2: The Citrix Session – On-Prem License Server Usage Insights Powered by Citrix Cloud

Hello everyone, and welcome to the second episode of the Citrix session. I'm your host Andy Whiteside. I have with me, uh, bill Sutton, the director of services for his Integra bill. How's it going? Going well. Andy, how about you? I am doing well. We also have with us the art authors of this blog. Um, Kelly and Daniel and Daniel Kelly. How are you guys doing? We're happy to be here. Thanks for having us on guys. As we talked about the, uh, the idea here is to give people in the world of Citrix, specifically an Avenue for catching up on blogs. And we encourage people to let us know if there's blogs that they would like to have the authors on for us to go through. But Kelly and Daniel are responsible for this blog. This blog was called a new on-prem license server usage insights powered by Citrix cloud. I gotta tell you guys as a guy who's been using Citrix[inaudible]

Speaker 2:
0:42

quality since the late nineties, I needed this for a whole time, either in my own environment or customer environments where has pliancy for the customer in terms of usage and what they own.

Speaker 1:
0:51

Oh, this right. And I'm, I'm believe it or not, I'm extremely excited to talk about Citrix license. I guess we'll, we'll jump into the article. Bill, do you have any, any thoughts before we jump?

Speaker 3:
0:59

Yeah, sure. I was just going to echo what you said, Andy. I think this is a, you know, as a former consultant and, and a administrator for customers, I, this is a great offering particularly for those enterprises with far flung or you know, disparate type of environments. Um, giving them visibility into their, uh, their license, their licenses, and allowing them to track the usage, but also gives them the opportunity to be able to reallocate where those licenses are. Perhaps not needed in one location but needed, but are needed in another location that makes it a lot more seamless for them to do that.

Speaker 1:
1:29

I think it's a great offering. Yeah, that's great. That actually brings a topic to my mind is can they, can they share this information with their, their value added reseller or their partner in the space? And I guess if I don't ask that later, remind me that I think that speaks really valuable. But Kelly, do you want to give a, just a little background on who you are?

Speaker 4:
1:44

Sure, yeah. I'm so, I'm telling Mahoney, I'm a product manager on the situa platform. I am responsible for, um, the license every usage and site new feature, which I'm really excited to talk about that.

Speaker 1:
1:54

All right, great. Thank you. You know what, Kelly, um, let me ask you this real quick. So there used to be a video that explained how user device licensing within the Citrix product works. This happened about the time it came out, uh, when we moved from concurrent only to concurrent or user device. You'd even remember what video I'm talking about. You wear that.

Speaker 4:
2:10

I'm actually not[inaudible].

Speaker 1:
2:11

Daniel, do you, uh, have you ever seen that video? I don't know if I've seen the actual video, but I certainly know a lot about user device slicing and all the interesting behaviors optimization on the license server with that. So CCU user device products, addition model. I've seen it all I think. I think based on that, Daniel, I would love to have another session that's just a deep dive into Citrix licensing. It'd be kind of off the, uh, off the[inaudible] off the topics of blogs specifically. But I would love to have a, a webinar that we record to kind of go through a podcast. We record to go through that topic and if you guys, if there's any way, and there used to be a thing called Citrix TV that's now kind of moved to YouTube and that, uh, that particular video never made it over to YouTube TV that I know of and I've wanted to show it to customers ever since I lost it. But it's really good at explaining how if you log in from a device, uh, the device gets a license. But if that same user logged in somewhere else and it's, it's, it's cartoonish and it's got some, a good graphics that go along with it, I would, I would love to see that revisited because people are really used a lot of times.

Speaker 5:
3:08

All right, well I'll have to see if I can track down this video you're referring to now. I remember Citrix. Stevie, yeah. And some of it port it to YouTube but not all of it.

Speaker 1:
3:14

Right. Okay. Hey Daniel, do you want to give a quick bio on yourself?

Speaker 5:
3:17

Yeah, sure. My name is Daniel[inaudible] and working with Citrix for 13 years now. I started out in engineering roles, so I was writing the code a lot on the virtual apps and desktop product line or formerly the Zen app,[inaudible] presentation servers or you guys have gone through a few name changes. And then about five years ago now, I transitioned to the product management role and was part of the team that started and ignorantly run and build out today. But in an exciting five years is the PM and one of my responsibilities along with kind of the core citrus cloud platform is our licensing technology estate. So whenever I'm in a context of a licensing conversation, I always, I always preface it, I don't own pricing and packaging, but I do own kind of the licensing technology, the meters, the dial, the good and the bad and new and the old. So it's been fun to kind of dig in on on like and excited to talk about some of our investments coming to fruition here today with the content and the blog and things like that. Thanks for having,

Speaker 1:
4:07

no, that's great. You know I kind of let it let one of my little secrets out here. Historically on the consulting side of Citrix, right, if I walked into a client and I knew what the product was currently call cause of the name changes, which by the way I agree with the name changes that the marketing guys have to keep things looking fresh and moving forward. So I, I totally agree with that. Even though it does come down to a challenge sometimes for the technical guys, knowing what things are called and knowing how licensing works for those things. A lot of times if you just know those two things, you come off as a Citrix expert, whether you know how to set it up or not, which for the most part I can know how to set things up right. But just knowing those two things and how to talk through it is a very big value add for clients and a lot of cases it makes, uh, makes really assaulted to look like they have a good handle on the Citrix.

