Welcome to Inside Citrix. This monthly column gives a glimpse of different aspects of Citrix through our people. Our guests have different areas of responsibility and expertise to give you an idea of what is happening behind the scenes. We discuss items of interest with people from Product Readiness, Escalation, Technical Support, and Engineering just to name a few.
In this installment of Inside Citrix, we discuss NetScaler with Kobie Crawford, Escalation Manager.
Q: Hello Kobie! Thanks for giving us the opportunity to learn more about you and NetScaler. This has been an exciting collaboration, but before I get too far ahead please tell us about yourself.
A: Hi, there. I’m 32 years old, married, with two sons, and live in Sunnyvale, California. Prior to working with the NetScaler products, my experiences have been across the board, from professional audio to teaching high school.
I started with NetScaler in September 2003 as one of the first five people dedicated exclusively to supporting the product. The last three years certainly have seen quite a bit of change with the company as we’ve grown very quickly, especially since the acquisition.
Q: Where are the Citrix NetScaler offices located?
A: We have two major offices. The main Citrix NetScaler office is located in San Jose, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Our other major office is in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Within a ten-minute drive of the San Jose office are the offices of the two other products that make up the Application Networking Group: the Access Gateway team also has an office in San Jose, and the Application Firewall team has one in Sunnyvale, which is immediately to the northwest of San Jose.

Q: I’ll go back a step further since many Citrix users may not have more than a cursory knowledge of what NetScaler does. We know you are not in marketing or sales, but in a nice technical nutshell, what does this do?
A: The shortest description I can give is that the NetScaler is a Web proxy. The box proxies Internet traffic between clients and servers, and, by being in that position, we have an opportunity to provide performance enhancements and features that make the experience faster, more secure, and more efficient. We load-balance traffic to multiple servers, offload CPU-intensive functions like data compression and SSL encryption, add TCP connection optimizations for clients and servers, provide disaster recovery and always-on high availability – the feature list goes on and on.
We began by providing these enhancements primarily for Web sites – and we count Google, Yahoo, MSN, eBay, AOL, Amazon, and MySpace among our customers. Our marketing has now broadened to include the enterprise, and how these same acceleration and optimization features can improve the user experience for CRM, HR, Finance, ERP, and other enterprise applications.
Q: Okay, that’s informative, thanks. So, you, what are your daily duties comprised of? You sick of this yet?
A: (laughs) Actually, things are going in new and exciting directions for me as a direct result of the acquisition. I’ve just recently been given management responsibility – which is an entirely new set of skills to learn. Also, as part of integrating support for the NetScaler products with the global Citrix Support organization, I’m spending the spring in Dublin, Ireland, providing transitional help for the EMEA team.
Q: I am now going to ask you the obligatory questions of what are the most rewarding and most challenging aspects of your job? Perhaps the same? Consider yourself asked.
A: The most challenging thing I’ve dealt with recently is finding that balance between staying actively involved with the technology and making sure that the processes and tools are working to help the Support and Escalation teams. I hope this doesn’t sound like so many platitudes, but I really want to work as a facilitator -- to make sure that I help others maximize their job satisfaction and productivity. And I’m just learning how to do that. The reward is going to be when people are able to get the mundane things done effortlessly, allowing them to focus their considerable talents on the complex tasks that require them. And there’s plenty of complexity in the cases that come up!
Q: How do you feel the integration between us has gone so far? I mean, is this going to be great, or is there some East Coast vs. West Coast gangster rap battle on the horizon?
A: Resistance is futile… we have been assimilated! Seriously, things are going to be just fine here in Citrixville. From the perspective of Escalation, we’re working with the philosophy that we’re a single global team, with each office maintaining expertise on different products, based on proximity to the Engineering teams that develop those products. Now that we have such a wide range of technologies in the corporate portfolio, it is no longer reasonable to expect any one person to know everything about everything.
Overall, the greatest thing is that the integration has been a two-way street. From the very start, executive management has been open to taking some good things from what NetScaler had been doing before the acquisition. The first step of absorbing support for NetScaler into the standard Citrix support structure is complete, and now, looking forward, we’re also working to add some of the best features of NetScaler Support to Citrix Support globally.
Q: What’s new and fancy on the horizon with NetScaler?
A: The next major version of the NetScaler platform is in the Beta stage now, and certain select customers are working with us to kick the tires on it. If you’re into networking, the things we’re doing are very cool – major capacity enhancements in some of our core functionality, as well as new flexibility and power in other areas. We’re getting some URL Rewrite capabilities for HTTP, and a completely new type of compression that is being called AppCompress Extreme – it’s a logical enough algorithm, but very tricky to implement. Hats off to Engineering!
Q: What would you put on your personal wish list for the future of Citrix NetScaler products?
A: Well, the best thing I can imagine is when all of our products start to really shine when put together in combined solutions. It’s great for us to be able to offer an array of products, but even better when those products have ways to leverage each other’s capabilities. That’s the vision in my mind that makes Citrix the hottest opportunity around. If we deliver on that… wow.
Thanks so much, Kobie. I hope to see you here in Fort Lauderdale or perhaps in California before too long. Good luck to your Lakers! Are you all named Kobie or Kobe out in California?

>> Interview with Kobie Crawford (Escalation Manager)