State of cloud from Citrix CTO of cloud

This article is reprinted from Building43.

Simon Crosby is the CTO for Citrix’ cloud business. Don’t know what he runs? Citrix’ Xenserver is underneath Rackspace Cloud, OpenStack, as well as Amazon’s S3. In other words, Crosby sees the infrastructure that runs the most important cloud infrastructures. Here Robert Scoble sits down with him for a long talk about what he’s seeing. Some things that come out in this 37-minute talk?

1. Enterprises live on apps, and those apps need to run both as apps on desktops, but increasingly as SaaS apps running on cloud.
2. iPads and iPhones are really hammering at IT departments to get them to change their practices.
3. The importance of open source and open approaches, compared to VMware and other approaches.
4. How businesses will get into the API world, which enables more apps like Siri.
5. The enterprise’s biggest challenge? Security.
6. 3.5 million desktops have been virtualized in past few quarters, which lets IT departments be more secure, even with laptops that can get stolen and/or lost.
7. He lashes out at VMWare, saying it’s a “factor of 10? more expensive than Citrix-based clouds.
8. Why Citrix is working with OpenStack and NASA to support opensource-based clouds.
9. How Citrix sells via different channels, direct to enterprise for some, through service providers, for others.
10. What he expects in 2011 in enterprise adoption of cloud technologies and how Apple is disrupting the enterprise. 40% of Citrix’ employees are bringing their own devices to work “incredible savings.”
11. What should developers pay attention to.
12. What mistakes enterprises are making when they get into cloud.
13. How OpenStack changes the world.

More info:
Citrix Xenserver website: http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=683148
Citrix: http://citrix.com/
Citrix on Twitter: http://twitter.com/citrix
OpenStack: http://openstack.com
Rackspace Cloud: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/
Simon Crosby on Twitter: http://twitter.com/simoncrosby

Full interview:

View the original article here