Speaker 4:
4:43

So that's actually something that's really cool about this new feature. I might be getting ahead of myself, but, um, our new feature maps feature code to the product name. So if you did buy, I'm a legacy product or you bought the product a really long time ago, our feature mapped it to the new product name so anybody can go into the page and, and the, the current and the old. Huh.

Speaker 1:
5:03

Well that's great. Um Hm. I like to see that in action at some point. Cause so Kelly you're saying that, um, the name kind of transitions through the portal and you'll be able to see legacy names along the way. Um,

Speaker 4:
5:14

so yeah, so you won't be able to see legacy names, but we have Feeser codes assigned to'em all of our different products and those, those feature codes are map as a new product.

Speaker 1:
5:23

I'm sorry Andy. So that would be like a, you know, standard advanced enterprise mapping to advanced enterprise platinum or what have you. Yeah,

Speaker 4:
5:31

correct.

Speaker 5:
5:32

Okay. Yeah, one of the big goals with that in the experience was just make sure that the language and terminology we're using for the customers in citrus cloud today is aligned to the offerings we have. So if they're in the experience and they're seeing they're running out of licenses, they know exactly what model in addition they would buy if they wanted to add to[inaudible]. Sure.

Speaker 1:
5:51

Makes sense. Yeah. That's great. Well guys, let's, uh, let's jump into this blog under, this may sound a little strange, but I actually do want to go through the blog, kind of a section by section, even paragraph by paragraph to make sure that people are getting the content from it. I, I, I love how it starts and we kind of hit it on here for it admins doubling licensing, whether it's Citrix or, or Adobe or, or dare I say Microsoft. Uh, it's a challenge, right? And, and there's business justification for why it's extremely important to understand what licenses you have, uh, which ones you own and which ones you're using, right? There's lots of organizations out there spinning a lot of money on software licensing for products. They, they're not actually using, uh, in Citrix is doing a big favor to the Citrix admin here by giving them one place to go look on an aggregated grout with one on. So if I jump into the, uh, the simplify licensing management section of the blog, uh, there's three bullets that are highlighted here. One says, managing solution, uptime and reliability. Uh, Daniel Kelly, any things you want to share about that particular topic?

Speaker 4:
6:44

Definitely. So a big problem is, especially for on prem environments, is customers aren't able to see, you know, what their usages, how close they are to running out. Um, and that's what is, um, a huge, really cool feature about this is because users no longer have to go from license server to license server. That usage is all conveniently laid out in a nice dashboard in the, in the plot.

Speaker 1:
7:07

Yeah. Especially good for people who have multiple license servers, multiple locations, multiple companies, multiple departments. Yeah, I could see that being a big, big[inaudible].

Speaker 5:
7:14

So the, what I'd add, what I'd add is just that I'm in the on-prem deployments today, if you run out of licenses, users can't connect. So if you're in charge of the Citrix estate and you're running critical workload, which tons and tons of customers are hospitals, banks, all centered, etc. And you run out of licenses or forget to put a new file on after your nude, et cetera. You have an outage and in this day and age that out, you know, outages and downtime in your it environment if money out the door. Right. So it's just an area that admins need to be on top of. It's not a hard thing to do, but if you lose sight of it, it can really[inaudible].

Speaker 1:
7:43

Yeah, no, that's definitely, it's in, you know, the business relies on it and we're supposed to be in an enablement enabler for the business and right. If we don't have licenses, especially in a world where we're user device licenses, it was one thing back in the day when it was concurrent and you just bought a whole bunch of extra and spent extra money. But now that we're trying to be much more efficient with user device sizes, it, it really has become a challenge to make sure you've had the license covered without overspending at the same time.

Speaker 5:
8:04

Yeah. And user behaviors changing. So more and more devices are connecting, which could impact your utilization. Right. So it's good to just have eyes on it and be aware of what's, if you're running out or not, or if you have, your file needs to be up.

Speaker 1:
8:15

Well, and if we're doing our job right as Citrix admins with the demand should be growing for the product that we're providing to the business. And hopefully we're gonna run out of licenses because that means we're doing our job well. Yeah. So let's, uh, let's, uh, let's talk about the second bullet, which I think goes right along with that. And bill, feel free to just jump in at any point in time. I'll try to leave some pregnant pauses in there for all year too. But the next topic is, uh, maintaining business compliant, I think goes right along with what we were just talking about. Daniel. Kelly, anything additional that you'd want to add that we haven't covered yet?

