>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage. This is Day 2, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Sheila Rohra is here. She's the Senior Vice President and GM of the Data Infrastructure Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and of course, the storage division. And Omer Asad. Welcome back to "theCUBE", Omer. Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Data Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage. Guys, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you. Always a pleasure, man. >> Thank you. >> So Sheila, I'll start with you. Explain the difference. The Data Infrastructure Business and then Omer's Cloud Data Services. You first. >> Okay. So Data Infrastructure Business. So I'm responsible for the primary secondary storage. Basically, what you physically store, the data in a box, I actually own that. So I'm going to have Omer explain his business because he can explain it better than me. (laughing) Go ahead. >> So 100% right. So first, data infrastructure platforms, primary secondary storage. And then what I do from a cloud perspective is wrap up those things into offerings, block storage offerings, data protection offerings, and then put them on top of the GreenLake platform, which is the platform that Antonio and Fidelma talked about on main Keynote stage yesterday. That includes multi-tenancy, customer subscription management, sign on management, and then on top of that we build services. Services are cloud-like services, storage services or block service, data protection service, disaster recovery services. Those services are then launched on top of the platform. Some services like data protection services are software only. Some services are software plus hardware. And the hardware on the platform comes along from the primary storage business and we run the control plane for that block service on the GreenLake platform and that's the cloud service. >> So, I just want to clarify. So what we maybe used to know as 3PAR and Nimble and StoreOnce. Those are the products that you're responsible for? >> That is the primary storage part, right? And just to kind of show that, he and I, we do indeed work together. Right. So if you think about the 3PAR, the primary... Sorry, the Primera, the Alletras, the Nimble, right? All that, right? That's the technology that, you know, my team builds. And what Omer does with his magic is that he turns it into HPE GreenLake for storage, right? And to deliver as a service, right? And basically to create a self-service agility for the customer and also to get a very Cloud operational experience for them. >> So if I'm a customer, just so I get this right, if I'm a customer and I want Hybrid, that's what you're delivering as a Cloud service? >> Yes. >> And I don't care where the data is on-premises, in storage, or on Cloud. >> 100%. >> Is that right? >> So the way that would work is, as a customer, you would come along with the partner, because we're 100% partner-led. You'll come to the GreenLake Console. On the GreenLake Console, you will pick one of our services. Could be a data protection service, could be the block storage service. All services are hybrid in nature. Public Cloud is 100% participant in the ecosystem. You'll choose a service. Once you choose a service, you like the rate card for that service. That rate card is just like a hyperscaler rate card. IOPS, Commitment, MINCOMMIT's, whatever. Once you procure that at the price that you like with a partner, you buy the subscription. Then you go to console.greenLake.com, activate your subscription. Once the subscription is activated, if it's a service like block storage, which we talked about yesterday, service will be activated, and our supply chain will send you our platform gear, and that will get activated in your site. Two things, network cable, power cable, dial into the cloud, service gets activated, and you have a cloud control plane. The key difference to remember is that it is cloud-consumption model and cloud-operation model built in together. It is not your traditional as a service, which is just like hardware leasing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> That's a thing of the past. >> But this answers a question that I had, is how do you transfer or transform from a company that is, you know, selling boxes, of course, most of you are engineers are software engineers, I get that, to one that is selling services. And it sounds like the answer is you've organized, I know it's inside baseball here, but you organize so that you still have, you can build best of breed products and then you can package them into services. >> Omer: 100%. 100%. >> It's separate but complementary organization. >> So the simplest way to look at it would be, we have a platform side at the house that builds the persistence layers, the innovation, the file systems, the speeds and feeds, and then building on top of that, really, really resilient storage services. Then how the customer consumes those storage services, we've got tremendous feedback from our customers, is that the cloud-operational model has won. It's just a very, very simple way to operate it, right? So from a customer's perspective, we have completely abstracted away out hardware, which is in the back. It could be at their own data center, it could be at an MSP, or they could be using a public cloud region. But from an operational perspective, the customer gets a single pane of glass through our service console, whether they're operating stuff on-prem, or they're operating stuff in the public cloud. >> So they get storage no matter what? They want it in the cloud, they got it that way, and if they want it as a service, it just gets shipped. >> 100%. >> They plug it in and it auto configures. >> Omer: It's ready to go. >> That's right. And the key thing is simplicity. We want to take the headache away from our customers, we want our customers to focus on their business outcomes, and their projects, and we're simplifying it through analytics and through this unified cloud platform, right? On like how their data is managed, how they're stored, how