Missing Things
November 3, 2006 represents my last day with Citrix/NetScaler. On one hand, I'm incredibly excited about the new opportunities that lay ahead of me. On the other hand, I'm going to miss the place that I helped build over the last 3 years.
There are of course the people that make Citrix/NetScaler up. It's rare to work with a team that works together as well as this crew does. The experience spoils you in a way -- I've focused on silly things like being a product manager instead of worrying about politics, what the other guy is doing and other such time wasting sillyness. Being a part of the machine that would rally together during escalations, big sales opportunities, and other challenges was not only a great experience, but it was fun. There's nothing quite like the high of walking into a sales call where the person on the other side of the table says "I've already made up my mind, but my boss is making me evaluate three vendors" and leaving with the same person saying "this is amazing, when are we getting the evaluation units again?" And being able to pull that off only works when you know you have a team behind you that will pull through.
What has surprised me the most is that I'm going to miss my products. Being able to point to most of the Alexa Top 100 and knowing that most of them are powered by my product written by my engineers is just plain cool. Ditto with my SSLVPN.
Corporate policy dictates that wireless access be in our DMZ. Want to go anywhere? You need to login to the SSLVPN first. Since the first week I've been here, I've made it a policy that I do all my work through the SSLVPN. I can't claim that my customers can do that if I'm not willing to. As the expression goes, eat your own dog food. So what about my SSLVPN? Well, I'm really going to miss that -- it's fast, it's sweet, it works with everything, and the test engineering box that I use for access has been the most stable remote access product I've ever used. I'm really going to miss that.
But enough with the missing things... time to start thinking forward again. Good times are ahead. :-)
There are of course the people that make Citrix/NetScaler up. It's rare to work with a team that works together as well as this crew does. The experience spoils you in a way -- I've focused on silly things like being a product manager instead of worrying about politics, what the other guy is doing and other such time wasting sillyness. Being a part of the machine that would rally together during escalations, big sales opportunities, and other challenges was not only a great experience, but it was fun. There's nothing quite like the high of walking into a sales call where the person on the other side of the table says "I've already made up my mind, but my boss is making me evaluate three vendors" and leaving with the same person saying "this is amazing, when are we getting the evaluation units again?" And being able to pull that off only works when you know you have a team behind you that will pull through.
What has surprised me the most is that I'm going to miss my products. Being able to point to most of the Alexa Top 100 and knowing that most of them are powered by my product written by my engineers is just plain cool. Ditto with my SSLVPN.
Corporate policy dictates that wireless access be in our DMZ. Want to go anywhere? You need to login to the SSLVPN first. Since the first week I've been here, I've made it a policy that I do all my work through the SSLVPN. I can't claim that my customers can do that if I'm not willing to. As the expression goes, eat your own dog food. So what about my SSLVPN? Well, I'm really going to miss that -- it's fast, it's sweet, it works with everything, and the test engineering box that I use for access has been the most stable remote access product I've ever used. I'm really going to miss that.
But enough with the missing things... time to start thinking forward again. Good times are ahead. :-)
posted by Steve Shah at 5:25 AM
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