Speaker 5:
8:41

Yeah, I mean, those are me on the compliance side. It's, it's more and more front and center in, in organizations today where they have an activity that they have to basically inventory what we've purchased, who's getting it and essentially prove to compliance or other accounting officers within company that we're compliant here and that there's no risk that we're going gonna get a bill later on cause we were overusing and or get hit with an overage fees or something else. So people are responsible within these organizations for producing those rewards and owning that inventory and reporting on it. And it's frankly can be quite the burden because it's, what's interesting about it is it's a mix between the technical world where Citrix admin need to kind of go digging for this information on license service today and a business function, which is like, Hey, where's the report? I need to send it upstream. So usually there's multiple stakeholders involved in this end to end process and this solution is positioned so that you know the technical teams and go and do their thing one time, update these license servers and get the usage flowing into this side, new cloud reporting UI. And then other stakeholders can come in just to the cloud portal and read and consume that data and take it forward on reports. So there's no longer this like hard linkage of people and process where a ticket gets created, the admin has to run around to the licensed servers, scoop up all the data. They probably send it over and 10 different Excel sheets to the compliance guy. Then they get stuck merging it all together and they're, you know, it's probably a little tug of war of who's delivering what. But ultimately there's a bunch of people involved and needs to get done. And this is, this is here to help in a streamline that and let everyone have a better experience.

Speaker 1:
10:11

Yeah, no, absolutely. I've seen that firsthand and most of the time it's a, they'll turn around and lacrosse table at me and say, can you help me figure this out? Cause most of them, they don't even know. They just know they have X number of licenses they bought, they put them on the server and that's it.

Speaker 3:
10:22

Yeah, I know. I know as a former accountant slash auditor that asking customer finance folks for software licensing is always a, historically when I did that was always a a met with blank stares. Um, and often a rush to try to obtain the information in a form that was sufficient for our purposes in something like this certainly would make the life easier for our admins to be able to demonstrate that in a consolidated fashion without all the effort necessary to do it. Which is pretty much another way of saying what you just said, Daniel. Yeah. Hopefully they can self service right in that role that happens do at once and they'd get it set up and they say, guys, the information's here if you need it, go get it.

Speaker 1:
10:57

Yes. Self-service real time. That's what's so awesome about it. So, uh, next bullet we have here is a mitigating solution costs I understanding license usage, you know, helps for trends and forecasting. Uh, Daniel, Kelly, anything additional you want to talk about that topic?

Speaker 4:
11:09

Uh, so this is really neat because it's really so hard to write lies how many licenses you need. Um, because gathering the data on how many licenses you use is such a complicated process. So this is why it's so neat is because you're able to actually see how much you're using and you can use that to predict how much you're going to use, um, or, you know, find the package, uh, of, of licenses that work for you.

Speaker 1:
11:32

That's interesting. Um, are there other, or to kind of change topics slightly, but are there other licensing tools that aggregate multiple vendor types of licensing that, uh, what would the on prem solution that reports up to the cloud could also report?

Speaker 5:
11:44

Are you thinking like, and you helped me with my spa license?

Speaker 1:
11:47

Well, uh, like Avanti for example, has a licensed server that aggregates their, um, that aggregates a of different vendor software vendors licensing into one place. Obviously goal for Citrix and maybe this is a longterm goal here.[inaudible] repository in the cloud, uh, for not just Citrix licensing but other type of icing. But I guess I should go back and claim that the way the solution works, right? You're on prem licensed server or your cloud licensing or both. They kind of aggregate into one single place. That's kind of the goal of this whole thing I believe. Is there a longterm plan to bring in other software vendors where you're aggregating their licenses? Right.

Speaker 5:
12:18

Well, so we don't have answer to really like be a, you know, have an offering that helps partners or customers manage across, you know, a bunch of different vendors. I could see areas where, you know, Citrix has an offering dependent on a Microsoft license and we want to sell it as a single subscription price so we and a roll in or bundle other vendors as needed into an offering. And in that, in that use case, I could see us having that experience where we're even like looking at some of that with our desktop as a service offering and that licensing experience as far as like, Hey, can I get my storage vendors usage within the Citrix cloud portal? Honestly, it's not something on our, on our current plans or strategy. We're focused really on our own house of licensing right now. And once we get all that right, we might be able to open our doors to some different use cases. You certainly have a roadmap ahead of us for our own licensing estate and lots of interesting changes there happening at Citrix as we go into the cloud and look at our offering strategy. So I think there'll be keeping us busy on the Citrix side or something.

Speaker 1:
13:10

Well, and that's what's so interesting about the world of Citrix these days, right? You have the premier on prem virtual app and desktop solution. Um, you've got to move that too as a service, AKA cloud. And so, yeah, you're right and you've got a, you've got the best product to move to the cloud, but that creates a whole nother problem of moving the best, most robust product to the cloud. Uh, so yeah, you guys are gonna be busy for a while, but you're, you're definitely making some big strides for sure.

Speaker 5:
13:31

We definitely hear that request before though from our service provider partners especially who have, you know, Microsoft, SPLA and other types of licensing running under the solution. And a lot of times Citrix is that at workspace experience we deliver that encapsulates a lot of these other vendors stuff. So it'd be great if we could cover all that, but it's just something that we're going to be cautious not to extend ourselves into that area until our offerings super on point.