they're secured, that's all taken care of in this operational model. >> Okay, so I have a question. So just now the edge, like take me through this. Say I'm a customer, okay I got the data saved on-premise action, cloud, love that. Great, sir. That's a value proposition. Come to HPE because we provide this easily. Yeah. But now at the edge, I want to deploy it out to some edge node. Could be a tower with Telecom, 5G or whatever, I want to box this out there, I want storage. What happens there? Just ship it out there and connects up? Does it work the same way? >> 100%. So from our infrastructure team, you'll consume one or two platforms. You'll consume either the Hyperconverged form factor, SimpliVity, or you might convert, the Converged form factor, which is proliant servers powered by Alletras. Alletra 6Ks. Either of those... But it's very different the way you would procure it. What you would procure from us is an edge service. That edge service will come configured with certain amount of compute, certain amount of storage, and a certain amount of data protection. Once you buy that on a dollars per gig per month basis, whichever rate card you prefer, storage rate card or a VMware rate card, that's all you buy. From that point on, the platform team automatically configures the back-end hardware from that attribute-based ordering and that is shipped out to your edge. Dial in the network cable, dial in the power cable, GreenLake cloud discovers it, and then you start running the- >> Self-service, configure it, it just shows up, plug it in, done. >> Omer: Self-service but partner-led. >> Yeah. >> Because we have preferred pricing for our partners. Our partners would come in, they will configure the subscriptions, and then we activate those customers, and then send out the hardware. So it's like a hyperscaler on-prem at-scale kind of a model. >> Yeah, I like it a lot. >> So you guys are in the data business. You run the data portion of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I used to call it storage, even if we still call it storage but really, it's evolving into data. So what's your vision for the data business and your customer's data vision, if you will? How are you supporting that? >> Well, I want to kick it off, and then I'm going to have my friend, Omer, chime in. But the key thing is that what the first step is is that we have to create a unified platform, and in this case we're creating a unified cloud platform, right? Where there's a single pane of glass to manage all that data, right? And also leveraging lots of analytics and telemetry data that actually comes from our infosite, right? We use all that, we make it easy for the customer, and all they have to say, and they're basically given the answers to the test. "Hey, you know, you may want to increase your capacity. You may want to tweak your performance here." And all the customers are like, "Yes. No. Yes, no." Basically it, right? Accept and not accept, right? That's actually the easiest way. And again, as I said earlier, this frees up the bandwidth for the IT teams so then they actually focus more on the business side of the house, rather than figuring out how to actually manage every single step of the way of the data. >> Got it. >> So it's exactly what Sheila described, right? The way this strategy manifests itself across an operational roadmap for us is the ability to change from a storage vendor to a data services vendor, right? >> Sheila: Right. >> And then once we start monetizing these data services to our customers through the GreenLake platform, which gives us cloud consumption model and a cloud operational model, and then certain data services come with the platform layer, certain data services are software only. But all the services, all the data services that we provide are hybrid in nature, where we say, when you provision storage, you could provision it on-prem, or you can provision it in a hyperscaler environment. The challenge that most of our customers have come back and told us, is like, data center control planes are getting fragmented. On-premises, I mean there's no secrecy about it, right? VMware is the predominant hypervisor, and as a result of that, vCenter is the predominant configuration layer. Then there is the public cloud side, which is through either Ajour, or GCP, or AWS, being one of the largest ones out there. But when the customer is dealing with data assets, the persistence layer could be anywhere, it could be in AWS region, it could be your own data center, or it could be your MSP. But what this does is it creates an immense amount of fragmentation in the context in which the customers understand the data. Essentially, John, the customers are just trying to answer three questions: What is it that I store? How much of it do I store? Should I even be storing it in the first place? And surprisingly, those three questions just haven't been answered. And we've gotten more and more fragmented. So what we are trying to produce for our customers, is a context to ware data view, which allows the customer to understand structured and unstructured data, and the lineage of how it is stored in the organization. And essentially, the vision is around simplification and context to ware data management. One of the key things that makes that possible, is again, the age old infosite capability that we have continued to hone and develop over time, which is now up to the stage of like 12 trillion data points that are coming into the system that are not corroborated to give that back. >> And of course cost-optimizing it as well. We're up against the clock, but take us through the announcements, what's new from when we sort of last talked? I guess it was in September. >> Omer: Right. >> Right. What's new that's being announced here and, or, you know, GA? >> Right. So three major announcements that came out, because to keep on establishing the context when we were with you last time. So last time we announced GreenLake backup and recovery service. >> John: Right. >> That was VMware backup and recovery as a complete cloud, sort of SaaS control plane. No backup target