of the APJ customers. We had strong growth in APAC between 2010-2014.

(more content to come)

Again? Moving to Fort Lauderdale a second time.

I was asked to return back to corporate HQ in 2015. Two big problems needed addressing; product growth and Microsoft compete.

I immediately put focus on the areas that needed attention – XenApp/XenDesktop (the product was down 8%), we had over invested in VDI! The feature gap between the older 6.5 product and the new 7.x was our focus. Focus was on getting new innovation into the process in order to get customer confidence back, working closely with all GEOs to improve product needs. We started the process of getting needed acquisitions back on the table, and under my watch we acquired, technology from Comtrade, Norskale and Unidesk. “We love XenApp” was our message ?. I worked to re-organize the PM team, Sridhar Mullapudi reported to me and I worked with him to setup managers to focus on the above areas and started to develop him for a VP role. XenApp was up 8% as I handed over the role to Sridhar reporting to PJ Hough. One of my last PM activities was working on the long term strategic initiatives. Chris fleck and I were assigned getting Citrix into a leadership position in the web app/SaaS world. We developed the key initiative/concept of the digital workspace, adding an embedded browser to Citrix Receiver and getting our key innovations in networking/access controls into the core workspace strategy.

On the Microsoft relationship which had become competitive again due to our mobility strategy, I knew what needed to happen and started the process working with Microsoft and the various Citrix product teams. Firstly, we removed the mobility conflict in the field, getting field engagement happening again and the Microsoft field back on our side. Then we quickly built back the relationship with the RDS development team and worked on how we can work better together. This engagement resulted in Microsoft seeing the value of Citrix again, allowing us to better integrate into their platform/Azure and seeing the value of Citrix cloud and virtualization on Azure. We drove the Microsoft relationship into a mutually beneficial focus again. As part of this engagement Microsoft agreed to de-commission Azure Remote App (A key compete issue for XenDesktop/XenApp), and we agreed to build special versions of XenApp and XenDesktop on Azure leaving Citrix Cloud as the best virtualization solution on Azure.

When Citrix moved the alliances organization into the product group under PJ Hough, I moved away from directly managing the Microsoft/product relations and PM activities in general and was asked to build and lead a great team of solution architects, building content to enable partners and customers to accelerate the deployment of our solutions. I did stay actively involved in product strategy as I worked with the alliances team on alliance technical engagement/strategy. Additional to the solution architecture leadership, with my extensive experience, I did regular customer and partner meetings, EBCs and external presentations at the various industry events. Also I was involved in many internal presentations/personal development and mentoring for director workshops, leadership development and sales training – passing on skills, knowledge and a lot of customer stories. Over the main years, I had the pleasure to meet many customers, working with our sales teams, getting into the C-suite, driving the agenda top down.

PS Previous to Citrix I spent 6 years, with Microsoft, 4 years at SIs in sales and business management and 10 years with Burroughs/Unisys.

To be modified/continued…on LinkedIn

Never say never!?.