Speaker 1:
13:52

The guys, the, uh, the next session of the blog is titled, uh, easier navigation of licensing. Before we jump into that, I'll make one quick comment. I talk to people all the time and I ask them, you know, what version of Citrix are they running? And, uh, most of the time they come back with a number and then ask them what edition they're running the most time they come back with a number. So their addition will be seven dot. 15. I'm like, no. What addition are you running a virtual apps and desktops service or you're running a premium, what used to be called platinums and desktop? Now it's called virtual address. That, but my, my pointing all that is a lot of times people are confused by what addition means. Uh, this next section, their article talks about how this aggregation of the licensing with the additions being called out as going to help people be able to more readily answer that question real time with valid information. Daniel. Kelly, thoughts on how you guys are accomplishing?

Speaker 4:
14:35

Definitely. So this is kind of what I touched on earlier about the um, mapping the products code, sorry, the product addition, um, that we are basically trying to build an experience where the data is digestible. Um, just because we do know that there are so many different additions, um, services and all that and different licensing models are really big. Um, our, our goal of this page is to make licensing easier to understand

Speaker 3:
15:00

and kind of along those same lines relative to easy to understand. I, I know that we'll probably touch on this in a minute, so I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but nevertheless, um, is it really Kelly as simple as the latest version of the license server and you point it to the cloud account and that's pretty much it. I mean, is it really that simple for a customer to set up?

Speaker 4:
15:17

Yeah. So it's actually only three steps, right? So you're going to make, yeah, so you're going to make sure that your lights and servers on the latest version, um, the, the, the, the, the version that that handle this new feature is going to be 11 point 18. Um, and all you have to do is register that license over with the trout. Um, it's a very, it's a very easy process. We really wanted to make the registration process as easy as possible and then all you have to do is log on to your citrus pod platform and your data's flowing right then and there.

Speaker 1:
15:44

Cool. I'm probably just to confirm, it's 11. Dot. 15 of the licensed server is the version that's needed. And then anything after that, in theory you should be able to report, does it need some type of a service account to report it to the cloud or is it anonymous?

Speaker 5:
15:55

Do need a citrus cloud account. So you'll, you'll kind of explicitly register your license server to your citrus cloud account. We use a code based approach, kind of like if you've done an Apple TV or a Roku or consumer device there, you get a code on the license server, you log into your Citrix cloud account, put the code in, and then it basically links them up. Yes. But creating a stitch spot accounts, super easy. Uh, all the whole solution is free. So there's no entitlement or urges or subscription and you need to own the use this kit. And when you upgrade your license server, unless you're really coming from like 1991, you can do an in place upgrade, uh, and its next, next, next. You don't have to move. License files are massive. Any of that stuff. So very lightweight too.

Speaker 3:
16:33

And presumably we can assure our customers that has no impact whatsoever on the ability of their products to check licenses out or return them to the license start over. Cause that's going to be one of the first things is going to come out of some customers in the houses. It's just gonna mess up my licensing delivery. And obviously the, the answer to that question is no, but I felt like we might want to restate.

Speaker 5:
16:51

That's correct. There is no impact to your existing environment. No real overhead on the license server because a lot of the usage is there anyway. We're just really getting it bundled and transplants moving it as interest.

Speaker 1:
17:01

Perfect. That's great. Hey, a quick question, quick technical question here. If a, if the user who do connected it to Citrix cloud leaves the organization, does it still continue to function yet? Yeah, so

Speaker 5:
17:10

it's a, registration is a, is actually a new thing we brought to market with this solution. So it's kind of behind the scenes of this, but product registration is something you'll be seeing more of across the Citrix portfolio, especially products that need to securely communicate to Citrix cloud, which is pretty much all our products these days. So, uh, there's a process involved there where you need to get an API key or what we refer to sometimes as a service key that will allow you to call citrus cloud API APIs from that product or server on prem. And that registration process is what basically negotiates that API key. And so the registration, there's a, there's a page within the citrus cloud admin portal called product registration. It's tucked into the identity and access management access area. And there you'll see a list of all the licensed servers or other devices that you've registered with Citrix cloud. And that's where like if you wanted to pull the rug out so to speak on the solution, you would could go and delete that registration. Um, but ultimately admins can come and go within your citrus cloud management lane and environment and your registrations aren't linked. Any specific admin there and independent registrations on their own. So no issues with multiple people being registering multiple different license servers. You can unregister and reregister it if you registered it to one account and realized, Oh I actually want to be in this Citrix fraud account with that usage. Let me reregister it. So we support all that type of love.

Speaker 1:
18:27

No, that's great. Okay guys, let's uh, let's keep going. Uh, you can tell we're excited about the licensing in general. Citrix licensing is crazy as that sounds. Um, cause we could probably talk about this all day. The next section of the article is a managed Citrix licensing across all deployments. I think we've hit on that a little bit, but some of the bullets that are caught out here are our mergers and acquisitions migrations from old environments to new. I mean we see that every day as well as the mergers. In addition, a test and development environment, every Citrix admin should have a test environment that is aligned with their production environment. And this is a great way to kind of help that come together and, and see where licenses are being used, where a multi multiple data center and multi-cloud environments, um, you know, that's, you don't go outside and look and see one cloud, you go outside and look multiple cloud, which as we all know is just somebody else's data center providing you a service. So a great way to this is yet another way to kind of aggregate those services. And then high availability and disaster recovery guys, I mean we could talk about those topics for a month, probably between the four of us, but uh, Daniel and Kelly, do you want to kind of hit on what you are covering there in that section? The artist?