management, no BDS server management, no catalog management, it's completely a SaaS service. Provide your vCenter address, boom, off you go. We do the backups, agentless, 100% dedup enabled. We have extended that into the public cloud domain. So now, we can back up AWS, EC2, and EBS instances within the same constructs. So a single catalog, single backup policy, single protection framework that protects you both in the cloud and on-prem, no fragmentation, no multiple solutions to deploy. And the second one is we've extended our Hyperconverged service to now be what we call the Hybrid Cloud On-Demand. So basically, you go to GreenLake Console control plane, and from there, you basically just start configuring virtual machines. It supports VMware and AWS at the same time. So you can provision a virtual machine on-prem, or you can provision a virtual machine in the public cloud. >> Got it. >> And, it's the same framework, the same catalog, the same inventory management system across the board. And then, lastly, we extended our block storage service to also become hybrid in nature. >> Got it. >> So you can manage on-prem and AWS, EBS assets as well. >> And Sheila, do you still make product announcements, or does Antonio not allow that? (Omer laughing) >> Well, we make product announcements, and you're going to see our product announcements actually done through the HPE GreenLake for block storage. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> So our announcements will be coming through that, because we do want to make it as a service. Again, we want to take all of that headache of "What configuration should I buy? How do I actually deploy it? How do I...?" We really want to take that headache away. So you're going to see more feature announcements that's going to come through this. >> So feature acceleration through GreenLake will be exposed? >> Absolutely. >> This is some cool stuff going on behind the scenes. >> Oh, there's a lot good stuff. >> Hardware still matters, you know. >> Hardware still matters. >> Does it still matter? Does hardware matter? >> Hardware still matters, but what matters more is the experience, and that's actually what we want to bring to the customer. (laughing) >> John: That's good. >> Good answer. >> Omer: 100%. (laughing) >> Guys, thanks so much- >> John: Hardware matters. >> For coming on "theCUBE". Good to see you again. >> John: We got it. >> Thanks. >> And hope the experience was good for you Sheila. >> I know, I know. Thank you. >> Omer: Pleasure as always. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back from HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE". (soft music)

>> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> And, welcome back here on theCUBE, we're at the Moscone Center here at downtown San Francisco. Gorgeous day outside, by the way. Picture perfect day. Chamber of Commerce weather, but a lot of big news happening inside here for VMworld 2019, along with John Troyer. I'm John Walls, we're joined by Pierluca Chiodelli, who's the Vice President of Product Management at Dell EMC. And, Pierluca, good to see you, Sir. >> Thank you, it's awesome to be here. >> Great, thanks for being here. And Muneyb Minhazuddin, whose the VP of solutions product marketing at VMware. And Muneyb, I know you're right just hot off the presentation stage. >> Yes I am. >> Catch your breath, it's all going to be fine. How was your audience? I'm sure standing remotely. >> Yeah, it was thirteen hundred plus >> Excellent, yeah. Been a big week, already. >> Of course it has, yeah. >> For you and your team. So, first off, let me just, let's step back, talk about the vibe of the show, the theme of the show we saw Pat on the stage. >> Muneyb: Perfect. >> About an hour and a half this morning, just your thoughts about day one and the big announcements that VMware's been making. >> It's been a great week, and it's actually been a great approaching week. As you know, on Thursday we announced intent and acquire both Pivotal and Carbon Black for close to about $5,000,000,000. So, that's, kind of a big announcement by itself, and then how do you kind of bring in and keep day one where you're not too focused on those two, but get the narrative of VMworld across. And really, you know, where we have, you know, CUBE has been with us on this journey for a long time. >> Right. >> We've seen that data center shift into kind of two tangents. One is, you know, workloads into data center break out into public clouds. Second, rerouting into cloud native applications. And, if you've seen our strategy wall when that was kind of the key messages. Hey, we're embracing both the modern app development, the focus on Kubernetes and Tanzoo announcement, was all about to say, "VMware platforms ready "for the breakout of both tangents." First, Cloud Native, we've got Kubernetes, we're bringing it right into vSphere, so that everybody in the audience can support it. Second, the breadth of our cloud everywhere, right, so, we've gone from Amazon to IBM to Google to Ajour. So, it'll give you the infrastructure for your workloads to be your choice. Modernize or migrate. (chuckles) That was a key message for us to kind of land today. For a lot of our audience who are kind of stuck in that same piece of, "What am I doing with my workloads? "What is that platform I got to build on?" And, you know, the key foundational platform being VMware Cloud Foundation. Right, that was our strategy, and I think last year we called out VMware Cloud Foundation in Pat's keynote, because I wrote it 44 times. (laughs) (group laughter) We didn't do it that many times, this time. We only said that's the platform that lands in Amazon, GCP, Ajour, IBM, and 4,200, you know, cloud provider partners. That gives you really that public cloud extension. The second part being modern apps, Kubernetes is a new, kind of, modern app development platform, vSphere is embedded into that project pacific and the whole Tanzoo announcement, right? So, really, a powerful message, what do you think? Was that successfully landed? >> I think so. John, do you feel good about what you heard today? