Cloud Revenue Shift

CF: As a public company, Citrix was constantly under pressure to move more cloud business, more recurring revenue, but for the way Citrix compensated partners, it wasn’t always to their advantage to do promote that shift. How are you addressing that now?

EF: There’s a lot to that. I don’t think that was necessarily a Citrix move. I think the ecosystem is moving to a recurring revenue cloud-based model. And one of the dynamics that has changed in the last 12-18 months is partner models have evolved into that as well. So, we’re getting partners pulling us along as much as we are encouraging them. You’re certainly going to see a focus from us around ARR and recurring revenue.

CF: What kind of activity do you expect to see this year in terms of customers either staying with the on-premises hosted model or moving more aggressively to the cloud or shifting to a hybrid mix?

EF: This is my personal belief, but I think where many customers are landing is in some flavor of hybrid. And I think folks have become much more adept at looking at use cases and [finding] what’s right for what they’re trying to accomplish with this initiative. And sometimes it’s a mix of what’s right for that within a specific initiative, which leads you to the hybrid. But some applications are going to run better in the cloud. And some, whether it’s security concerns or connectivity issues, may need to be closer to home and on prem, which is why I think you see a lot of people landing in that hybrid model.