Speaker 4:
19:26

Yeah, definitely. So something we really want to emphasize with this new feature is this concept of a single pane of glass. Um, so you know, traditionally in order to get this data you'd have to go from licensed server to license server. You'd have to get all the data, aggregate it yourself, um, and then, you know, hand it over to whoever you needed to hand it over or you know, do it. But what's so neat about this is it's all just right there on one page, um, and it broken down in a way to where you can, um, you know, see how everything's organized, you have your usage, um, and then go into the use detailed view to see a historical trend of um, you know, how, how it's performed over time. Um, and so on.

Speaker 5:
20:02

Yeah, I think this is one of the big value adds to this solution is the aggregation layer because a lot of customers have multiple licensed servers deployed out there. And the activity to actually get to like, what is my licensing estate or my Citrix estate all up is painful. If you do it yourself, you've got to run around and do these licensed servers, take the data to go into Excel or some other tool and merge it all up. And of course, that's just a snapshot of time. So a month goes by, the audit guy comes by again, you gotta do it all over again. It's just cycle. And, and by the way, who has access to the Citrix license server? Some of you are probably highest paid admin, so you're ticketing against a pretty costly individuals to go and do some of these activities. So this is really a good play for us and we're, we're able to then organize and aggregate around the additions and modes so that, you know, you can see how much GCU platinum do I have my state and something like that. It's really interesting as you acquire and kind of merge with other companies because pretty sure when they were doing the big a acquisition deal, they weren't looking at the Citrix licensing a state and what it would mean to bring it together, right? All that happens after the fact, it lands on a Citrix team to say, Hey, by the end of the year, get us all aligned on the same texts solution. Right? And by the way, we need all the same apps and all that other stuff too. So just one of many aspects of that Citrix, you know, joining those two Citrix worlds together across the merger or acquisition, but a good one from the kind of business process. And how many licenses do we own now? Now that we're two companies in one. Okay.

Speaker 1:
21:22

Daniel, you're saying that company a buys company B and nobody thinks whether the technologies in place to support it. I'm joking, but yeah. Well no, you're right. That's, I think about it in terms of ERP or CRM. So the, the, the applications, right? They think about the applications. At least we hope they do. But the thing that makes the application work, whether it's the infrastructure in the middleware, those are often afterthoughts. And that's what you guys are pointing out here is this is a way to, uh, if you can't get ahead of it, at least be able to react. Very.

Speaker 5:
21:49

Yeah. And, and there's, there's so many changes going on across those companies and organizations during that time. So it's easily, it's easy to overlook this activity of like, well, let's true up on all our Citrix licensing, make sure we're not overspending now that we made all these organizational changes across companies and what a better way, right? Just get the information going to cloud and then you can see a trend over time with a solution like this. You could actually see kind of some of the historic reporting we provide. Things kind of settle in right after the org, right? And Hey, we're going to be consolidating this to there and now we're seeing the less licensed servers on our list and manage, et cetera. So it's just a good tool for that. And you know, long running process of bringing those worlds.

Speaker 1:
22:25

It's a great use of the cloud, AKA yet another service that can provide value and efficiencies. I love it. And again, I keep apologizing for getting excited about Citrix licensing, but this is, this has been something we've all needed for a long time. He, uh, the next section of the, uh, the blog or his, uh, licensed server status, I gotta admit, right? I'm an old school Citrix admin slash consultant. I still to this day, you know, kind of have a nightmare where I wake up and wonder is the licensed server up and running? I'm on, am I in that 30 day grace period? I see this is it really valuable way to to find out the status of the Citrix environment of the lysine, which as you pointed out in earlier, if it's not up, it can bring the whole thing on as well as a Microsoft remote desktop service license. But the bullets we have here is a licensed server reports every 24 hours, uh, licensed usage shown, uh, the usage tab to source only from a reporting license reporting, licensing servers are licensed servers and historical license usage is not a, it doesn't go away whenever that, uh, that server has been decommissioned from the portal. How do you want to kind of expand on some of those types?

Speaker 4:
23:24

So it's basically all there, right? So, um, licensed servers report every 24 hours, they're going to appear on this list, um, as reporting if they've reported in the last three days. And after, after three days they'll appear as not reporting. Um, and once they're not reporting for 30 days will fall off the list. Um, we also really want to make it known that all of the usage data on the net Hab going to come from reporting license servers. Um, so we know that that data is flowing. We know everything's going, going well. Um, and, but the, but the really cool thing about the historic work trend that we're, that we're introducing is the historic trend isn't impacted by the reporting status. So that means if a lifer falls off, um, the, the historical trend will, will stay as true, um, up to that point.