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think VCF is super interesting. I'm also kind of, so there was an announcement today also about the Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs for using VCF. So, VCF the layer, which is kind of the VMware stack with some extra magic in it, that can be in, can make a private hybrid cloud, you know, everywhere. So, talk to us a little bit about Dell Technologies Cloud. As I call it, "DTC." The, it's a lot, there's a lot of stuff in that as well, so, but we have two very complicated solutions stacks that are, we're talking about now, so. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Can you talk a little bit about the validated design and what came out of that? >> Absolutely, so before we go into the validated design, I think it's very important as Muneyb said. When we think about the Dell Technology Cloud, really, it's a component of the best (murmurs) technology from our storage, networking, and also compute, but we did the VMware VCS on top. So, we work very closely with VMware, and today we are announcing today the Cloud Validated Design. As we announce at the Dell Technology World in May, we said Dell Technology Cloud is this, now we want to tell to the people, how you can easily deploy this. What is make this tangible? So, what we are doing today is rapid time to value. We did design and pretested configuration, that we put in Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Design, as we said. The other important things as Muneyb said, right? It's... And, I heard this also from theCUBE. There was a debate with Stu and other people about, what is the Cloud? How I deploy the Cloud? When we think about Dell Technologies we speak with different peoples, and two set of peoples. One is the app, right? The Cloud app, all the app people that, they want to build have all the automation, DevOps operation and all these things. But, behind those people, there's still an infrastructure. So, we are speaking on both things. So, it's very important this paradigm is there, where you can have people that they can consume the technology, and understand how to build the infrastructure to be automated, and build that automation for the Cloud. So, that's what is the Dell Technologies Font Validation Design. Right. So, one of the biggest things here that we announced, is not only the Cloud Validation Design. It's the first one but also the ability to have compute, storage and network together, and also use it primary storage as a primary citizen of the VCF. So, we should talk about that later but that's-- >> Absolutely, and I think to catch onto that, you know, talking about the applications et cetera, you know, again, in the evolution of Cloud, and we've been on the journey for 10 years is, we've had, the first few years of the Cloud journey was, felt a little like a one way street, which was, kind of meant where people were shutting down data centers and going to all these public cloud providers, was always a one-way street. Now, VMware, and if you followed us closely, we had a service call VMware, you know VCHS, which is VMware Hybrid Cloud Service before the vCloud Air and then we came out with this solution, right? The idea was, we thought there's going to be movement back-and-forth but it wasn't the case. People were seriously shutting down and going one way. As we made all these partnerships of you know, Amazon, IBM, we started seeing, and you heard stories of IHS, Freddie Mac on stage where they take six weeks to move 100 applications one way into the Cloud, customers started asking us some questions, say, 'If it's so easy to go that way, is it also that easy to bring it back?' >> Come back! >> Right? And, that kind of lead to the whole kind of Dell partnership, Dell announcement within the Dell Cloud Foundation, you know, VMware Cloud Foundation, Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to say that, "Hey, it's actually..." There's a notion of not going from hardware-specific, you know, just high-tuned for workloads to commodity hardware in the Public Cloud. There's now a need for having common hardware platform on both on-PRAM, off-PRAM because there is a need for customers to take EC2 workloads or, you know, Ajour workloads and bring it on PRAM again. That was just a notion of how fast it is. I add that point because it is so critical to know that your hardware is performing in tuned, to perform for a high business critical applications. People forgot about them the first few phases of going to the Cloud, and now as they think about a hybrid, true hybrid Cloud nature, they want optimal performance in the software layer, in the hardware layer. You know, hence our announcement of Dell Technologies Cloud, Cloud Foundation, Validated Design. It's really supporting that customer notion. >> So, it's like this optimal, or maximized flexibility is what you're trying to give people. I mean, is that-- >> Pierluca: With the Cloud simplicity, that's really the key. >> But what drives that? I know that you have, you've, you know, whether you're on-PRAM or you're off-PRAM, you're going to decide what workload's going to go on what space on, so forth, but is some of that kind of hedging bets for future workloads because you can't predict where they're going to be done or where you want them done? Or is it just providing flexibility today, and let's not worry about tomorrow? You know, it just seems like there's a lot of runway here, if you will. >> Yeah, and I think there's no right or wrong answer. One of the big workshops I do with our customers is really kind of say have you figured out what's your three to five-year application strategy? Because again, in that first phase of that fast migration to the Public Cloud, people were just like CIOs I know, it's like, I have a cloud for strategy, what does that mean? I'm shutting down all data centers, I'm going to the Cloud. Right or wrong, and that's my Cloud First strategy. Now, what they've come to realize is not all workloads work effectively in the Cloud, right? So, they kind of like, hey, put an application strategy to say what are the most optimal applications that will get the benefit of Cloud? These are like, e-commerce retail. They have to have, you know, Black Friday, expanding elasticity. If you got no slow, mundane, you know backend processes doing batch processes of massive storage of in a bank ledger in the back end, they're not going to get that elasticity. I know what it is, I know how many, you know, batch processes I got to run. So, people are getting smarter about which ones get the benefit of, you know, modern app development, or Cloud elasticity, which ones don't really need to have that. So, we've seen best practice customers actually have a very good app strategy, three to five years, and then decide how much of my app strategy is gone to the right, you know, or gone to the left, right? It's pretty much to say, "I don't have to change." 