>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're having a great time here in Atlanta, Georgia and we have one of our CUBE alumni back with us Calvin Hsu vice president of product marketing at Citrix. Calvin thank you for joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be here. >> We have had a great action packed day yesterday half day today or so. What you guys announced yesterday with respect to the digital workspace. The Intelligent Experience is really resonating with the audience here. People are excited about it because we get it. We're all workers, employees of whether it's our own companies or a company like Citrix and we just need things to work. >> Yeah no matter what, as much as anybody loves their job it could always be better, right. There could always be things that are more streamlined or everybody talks about the red tape with the bureaucracy that they get to get through and more and more which is building red tape and bureaucracy into our systems and into our enterprise applications and now we start to blame the technology and it's not really the technology it's just that we're not thinking about what it takes to get through some of these daily work and how we get some of that noise out of their way and just make it more streamlined. >> Some of the stats that David Henshaw shared were shocking that companies waste seven trillion dollars a year on lost output because employees are having to, before they even get to their actual function, you're a marketer, all of the different tasks that you have that are bombarding you and distracting you, is a massive amount of money that companies are wasting every year. >> I love the line that you use also. Basically we're taking knowledge workers and turning them into task workers. Then I think the other part is we take task workers who are supposed to be focused on specific tasks, and they can focus on the wrong task, so there's just a lot of opportunity for people to be either giving them time to be more productive doing the things that they normally would do or time I think in a lot of organizations today to be more innovative, being creative because that certainly we know from psychological studies. That takes concerted blocks of time. That takes thoughtfulness, it takes non-distraction that's why there's all these practices about mindfulness and things like that. Now how can you find time to be mindful if every two minutes you're getting a disruption somewhere? >> So Calvin you're sitting in a unique position. One, you've been at Citrix for almost 15 years and then you're over the security products. So when you look at solving the seven trillion dollar problem there's 1/5 of our work week going to rudimentary tasks. That involves automation. When I as a security guy, ever time I present some type of automation, process automation tool to someone. Oh you don't have to sign into sales force directly. There'll be some back-end system. As you talk to your long term customers that might be a little bit apprehensive if we're looking at this Cloud way of doing legacy technologies. What are some of the insights in however you have pulled those customers along? >> Well first before anyone says anything, I'm not a security guy per say. (laughs) I know the security value my business, I know what we do but I know a lot of security professionals will be like I know Calvin, he's not a security guy. I would say for those organizations, particularly for the ones that have been with Citrix for a long time. Don't try to solve all seven trillion dollars of problems at once. Take it one step at a time. Build some trust in one area. I like what a lot of our customers have started to do and we're starting to plan with them on their first potential implementations of Intelligent Experience in the workspace. That is say, take something that's just really painful, something that gets done a lot and just solve that one thing. Build one micro-app for it, see how that gets adoption learn from it. This is part of the reason we built analytics and telemetry into all of our products so you can start to measure the utilization of it. Are we really achieving the productivity gains that we thought with that one task? Then go from there. Just earn that trust on that one action that one process or workflow and then sooner or later then the business will start to tell IT which things they need to optimize. They'll say, okay that worked great here's the next one I want you to do for me and then it just becomes a matter of prioritizing them. So taking those baby steps, getting started somewhere. I think we see a lot of paralysis by analysis of just trying to solve too much of a problem all at once. >> So as the VP of product marketing you talk with customers a lot. What's been some of the feedback from some of the beta customers who are in there getting their hands dirty and playing with Intelligent Experience. What's some of the feedback that these customers are sharing with you but also how involved were they in saying Citrix, this is where you need to take digital workspace. >> Yeah so second part of it first. In everything from the UI, the interface design process as well as architectural review. We've had customers along the way. So it's been interesting to watch them. We did this thing internally where we set up a bunch of tests of common tasks for people to do. We had them do it the old way and then we had them do it the new way and were just, basically time trialed trying to figure out what kind of productivity savings. So we invite some real end users and customers and things and to do that. So they are definitely very influential in that whole process and in giving us information about what's working and what's not working. A thing I would say is what's getting them really excited is that they see that there's alignment with the bit liner business. So we typically, most of our executive briefings are with the IT part of the house and when you talk to them about what the possibilities are then their eyes light up because they know, hey this is what my liner business has been asking for, this is how I can engage with them, this looks like a meaty project