Speaker 1:
24:09

Yeah, that's great. Just, just the ability to see them a machine is up and able to communicate properly with the service, uh, gives you that peace of mind, uh, as a city can.

Speaker 5:
24:18

Yeah. I want to, I want to just add a little bit to what Kelly was saying. When we, when we set out to build this experience and we're in the usage tab rather than the license server tab, the conversation becomes, well what usage are we showing? How fresh is the data? And if a license server recorded 45 days ago but it hasn't reported recently, should we show that usage and in what capacity? Right. And so we tried to get to a very simple straight or an essence to customers here, which boils down to if the license server says it's reporting in the status page then and you go over to the usage page, the usage is all from these reporting license servers. And in the same way, if you're looking at the usage and you, and you're wondering, well what licensed servers are reporting this usage? It's the ones that are marked as reporting, right? And so a licensed server on your list with not reporting is not only one that hasn't sent us data recently, but it's anything that it sends us, you know, in the last 10 days or something like that. Depending on these rules we defined wouldn't appear in that usage task. So we just wanted to make sure we got a clear message to customers on what is the usage and the usage tab, where's it coming from and when would I expect if I decommissioned a license server, when would that usage like not be in that view anymore? Right. And basically based on these rules that three days after you decommissioned the licensed server, it's going to fall out of your like an opinion view. But as we roll over month over month on those trend, the historic stuff's going to stay. We wouldn't want to go impact your whole year's history after you Solidated your license servers or something like that. So it's a simple experience on a work by Kelly and the team behind the scenes to actually have a plan that strategy for them. Yeah. I imagine a lot of discussions went on about what to report and what not to

Speaker 1:
25:50

reports. So I certainly think what you said just then, Daniel makes perfect sense. Great approach to it guys. I've gotta be honest. I'm sitting here thinking about those conversations that were happening in conference rooms mean two weeks and months ahead of time and I just, I'm just so glad I wasn't there. Um, he um, I did have a topic for your alone that in terms of what you brought into the portal a, this is all information coming out of the license server. Is there any plans or is there any integration here with your, your my Citrix portal that goes and looks at what you owned that may not be on the license server that can also give you that insight?

Speaker 5:
26:19

That's a very question. Andy. You obviously know the licensing world pretty well. So maybe our, our approach here has been first I build an experience on that. Again, the customer messages, everything you see here is being called home premier license servers. So there's no, there's less confusion, right? It's a very complex area for customers to kind of digest. And so our first pass was, well let's get all the data from the environment, what's actually installed. It's actually in use and make sure we deliver that you're right in that the next click and opportunity for us is to kind of merge these two worlds of assets and entitlements that sit in kind of the Citrix back office as we like to call it sometimes. And you know, if our, our experience here is based around installed licenses in use and then kind of what's available based on what's installed, there could be another number ring in like how many do you own? Right. And I think it's the next frontier for us to kind of evolve that experience and bring them together. But we're currently focused on getting all the good data up on the screen, so it's not eminent that we'll have that like list of allocated license servers or here's all the licensed servers that could have reporting. But I think we could get there something.

Speaker 1:
27:24

Yeah, that sounds great. The next topic you guys have on here is it's called licenses installed in use and available. I think you're really talking about the UI here and there's really three areas, uh, that it focuses on. One is installed licenses. Uh, the other is licenses in use and the last of course is available licenses. And I want to dig into that a little bit. You have to kind of almost see the screen in order to fully absorb that. But do you want to talk through that?

Speaker 4:
27:46

Definitely. So this is just kind of breaking down what the numbers on the screen mean. Um, so this is so the users can be just kind of how their usage is going. So you know, the number of use is pretty straightforward. It's the number of licenses that are currently in use, um, installed as the same thing. Um, something to note that in installed number doesn't necessarily equate to how many licenses you own. Um, because this is on, cause this is an on prem environment, um, we're only able to get the data of how many licenses are actually installed on each license server. And then the number of available licenses is just a computation of, you know, what's left from the other two numbers.

Speaker 1:
28:25

Yeah. Thank you Kelly. Daniel, anything else to add to that? That was probably a good, really good number. Yes.

Speaker 5:
28:28

Yeah, I think it's just that this is where we're, we have our eyes open on that available account, right? So today, and this is where some of, there's some nuance and it wouldn't be Citrix licensing if there wasn't do us. Right? So, so in the cloud we have an experience for your cloud usage where we would a, your available kind of maps to how many urges and actually the cloud licensing is a lot simpler than the on prem license. But on prem the available count is actually what's available from the installed by. So it goes back to that conversation you sparked just a second ago. What is our opportunity here to have a purchased count or could be available be how many I actually own. It's a, it's an area we have to build those pipes into the Citrix back office and bring it into this area. But it's certainly something we can evolve. So just to run it back today and the on prem experience that we're talking about, a licensed server, all of the data comes from the licensed servers. So we're focused on what's installed versus what's in use. And then the difference, but definitely[inaudible]

Speaker 1:
29:17

well, I love what we're really talking about here. What we're really talking about here is something that's always been complex and let's give Citrix a break, right? So every software company that has capabilities, lots of capabilities, has licensed complexity, uh, in the on prem world because that's just what comes with it. But as you start to move to as a service, everything, whether it's licensing or the whole product, a lot of, um, complexity happens on the back end. But a lot of simplicity happen to the end user. And this is one way for customers to start hearing Citrix cloud, AKA Citrix as a service, which will help their world get easier, uh, while leading them towards the future, which is everything as a service, uh, depending on the architecture, right? There's lots of people who probably just cringed when I said that, but as a service is the direction everything will go. But it's just a, there's architectural challenges on cases, but in many cases that can, that can and has been[inaudible].