60, 70% of my Eastern European customers, their banking ledgers are still on mainframes. They're not in a hurry to go to the Cloud, whereas, you know Fintech on the East Coast is going, "I'm going to the, I'm going to the Cloud", right? So, it's really that strategy that's, they should take the app strategy and decide what the infrastructure strategy is on the top shelf. >> I think from the storage business, we see that really clear, right? The app is definitely what is moving the things, right? It's not, people they're not thinking anymore because the transformation is in the way that you consume the infrastructure. They not thinking anymore about what I put there, but is about what app I need to run, how I build my app. So, it's the environment. And, I don't think personally I meet a lot of customer. There is not one right way or wrong way, it's an end, right? As you can see also in VCF we have Vsend, VxRail and primary storage. If you look at two years ago, we will be sitting here and say, you know, "It's only this, not the other things." When we, I been in governor conference, three years ago was like, it's all Cloud. It's reality is the world, the information technology world is always the same, where is a natural genius things. Because people, they need to have the trust, right? You cannot run your entire things on something that you don't know or you didn't prove. So, what we give here today with our technology is the flexibility. You can have a Cloud approach, but use the trusted PowerMax, for example, in conjunction with Vsend, in conjunction with the Unity. So, not all these is the proof that you can preserve your investment. But, is the proof that you can start to build those up. And, if you've seen what paths say today, then those app can live everywhere. So, you can go, you can move, it's much easier to move, and you can just trust what you're doing. >> And, you hit an important point on the move part, right? And, people are so easy, like, "Hey I moved a thousand applications in six weeks "to VMC and AWS." The fundamental notion where that was not possible before, was compute, network, storage. Like, we've been doing vSphere for a long time, you know that. And, it wasn't that easy because what used to happen is people thought, "Hey, a virtualized computer, I can move it." But, what did not happen as you moved that, was your databases, you know, your storage, rules didn't follow you into the Cloud. Your networking QOS and, you know, policies, and you know, priorities didn't follow you into the Cloud. So, that was kind of like, you know, you know, I'm an Australian, so it was a half-assed solution, right? (group laughing) So bear with my language, right. It was a half-assed solution, but really what needs to happen is your compute, your network, your storage has to all work together. And, that's where Cloud Foundation was powerful. And, what we're lighting with this Validated Designs is also that capability that your computer, or storage is one unit from a app. Once you package it and make it available in all the platforms, then that migration becomes six weeks, two weeks to move that. Because once you break it apart, it's a nightmare. There's not a lot of folks who have survived database migrations. (laughs) >> I mean maybe Pierluca, you can kind of sum us up here. This conversation's been a lot around evolution, right? And, there's also been an evolution of data center design and what to expect with that, you know, just buying things off the shelf and getting a Var and, you know, the VMAX, and we've been through this whole, and now, we've talked about VxRail, which can be part of this solution. But, can you talk, just, maybe, take us in, take us out with the, or into the future with the Dell Technologies Cloud as the idea of the Validated Design, the idea of this stack from Dell Technologies in storage et cetera, what can we expect in the near future? And, how much guidance will folks get? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, without breaking any NDA things, but this is only the first step. So, the Cloud Validated Design is just the first step where we said, 'Okay, we are tasked in this, "we putting this together." We are working very closely to also solve the entire things that VCF allow you to do first day deployment, allow you to expand the infrastructure, and allow you also to do life cycle management. For example, with the VxRail we already have the life cycle management part. We are working in way to do that also for our storage and other things. So, if you think about that then it becomes as you said, all the policy we put, like with Vworld, will be strategically in that sense, the policies can be carried over. So, then you can go to VMC, you can go to another place where the software and infrastructure can move back. So, because people can do this on PRAM, a replicate exactly but not only replicate the application, but replicate the (murmurs). What do you do on the QOS, all these key things that makes people running enterprise application, right? So that's, I think, it's very exciting moment. I think it's just the starting of this dream. >> Absolutely. >> Gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> And you're all, you paint a pretty exciting future, don't ya? >> I hope so. >> So, I can't wait to look forward to even VMworld 2020? >> Wait 'til Barcelona, come on? (laughs) >> All right, well I'm not making that road trip, so unfortunately-- >> We going to more out there. >> But, Barcelona's going to be good. >> Yes, thank you for having us. >> No, I'm not the best guy, so, all right good. Hey, gentlemen, thank you for the time. >> Thank you >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it very much, great discussion. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Back with more from San Francisco right after this. (techno music)