where at the end of the day we get this all done right. Everybody pats each other on the back and says, okay now we know what we need to go do next and I think sometimes IT projects get lost in the procurement and they rack 'em and stack 'em and they're thinking about it in those terms of project lines not what is the business person trying to do at the end of the day? How do we integrate with that? How do we help that move along and improve that process? >> So Calvin talk to us about the foundation. As a long time Citrix customer you come to this show and it's changed. It used to be, day one we talk about product, speeds, fees. Yesterday was all about solutions like okay we're solving this seven trillion dollar problem we're increasing productivity, the Intelligent Experience is the future. Tie the foundation, how do we get from traditional Citrix products into this Intelligent Experience? Where is the connection? >> Yeah so at the core of it I think it's all about-- What we've been doing for generations really is about trying to get applications out to people and so really all we're doing is we're adding to the variety of applications that we're delivering. It's no longer just Windows virtualization which has been a huge part of our history but now it's just standing out into SAS applications and to mobile applications. Along the way I think what we also realized in the past year or so is that if we're powering the future of work, work is not done by applications, work gets accomplished by actions and so can we extract actions out of applications? Then we have a fast path to getting work done. What we're starting to realize now is that anytime we send somebody into an application to get to an action, to get work done, then we've all ready moved them couple steps away. Anytime they have to go to one application to go to another application to go to another application to get to an action then we've all ready wasted a lot of time. That sort of realization has really helped us along the way. I think your point about presenting solutions is a really good one in a sense that that same journey made us realize, well we had a networking business and we had an end user computing business but more and more you can't get to the end using computing components without some networking in between. So there's just this interconnected mesh of have an action and when it connect to another action there's always some kind of connectivity, some kind of networking that has to happen. All these things need to work in concert and if those things are working in concert then you have this amazing opportunity to collect data and get analytics and insights and apply some machine learning against it. So that led us to say let's start talking more about solutions because people aren't going to get it if we try to explain this whole daisy chain of events. Let's just talk about what the outcome is and what we want to achieve. >> People like that, right, we're outcome oriented by nature. Speaking of outcomes I couldn't help but think yesterday when you guys were showing that great demo David showed during his keynote of the marketing manager and the bombardment that happens when that person in the liner business comes in and has five or seven different apps to interact with. Go to the app as you were describing that what can be a complicated process then having to take an action and being able to use intelligence and machine learning to surface, Lisa's a marketing manager, this is how she engages with work day and with sales first so bringing that to the surface based on the data analysis and the insight, I can't help but think another business outcome that we haven't really talked about yet is increased adoption of those SAS, web, and mobile apps that the business is investing in is we all know if you're spending money on applications like that and they're not being effectively utilized by your entire company or all the people that need to use it it's not going to work very well. So I'm even thinking from a product marketing perspective that's got to be one of the benefits, is actually fine tuning even the cost optimization of some of those apps that you guys can now bring that right to the user based on what you know they need. >> Yeah I think there was a couple of important points there that you mentioned. One is bringing the apps to the user so they are not-- Or the actions, sorry. >> The actions yes thank you. >> So instead of them going to multiple places to get them they're all just coming to them in one feed. The other is I'm from the adoption perspective. I think there's a lot of opportunity not just to improve the adoption but also to improve the satisfaction with the usage that's happening there. Anytime somebody talks to me about adoption now I think about this one customer briefing that I had where there was a very unique titled person, they were director of end user experience. Not director of end user computing they were director of experience. Their job was, he was saying, we're in charge of adoption and satisfaction, we have overall experience with it. I said, by adoption are you just creating mandates or policies or saying hey you will use this application not these other four options that you found online just doing a search. I said no because that doesn't lead to good experience. So our NPS scores. So he's rated more on NPS scores than anything else. Our NPS scores go down even if we can drive adoption up, if the NPS scores go down that's a failure for us. So it's not just, because you can get adoption by forcing people to use something and they hate it. You're no better off from an employee engagement perspective. >> It just goes to show how essential the employee experience is to customer experiencing customer satisfaction. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Employees touch in any function some level we're all engaging with our employer's customers and if there's dissatisfaction going on within the employee it has a very good chance of making it to the customer. Customers these days of any product or service, we have a choice. Customer churn is something that all marketers aim to eliminate and prevent but we know we have choice so I thought you guys did a great job yesterday of really elevating the employee experience to a business critical imperative. I don't even want to say it's a (mumbles) topic of discussion it seems to be an absolute imperative because to your point, you can by forcing function, make your teams use certain software applications but if an internal NPS goes down so does an external NPS so the risk thereof. So you guys did a great job of tying those two together is really, this is something that every business needs to be laser focused on is that employee experience. >> Yeah. Well the other thing I think about is a lot of these systems are not necessarily part of the primary function of their job. So unless you're in HR, you're not there to use the HRIS system all day long. So you just got to get them to the point so that they can do the things that they need to do as an employee for a legal or financial reasons and then just get them out of the way and let them go on. They feel productive, feel like they're contributing to the actual outcomes of the company. That goes a long way towards that experience and engagement. >> Absolutely. >> So let's peek a little bit into the future. You know it's funny that we're talking post-digital transformation as most people are still going into digital transformation. Customer experience, employee experience are the output of digital transformation. You get data from your digital transformation. You guys are doing a great job of providing analytics. Let's talk about the importance of those analytics as we go beyond employee experience, digital transformation, and customer experience. When we remove one bottle neck, when I first got my first iPhone it was awesome until the next iPhone came out and then the next one, then the next and my level of expectation changes. So what was good seven years ago, is unacceptable today. As you guys help customers innovate you collect data. What types of x-data, experience data will you continue to collect so even when the employee experience rises, that bar again rises and you help customers meet that bar. How important is analytics to that? >> The whole analytics platform is, I could foresee a day where people almost buy the workspace or buy bio networking solutions to get to the analytics that they want. We are in a unique situation where we have information about who the end user is, what device they're using, what files they're accessing, what networks they're going over, what servers are touching, what Clouds are using, and all of this stuff, it's very rare in industry that all those kinds of things come together in one place. So I think for one, the great thing about the purpose of gathering those analytics is for the machine learning. So the machine learning never stops learning as their end users continue to use it over time it just keeps getting better and better and better. It understands their behaviors, it understands their patterns and so the longevity is actually what helps. It transformed with the end user as long as we're just continuing to provide those sorts of capabilities. I think also the analytics, particularly in the area of engagement and productivity. We go back to the idea of breaking down applications into actions into micro-apps. I think once you start to see what micro-apps people use and what micro-apps people use in concert with each other or in sequence, that also has an interesting analytic behavioral benefit to it. You can see what work flows are developing whether organically or inorganically, whether there are patterns that you should take advantage of or patterns that you should stop and those analytics start to evolve in a way that we're getting a very granular pieces about granular units of work and then we can start to see how those impact the business outcomes. So as long as we keep thinking about not just how analytics apply to one piece of software and the experience with that software but start to think now what is the daisy chain of micro-apps? What is the experience of work and interconnectedness of that, the analytics just become more and more important in bringing that together. You can't do that mentally as a human being. You need some of that help from the machine learning. >> So Calvin last question for you. Lot's of folks here, over 6,000. The keynotes, yesterday and this morning were (mumbles) only. We heard record numbers watching the live stream. Intelligent Experience, not GA yet, we mentioned there's some customers in beta. That was some popular demo here in the Solutions Expo. Long line yesterday. Got to ask you as a VP of product marketing. What are some of the feedback that you've gotten from customers here since that breaking news yesterday morning? >> Number one is, can I get it now? They didn't pay attention to that. >> Of course right. >> So they, can I get it now? The other one I think is really great discussion to have because they see it, they see the end vision of it. It's like the cooking shows. You pull out the finished cake and they're like, oh that's great. How do I make it? How do I get there? So that's been the nature of a lot of those conversations. We're also holding executive briefings here a lot and what I've been hearing from all the teams is we'll start kicking off into a presentation we'll say okay, so let me recap what you saw and they're like, no no no, I like what I saw, tell me how we're going to do it. >> What does it look like? >> You get right into that conversation of execution and planning and who do I need to get on board? Who do I need to talk to? Do I bring in my CHRO? That kind of stuff. That kind of reaction, it's exactly what we were hoping for. >> I'll sneak one more question in because you've been at Citrix for 15 years but looking at the employee experiences as a horizontal across, it's not just IT's issue to make sure things are connected. It's HR, it's people officer, it's marketing, it's sales. Have you seen a big change in how Citrix is going to market? Not just talking to the IT folks but people saying, who do I need to engage in my business to get on board with this direction? >> Definitely. I