Speaker 5:
30:00

Yeah. And this is a really great solution for our customer, our citrus cloud customers who have onto the cloud subscription and the as a service model that comes with the hybrid rights, which means they have basically licenses to deploy our Ram or leverage the cloud service or a mixture of both as they make that migration into cloud. And so, you know, in our hybrid customers who are in that state where they might have use cases or to eliminate that, made it to cloud but are still dragging the other rest of the estate there, uh, they can have this mixture of both and see all the licensing on the land to Citrix cloud so they know what's running around, you know, when it's running in cloud and they know their client and have enough good debt for that cloud migration in addition to just running up.

Speaker 1:
30:36

Great. You guys, the, the last really final section of the article is probably what matters to a lot of people the most, and we've touched on some of it, but uh, it says get started with licensed server usage insights, which is the whole premise of this topic. But a depth one talks about getting to that the on prem licensed server version of 11. Dot 15. Dot zero.zero. And anything after that, you in theory would support the concept upgrading, you know, download it, upgrade your license server or licensed servers, uh, enroll in a usage insights from within that a software that you installed on the license server and then log into the, uh, the Citrix cloud. Uh, you know, cloud.citrix.com or citrix.cloud.com either way, get you there and start taking advantage of the insights that will be, uh, hooked up to the, uh, service, uh, on, uh, at least 24 hour basis. Right guys with that, any, uh, any thoughts on the steps there that I highlighted?

Speaker 4:
31:23

I think that we just want to reiterate is that his solution is available for free to customers. So it's a really great thing to take advantage of, um, to get that insight that you previously couldn't get before.

Speaker 1:
31:34

Yeah. You know, you can tell the technical guys cause we didn't even bring up the cost until the very end, but a cloud license or Citrix cloud account costs you nothing. Every customer is entitled to it and to integrate this licensed server usage into there also costs, you know to them. I'm glad you brought that up Kelly. Daniel you had something[inaudible]

Speaker 5:
31:50

yeah just the other thing I'd add that hear a lot from customers is of course everyone's very sensitive to the information that's being collected and shared and in today's world around privacy, GDPR, all those considerations and there is an option on the license server, you know like default. We actually send the username data so that you can look at a reward. All the users that pulled that your license and when they're last logged in time was, which is a pretty interesting insight or admins to know like is using licenses, how fresh and he's like that. But if you're sensitive to that and don't really want that username data going out to cloud and are interested in the license counts, there's a big lip on the license server in the registry that will actually scramble or op you skate all those usernames into like IDs that are non recognizable. So we do have a solution for those customers who are very sensitive to that. A user identifiable data going up into the cloud and they can turn that on and still use the solution to get 95% of the value. They just won't get that her visibility's if chosen and to turn that off. Yeah,

Speaker 3:
32:41

you know, that's great. We've, we've gone this far and I had missed that point that you can actually see which users are using which licenses. I kind of thought of it kind of at an aggregate, uh, that that is very valuable, but I can't see your point where some people would not want that information either visible to someone or in a cloud of some type. So definitely good that you guys have thought that far in advance. Hey bill, any closing thoughts or at least thoughts on this topic before we kinda start to wrap this thing up? Well, I, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask the typical question that all technical guys ask of folks from Citrix. And that is what's, what's coming in this arena to the extent you can talk about it. Well, what are you, what have you got planned for the future again, and to the extent you can mention

Speaker 4:
33:15

definitely. So what we're looking to introduce is, um, more licensed, licensed models. Um, we're hoping to release that soon. Um, we're also, uh, interested in breaking down the views on a per license server basis. Um, so instead of this aggregate view, you're able to drill down and see things, um, in a per license server, per product edition. So we're really excited about that. Um, we're looking into, um, some API APIs for that feature. And another big thing that we are really excited about, uh, investigating is this idea of a role based access control. Um, so that way you, you can set certain people's account, um, certain, uh, access so they can, you know, manipulate things. It can not manipulate thing though we're, we're really excited about the future.