(upbeat digital music) >> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019, day one, continues. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, in Atlanta, Georgia, and we're pleased to welcome the SVP of Sales and Services from Citrix APJ, Colin Brookes. Colin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa, great to be here. >> So Keith and I, excited to have you here, as well. This has been a really exciting start to our day. >> Colin: Yes. The keynote this morning kicked off with David, PJ was there, Microsoft was there, there were some customers featured. Employee experience is so critical to a business's digital transformation, but we often, and theCUBE covers tech innovation all over the world, we don't hear it as a leading edge for companies who really can't transform digitally and be competitive, and identify new products and new services, if the employees don't have access to the apps they need, whether they're SaaS, mobile, web. Talk to us about employee experience, and particularly as it relates to customers down in APJ, as a critical factor in businesses success. >> Yeah sure, it's a great question, and the employee experience is just as you described, it's almost overwhelming the amount of technology that's thrown at people. Which initially is all there to try and make life easier, but it's just adding on top of existing applications and existing systems, and it isn't really making life easier. So what we found is that the employee experience is actually getting more and more frustrating, which means less productivity, which doesn't help the bottom line and the production of the organization, obviously. So our solutions are all around trying to enhance that employee experience, making sure that people have got absolute choice of anything they need, such as the applications that you mentioned on any device that they're using, and also, wherever they happen to be. So it's normally around the future of work, when we're talking about employee experience. And we're trying to make sure that no matter where you are, not just the office which is the traditional workplace of the past, if you're at home, if you're in the library, if you're on a plane, in the car, you should be able to work exactly the same way. And those are the types of solutions that we're bringing to market, to make just that thing happen. >> So Colin, talk to us about, your team is the tip of the spear. They are the first to hear the customer's success stories, they are the first to hear the frustrations. We're in an environment that Citrix is trying to solve a $7,000,000,000,000 challenge of becoming more efficient. IT is a huge part of that. Your frontline, your Sales Engineers, your AEs are having these kind of conversations. Talk to us about their experience of moving the conversation beyond IT into these new areas that Citrix is entering. >> Yeah, again, another great, great question, and that's one of the pitfalls that we normally fall into talking about products all of the time rather than the outcome, which is what we're trying to help our customers with. So perhaps, if I give you an example of some of the places that I travel around in APJ. So, I look after the APJ region, Asia, Pacific, and Japan. It's a huge, vast geography, with multiple cultures, obviously, very heterogenous. An example, say, for Japan, where I was in Japan last week, the Olympics are coming there in 2020. People who have seen Japan, or been to Japan, you'll know about the huge commute that people have to do. There's millions of people in Tokyo, for example, and their business day is long anyway, but when you add on to that one to two hours commute in the morning, and then the same at the end of the day, the normal everyday stressors are just magnified exponentially. And then with the Olympics coming along, you can imagine an extra few hundred thousand, or an extra couple of million people being in Tokyo, that commute is just going to get worse. So the government have actually launched something, I think it was actually in 2017, whereby we're trying to enable employees to work more remotely, which might not sound too new, but it's amazing how many organizations still feel the employees need to be in the office to work. So we're helping them to make sure that people can work just as efficiently at home as they can in the office. And it doesn't just have to be at home. We were talking earlier, Lisa, that traditional office used to be a place, and work, a place you went to, whereas now it can be at home, in the library, traveling in the car. It can be on the plane on the way to countries. I'm in a plane most of the time, every other week at least, but I'm still able and lucky enough to work extremely productively no matter where I am, and on any device. So that's the other thing that we're trying to bring to our customers. it's the ability to have access to any application that we want, so we have complete choice, on any device that we want. So whether I'm on my phone, whether I'm on my tablet, or I'm on my iPad, it should look and feel the same, and I should be able to get the same types of productivity levels. And now you can, with the solutions that we provide. So, in answer to you question, our customers are trying to find solutions to enable their employees to feel they have the best possible experience, and stay productive anywhere they are in the world. >> Well, and really, Citrix is taking it farther than that. It isn't just delivering the same experience on mobile versus desktop, versus tablet, and ensuring that you can do your job, Colin, from