don't want to overstate like we're in front of everyone. We're not a consumer name yet but in the past several months the audiences that we've been talking to it's not uncommon that we'll have a briefing with the CIO and the next time we talk the CHROs in there with them. Somebody else from the from the liner business. There are chief revenue officers and they are starting to bring people in that we've never met with before and I think that's good for the CIO too. It says, I'm invested in this business, I understand what our business is and I found a way to help you and let's talk about how to do it. >> Exciting times, never a dull moment. Well Calvin thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. At Synergy we've heard so many exciting things talking a couple more of your innovation award. Nominees this afternoon. Really great stuff from Citrix. >> Really good flock this year of the innovation award finalists. >> Outstanding. >> Great. >> I love how you guys do the voting too that it's, some of the public gets a chance to vote as well as some of the experts. I thought that was very cool. >> American Idol us. >> American Idol style. >> Exactly. Well Calvin thank you, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Center G 2019. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE covering DotNext Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the district everybody, I'm Dave Allante with Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we Extract the Signal from the Noise. We're here, this is day two of the Nutanix.NEXTConf, #NEXTConf, Chris Hsu is here, sorry Calvin Hsu is here, VP of Product Marketing at Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, nice to be here. >> So, you're up on stage earlier today right? A lot of good action here at the show. Talk about Citrix, and what you guys are doing here. >> Yeah, so I think Citrix, Nutanix, we've had a partnership going back for quite awhile. I think what really brought us together were customers that were actually trying to solve this issue, of how do I implement VDI, and how do I do this better right, there has to be a better way. And it's funny, we were just talking about chatting a little bit before about how many different infrastructure pieces and how many different components there are to learn in order to do VDI, and that was one of the things that always kind of stood as a barrier to adoption in some of the early days, going back, I don't know several years now, and they would say, well, you got to have, be an expert in networking, you got to be an expert in storage, you got to know all the server side infrastructure, the virtualization that goes with it, and then you got to also know the desktops, and the app parts of it, and how to manage all that. And in my experience it was all that technical knowledge, but it was also, it was also the people right? So, you also had to bring those people to the table, have one VDI project, go in and talk to a customer, and we're going to do a pilot for 200 people to start, and there'd be 20 people in the room. Because everybody had different areas of responsibility. And so as Nutanix is involved, and the whole idea of hyper-conversion, and HDI that's come around, that's really been some of the basis of where VDI is kind of getting that second booster of, in it's life cycle here, where they're realizing that it could just be a few people that are responsible for that HDI infrastructure, can deploy the VDI, and now they have a more simple reliable way of implementing that solution so (mumbles). >> I mean, that's kind of where, even when I go back to the converged infrastructure world that's, VDI was the one like foothold use case with Vblock's in the early days, and the HPE stuff, or HP then, and you know I have to say, I have to ask both of you guys, because you know this business really well, and you're obviously a VDI expert but, when you talk to customers, they get really excited about VDI, they're like, "Hey, this is a great use case, "we're going to, we're doing VDI, VDI, VDI, "it was a big project effort." When you talk to the analysts they're like, "Uhhh, VDI is so boring." What is it about VDI that there's this bifurcated opinion base right? Analysts uhhhh, okay, but customers eat it up. What's going on, what...? Unpack that for us. >> Well, I mean analysts don't necessarily feel the day-to-day pain of managing a desktop right? That's what it is right, so for them it's a-- >> Well said. >> It's the truth. Well, actually I know, I know some analysts that actually did that job, and so they're the ones that are still excited about it right? But in general, like once you get past the idea of that consulting a client on the complexities, and how do you choose a vendor and, and then it comes down to a few basic things, it's which one's going to deliver the best employee experience with the solution, which one's going to be the best operationally to manage and then sort of their job is done. But then, from a IT Admin perspective it's like they're still, every day they're managing new application update, the new desktop image, and it doesn't end right? And that's dozens and dozens of hours out of every week, every month, that you spend. >> Alright let's hear from the analyst. >> Dave, it was called VDI fatigue. Every year was the year of VDI you know. I think we've gotten beyond that, because I tell you, from my viewpoint, it was wait. It was this mess of a stack, and we're going to fix that. Oh wait, now storage is the mess, now flash is going to solve that, oh wait, mobile adoption is you know, the barrier, yet the opportunity, how do we modernize our applications, the changing workforce, mobile workforce. There were always the next, the next, the next, the next, the next thing and, it reminds me of our conversations with (mumbles) you know, it was like we're never finished, and a lot of it was, it was this big category of you know, you talk about the user experience, is I think, what Citrix is focused on, and how do we make that simpler and you know, so many analysts... The other thing from an analyst is, most analysts focus on a piece of it, and this is very