Speaker 3:
33:59

Sure. What about like any thoughts about, uh, leveraging it for like ADC licensing or is the ADM still the go to for managing all of that? I think I'm thinking about things like pooled capacity and some of the newer developments in the ADC arena where something like this might be helpful to customers or are we really focused more on the, the, the administrative elements that are already associated with that for that

Speaker 5:
34:18

purpose? I mean, we've got a ton of stuff going on on our, on our broader licensing roadmap and set of priorities. But to address some of those things specifically, I think, you know, yes, we want to help our, our gateway and ADC counterpart at their licensing solution. They certainly have a level of complexity and needs that it rivals virtual apps and desktops so that they definitely would benefit a lot from this solution. We don't have anything that's coming out in a, in this quarter, but we're, we're working with that team. One of the technical challenges we have there is that, uh, on that ADC product line, they actually have like an edited version of the license server kind of running on the ADC, the Linux distro of the license and a call hold solution we build is all windows based on the kind of flagship, a windows based license server that run in the virtual apps and desktops environment. So we have a little bit of a technology port to support some of the same all homes abilities on those. We know how to do that. We've done it in the past actually with some use cases. So it's just a matter of building out that roadmap with them. But it's not eminent. But I definitely see it aligning in that direction. Some of the other stuff we're working on, like Kelly mentioned, really rounding out this experience, a brand new, Elliot just kind of launched it with this blog that we're talking about. If you were to see her whiteboard, it's this matrix of the supported products, additions, models, all that fun stuff. And like, so number one on the list is like CCU, right? And so we've been kind of caught talking in context of user device licensing yet we've got a ton of customers who love their CCU. And so we have a CCU experience coming. Kelly actually has a private preview going for it now where we can turn it on for customers. Working out a few kinks there. That's a really cool solution that tracks what we call milestone events, which are like your peak CCU. So peaks you see over the last seven days peak CCU for the month for a license server and aggregate and all time peak CCU. So some cool insights in there on the CCU and we have all these uh, designs queued up that we need to build to show the license load curve as we would refer to it. So, so the license load curve of how a farm loads and unloads and a CCU use case throughout the day is something we're super excited to bring to data visualization for our customers. So tons of cool stuff around enterprise insights. And then, you know, in the future of Citrix, the license server hopefully goes bye bye. Along with files and all the other allocation experience that we get to cloud activation, which is maybe another conversation for another time. Andy, on the Citrix session, I literally could talk all day.

Speaker 1:
36:32

Well certainly sounds like a, there's a lot to keep you and Kelly busy in this, in this arena anyways in the, in the near term. So that's a good thing. Licensing is really important and really where the, uh, the it in the business come together, right? That's where, that's where the money gets spent and then we have to go make it work. You guys, uh, I think bill did a really good job asking you what was next and that was going to be my next topic. But, uh, anything else between Kelly and Daniel that you guys would like to share with the group here? Uh, before we start to wrap it up. And I'd, Kelly, I've already requested from you another podcast topic. Hopefully we cover in the coming weeks, but I really appreciate you guys jumping on any, anything you would want a wide audience of Citrix people to know before you, uh, we start to address

Speaker 4:
37:10

just that, um, you know, check it out. Like, like we said, it's free. Um, so you know, there is no reason not to. Right. Um, but we're really excited about it and um, I hope everyone else's.

Speaker 5:
37:20

Yeah, I just don't want to echo that out and use it. Give us your feedback, what challenges you have or areas you need us to improve there. And we're looking forward to helping solve Citrix licensing for our customers. So thanks again for having us.

Speaker 1:
37:30

Oh, absolutely. Hey Kelly. If somebody wants that, a private preview of the CCU a option, they just send you a message through the, through the blog.

Speaker 4:
37:37

Yep. Um, yeah. Or are they going to reach out to me? Oh, over email.

Speaker 1:
37:40

And it's just your first name. Dot. Last name at Citrix before we, uh, adjourn here and eat. Anything you want to bring up for the audience other than just to say, nice job. I think this is a great feature that a lot of a lot of Citrix admins have been looking for, and we'll, we'll bring a lot of benefit to those compliance reporting efforts as well as maximizing the use of their current licensing estate and also, uh, allow them to better predict, uh, what's to be needed in the future. I think it's a great step forward for Citrix and sort of the community that kind of along those lines. I mean, what I think I would leave people with is, one, the topic has been great. Uh, again, the fact that the four of us are this excited about lysing is kinda created it. It shows that the need is there and then the topic is important. Number two, right? This is our first, a real podcast. The first one was kind of an intro to what we're going to do here. And I mean, I couldn't be happier on how this has turned out and in the content. I know it's a, it's not a lot of razzle-dazzle and marketing, but it's a whole lot of good stuff that we've covered here. So really excited about that. Uh, finally, the fourth thing, and I'm probably going to say this, every single my number one thing that I love doing the most, uh, here as Integra is taking people to synergy and getting people together at least once a year. So if you're interested in attending Citrix synergy next may, uh, in Orlando, I believe it's gonna be, uh, please, you know, look me up on LinkedIn, shoot me a private message. Uh, there's all kinds of ways that I can come up with to help and help the discount, the cost of attending or to even get people free passes. I think we took 65 customers this year. It was awesome. Uh, but I've kind of probably in every podcast without talking about that because it's my, one of my favorite things to do as a, as a business owner in a, in a Citrix, uh, person, uh, out here in the, in the real world. But, uh, with that guys, I appreciate the time and I'll look forward to having another podcast with you too, Daniel and Kelly and bill, uh, at a later date. Looking forward to it. Thank you both so much. Folks.