anywhere in the world in an airline seat, whatnot. It's also making that experience, the productivity apps, so much more connected. And the video example that David Henshall showed this morning, I thought, was fantastic. >> Colin: Right, wasn't it, yeah? >> It was showing a Senior Marketing Manager, whose a Marketing Manager, whose responsible for Rockstar marketing campaigns, who might be a people manager, and she logs in and goes to check email, and then all these other things pop up over the course of a couple of minutes, and she's in and out of seven to 10 apps, not connected. >> Colin: Exactly. >> Tell our audience a little bit more about how Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience is really transforming that experience, allowing those workers to get back to their daily responsibilities. >> You need to come in work in APJ, that was perfect. (laughing) >> Lisa: Okay! (chuckling) >> I've got job just for you. Yeah, so, the day to day activities that we all go through, the lady in the video was the Head of Marketing, I believe it was, but most of her day is spent being distracted. I think the statistics that David gave was that something like 85% of the workforce are distracted throughout the day. You flip that around, that means only 15% or so are actually being productive. It's frightening, isn't it? So the examples that you saw were her signing some simple expenses, but that isn't as simple as it sounds. She needs to be almost an expert in the application that signs off the expenses. What we do with the Intelligent Workspace from Citrix is we pick out the bit's that actually she only every really needs to use, which are probably a small percentage, one, two, three, maybe five percent of the full, wonderful application that that expense report may be, she doesn't need to use all of that. so what we do with the Intelligent Workspace is we just bring forward onto her workspace the buttons that she needs, a summary of the expense, an accept or an approve, or a reject, and she can carry on straight away. And what you saw was about a 10 minute session within an application to approve an expense, reduced to less that 30 seconds. When you do that across the whole day, I think the numbers that David gave was our ambition, is to probably give people one day back of their week. That's 20%, that's a huge amount that we'll be able to find. Almost thinking of it like a time machine. We're going to give you some of your time back to actually be productive and do the things that you've been employed to do. She'd been employed to be creative in marketing, and now she can. >> So, you gave us the use case of the remote worker in Japan, great use case, but APJ, huge region. >> Colin: Yes. >> And you're not IT, and IT Vanders are not the only ones that have APJ regions, so talk to us about the importance of the relationship with Ajour and Google. David shared one stat, he said we're entering the yoda bite, which was a new word for even me... >> Lisa: Yeah! >> I'm a geek, the yoda bite era, and as data sets grow and the need to perform analysis against that data, but yet, we're in a very dispersed region. >> Colin: Sure. >> Keith: How important is the relationships with Microsoft and Google to enable that type of analysis of data? >> Yeah, sure. So look, the relationship with all of our partners is extremely important, especially within the APJ region. As you mention, it's such a vast geography, and I think people that have not actually lived in the APJ region just don't realize how vast it is. I'm often asked if I can go from where I am, where I'm based in Singapore, to nip over to Japan or down to Sydney to go and sort out some problems. >> Keith: It's only an eight hour flight. >> It's 10, 12 hours, but it's also a different time zone, and you know, then you talk back to the UK or the States, you lose a day with the time zone there. So, I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong, but it is a vast, and it's not just the geography, it's such a diverse culture area, as well. So everybody behaves slightly differently. Coming back to your Microsoft and Google, we're not a database company, we're not a data center organization, our solutions are going to provide these wonderful experiences for people. But we need the help and support, and we're very lucky to have it of the likes of the Microsoft, and the Google, and all of our other partners that have this infrastructure in place, and that effectively, shrink that geography for us, does that make sense? >> It does. >> So let's dig into the Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience a little bit further, 'cause you talked about something that really struck me, saying with this video example that which David shared, and we were both talking about it here. So for our audience, it was this great video of a Marketing Manager's daily activities, I kind of mentioned on it a minute ago, but you mentioned that with Intelligent Experience, you're going to surface. Say, I'm a marketing person... >> Colin: Yep. >> And I need to get into Sales Force, 'cause like in this video, my boss has asked me the status of a deal that maybe marketing influenced, and I don't want to have to know a ton about Sales Force. What, how is Citrix using AI and data to evaluate per user what components of each of those applications should be shown to say, me, that Marketing Manager? >> Yeah, I think he gave the great example of the photocopier, didn't he? Whereby you walk up to these machines these days and they've a hundred different buttons on them. (laughs) >> Yes. >> And we basically just want to take a photocopy, and they make it simply one large, green button, and that's probably the one that we always use. It's the one percent of the functionality on the photocopier, and it's the same with the applications. That you and I are not super users, but these applications are wonderful applications, but they're built for the super user a lot of the times, with every part of the functionality within them, which makes it quite complicated for you and I to use when we want very simple tasks. So the Artificial