different. I know some analysts focus on like, user experience, and let's look at the application, that's probably closer to where VDI is then, right, if you ask the storage guys they're like ah, VDI. If you ask the desktop people they're like wait, my place is fine so, it's that, it was a really complicated problem, but it's very different today, than it was, and I have to think with Nutanix it is, must've changed in the last five years. >> Absolutely, and well, I think the other thing is that's funny is if you take it back to like 2008 right? Analysts called the VDI game really early, so it's like you're saying every year was the VDI. Before anybody was deploying it in any sort of size, they were already saying it's a, X gazillion billion dollar market and that, and it, I think it's taken awhile for the customers... The customers are still just trying to dealing with some very basic desktop management issues today, and they're probably lagging behind the industry and analysts by three to five years I'd say, right? But what I hear now is, Windows 10 is coming around the horizon, how am I going to manage Windows 10 updates? I've got an Office 365 deployment project on my hands, how am I going to get this all out, how am I going to get the functionality that every one of my end users needs? And it comes around and it's like VDI is a great answer for that, it's a great way to solve that issue. >> Calvin, one of the things that we hear from new (mumbles) customers I mean, they love that kind of one-click simplicity, one-click update, and I hear about you know, Windows 10 is like the roll-out of the next thing, and where things break. How are Citrix and Nutanix working together to solve some of these challenges? >> Yeah, I think that approach of one-click, the automation you know, both the blue-printing types of technology is what we're pulling together. All that sort of automation is really important for, for this type of environment. You know I think the, we're both willing to pull together solutions that really then, drive that simplicity for, for both the infrastructure and the management, ongoing of that solution. It's like for example, we're working together on, work on the district's workspace appliance right? And that's, for us it's not a product name that's really a program, it's a way of defining HCI infrastructure like Nutanix and they're jumping on board with this. To be able to point that thing at the Citrix Cloud, and then download all the resources that it needs in order to run a Citrix workload on it. So it's a very automated way of getting stood up, so that not only is it deployment of the infrastructure, automated and simple, but placing that workload on it, and getting it set to manage, and then even running it and operating it is more like running and operating a Cloud service than it is even operating a local infrastructure for it. >> One of the things that David Floyer from Wikibon, has done a lot of analysis saying, if we can get to basically a single-managed entity is where he calls it, so I can have the entire thing comes out, not just the infrastructure, but all the way through the stack. Not only does that really help your deployment, but the overall kind of time-to-value, customer experience is just tremendously improved, tell us how you're helping to kind of reach that vision. >> Yeah, well I think it's time-to-value, but it's also making VDI accessible to more customers right, and more segments of the market. The types of things that VDI solves, security, manageability, those aren't just enterprise problems right? Even midsize companies, they have security concerns, and for them it's actually probably even more dramatic, like they have a breach there, and it's catastrophic for the company, not just, you know we're delayed by a few hours. And so you know, having that simplicity, and then making that whole thing easier to deploy, and faster, it's not just easier to deploy, but on day two, it's easier to manage ongoing. Those things are getting into tension again. >> So for years I remember in the Citrix, Synergy, a bunch of VMware, VM world's, talked to customers, and it was always a two-horse race between those two companies, and Citrix was like Secretariat, and VMware was like Devil His Due. You've probably never heard of Devil His Due. Pretty good horse but not Secretariat, and you guys, Citrix was the dominant player in that marketplace. What's the competitive situation today? It seems like VMware has made some acquisitions, has maybe caught up, maybe has some advantages, what, how do you see them as a competitor? >> I, so I think where Citrix is, I think that what really happens in the competitors space now is that it becomes less about VDI, versus VDI, and like what features are in each one. Although I could talk for hours, I think there's still a bunch of differentiation in there. You know earlier talking about user experience, I think the way we're looking at this market, and what's happening to it right now, is less about sort of user experience in the sense of a classic protocol versus protocol sense, in a technical sense, and more about, and I'll use the term more and more often about employee experience, alright, so it's not just what is the performance of my virtual desktop when I'm on x-y-z device, over a certain network. It is what happens that first time I give an employee a resource, or a virtual desktop, or a mobile application, or access to a SAS application, or an internally-hosted Web application through a virtual browser, and they go in and they, they want to get work done right? So the experience of that employee is now, not just one of these technologies, it is what we refer to as workspace technology. It's everything I need from the applications, to the files that I want to use, to the workflows that I want to kick off, and I think that will be their new area of differentiation, and again, that's where we want to move very far for. >> Calvin, what should we be expecting to see from Citrix and Nutanix going for a long partnership, and how does it improve even more for customers? >> I think you know, the stuff that Nutanix has announced here, with the