Intelligence of the machine learning is used to, each time we go into one of the applications, to figure out what do we do on a day to day basis, what's normally the thing that we're trying to process? And the more and more that we do that, the smarter and smarter the application becomes. And it also, instead of just guiding us along the way, it's almost starting to think for us, and put the things in front of us that we only need for that day, which is great. So rather than me having to now look at my to do list, it's there for me already in the the Intelligent Workspace, and I can just go through things, skim across the applications where I need to be without going deep, four, five, six different layers, and I'm wasting time on things that I'm not really being paid to do. So, that's how it works. The more I go in, the more it learns about me and my behaviors, and if I go in one particular application, it probably means that I'm also going to be looking at another application that's connected, moving forward, and that's the sort of intelligence that we've built into the system. >> So going from that marketing person being reactive or staring at the copier, that brought back some memories today, I'm like, whoa, I haven't seen one of those in a while, but being reactive, to proactive, to eventually predictive. >> Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it. You definitely need to come to APJ. (laughs) >> Okay! >> Need to start writing these sound bites down. Yeah, that's exactly it, and not only, like, she's using the example of the lady, she's feeling less stressed, she's able to have more time being creative, which is what she's been employed for. So this is what turns 'round into the employee experience, which equates to better productivity, which is the bottom line for the organizations. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day. The organizations want to be more efficient, and they want to be more productive, and they want to make more profit. And we're enabling them to do that via enabling the user experience to be the absolute best that it can possibly be, whilst at the same time, making sure that everything is extremely secure. (crosstalk) >> Oh, sorry, Keith, go ahead. >> I want to get into a question around culture when it comes to APJ. You know, we have, to your point, very different cultures. There's Japan, whose embracing the concept of robots, so we've seen, like, software robots in different industries, and Japan embracing that idea of automating and making these tasks simpler. But yet, culturally, Australia's very different. There's maybe a little bit more hesitation to embrace robotics. How is your Sales Force bringing along the two different cultures so that, you know, you can have full experiences from one region, and bring that to, bring the best of class to...? >> Yeah, that's another great question. I think we have 57 different nationalities in our Australia and New Zealand team. The culture within Australia is multinational, as well, because of that. So although it's Australia, it's not just Australians that are there, and you find that across the whole of APJ, every office that I happen to work into has got a multitude of different nationalities. A bit less so in Japan and South Korea, but all of the others are very very mixed. So it helps that you're bringing people from different parts of the organization, even from the States or from the Mir, into the APJ region, so that they can cross culture and learn from other people. But it is one of the fascinating things of living in APJ that they're diverse cultures, and one of the reasons why I choose to live down in that part of the world. I have to act, sometimes, as the buffer between the North American mentality of everything's the same, and everybody speaks the same language, and why can they do it this way? And how I then have to translate that for the boys and girls in Japan, and the same in Australia and New Zealand. So it's a thing that's you're learning about every single day, and every single year. It is a fascinating place to live, fascinating place to live. >> Well, I imagine that really can be used as an internal engine for Citrix in the APJ region, because you mention, what, 57 nationalities in two countries alone represented on your team? About leveraging that as an opportunity for even maybe the rest of Citrix and your partners, too, to understand the nuances, why it's important to understand cultural differences as they relate to how technology is used, different security and compliance regulations. It's got to be an advantage. >> It is an advantage, and you also find that depending on the country that you're working, when they're at different stages of their journey, so moving to the cloud, for instance, it's as people have been moving to the cloud for many, many years, but you'll be amazed how many of the largest organizations in the world are still on that journey. And it's not a journey of you're suddenly have an unpremixed application on a Friday, and now we're in the cloud on a Monday, it just carries on going. I think there was a statistic that David mentioned this morning, that something like 95% of the applications that we currently have today are still going to be here in four or five years, plus all of the new applications that we're building every single day. So it is an advantage to be in such a melting pot of cultures and different personalities, you're absolutely right. >> And I'm sure having a boy from Manchester is a facilitator of all of that, right? >> There you go, there you go, I slot straight in. I think I'm the 58th nationality to go in there from Manchester. (laughs) >> There you go. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE at Synergy. We're excited to hear about what you guys are doing down in APJ, and excited to hear more of what's to come from Synergy 2019. >> Thank you so much. >> We appreciate it. So, for Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching us on theCUBE live, day one of our two day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. 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