whole Hybrid Cloud strategy, I think that very much is in alignment with our philosophy on Hybrid Cloud approaches for customers. So I would expect to see a lot more in that collaboration area. There's lots more that we can do on the NetScaler side of the business for networking, and enabling the reliability of a lot of these network connections as people become, you know I love that concept of the core, the distributing the Edge Cloud right, and all of that's going to need interconnectivity, and security and reliability. And you know, more of the same on making VDI simpler for, for all customers of all sizes. I think we're just at the cusp of you know we've got this automation plan going in, we're creating the workspace appliance in its simplicity there. I think there's a lot more we can do, again, from day two perspective operationally, as I keep going and I'm growing this thing, and I'm managing my images, and I'm managing applications, and growing the infrastructure, increasing performance, taking on different types of workloads, there's lots more we can do in that area. >> What is the all Citrix Stack Workplace Appliance? >> Right, so that is really the Nutanix has announced support for XenServer, and for us, you know XenServer, we've really done a transformation of that technology over the last couple years, where we've taken what was a general platform virtualization solution, and we've really specifically targeted at our workloads. At XenApp, XenDesktop, NetScaler, and making it the best virtualization platform for our, for our solutions. Why do we do that? We do that because there's going to be certain things that we need out of that layer from an innovation standpoint whether it's supporting graphics, which we were the first to do, across all the major ship vendors, virtual GPUs, coming up with new security paradigms like being able to do deep Hypervisor Introspection, and identify day one malware attacks before they, even infect any of the machines. You know, those sorts of innovations become really important that we can drive, and having control over XenServer we're able to do that. So through the partnership with Nutanix, and getting their support on that as well, then all the joint Nutanix and Citrix customers could take advantage of that innovation. So now they also have the obviously at their disposal, everything that Nutanix is putting into HV, everything we're putting into XenServer, and being able to manage it that way. So, in the workspace appliance, sort of reference guide for building this, one of the things we focus on is the XenServer component of it, and being able to have that innovation coming from Citrix as part of that solution. >> Great. Calvin, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, appreciate your time, and your insights. >> Thank you, yeah it's good to be here. >> Good to see you. Alright, keep it right there buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from DotNext, #NEXTConf, this is theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, It's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith, it's great to be back with you. We had a great day yesterday. >> Wasn't it exciting? >> It was. >> And this is surprising. You know, I have to be honest, as a former Citrix customer, and as a watcher of it, David Hansel talked about the 85% of IT budgets goes into keeping the lights on, et cetera, I'd firmly put Citrix in that 85% of a company that produces solutions that basically kept the lights on. They snuck into the other 15% yesterday. It was a really interesting keynote. >> They've made an obvious pivot towards general-purpose users. David also mentioned, and this is something that I didn't know, that most enterprise software, historically, >> which is the one percent of users. And, they are really positioning Citrix Workspace, intelligent experience, for the general purpose user. The marketing managers, the folks in finance, et cetera, who can really leverage this tool, to dramatically, not just simplify their workdays, but they made this really bold promise, yesterday, that Citrix Workspace One, with the intelligence experience, is going to be able to give each person back, a user, one full day a week. That's two months a year back to actually do their jobs. >> I think I will choose to go on vacation for those two months. >> I'm with ya. >> But one of the things that was consistent, throughout the day was the tone of, one, excitement. All of the analysts, all of the executives we talked to yesterday, very excited about the intelligent experience, but it was, I think, it was more of a abstract thought versus solid, like, this is what the product will do, this is what it looks like, so I'm looking forward to the coming months of seeing the product in action. I could equate it to robotic process automation tools like UiPath and the MiniTools that are out there, but I didn't get a good sense of how deep Citrix is going to go in to robotic process automation, and who would control it. You mentioned the one percent power users. You know when you look at a automation tool, these are tools that are for the one percent, to create these automations, these processes. Will this be something that the Citrix administrators will do on the back end, and then deploy to end users and the app store, similar to how Citrix is deployed today? Or, is this something their going to give users, power-users, the ability to create, so a department team can create a process, an automated workflow, and then deploy that to their team members? I'm strong believer the further you push technology, simple to use to the end-user, the more powerful it becomes, and the more they come up with creative ways to use the technologies. >> And, also, the higher the adoption's going to be. You know, every tech conference we go to, Keith, talks about, you hear the buzzwords, simplicity, frictionless, make it seamless, those all sound great, and yes, of course, as employees of any company, you want that. It's, where does the rubber meet the road? So, I did read, though, that even though the intelligent experience isn't going to be GA until later this year, there are a suite of beta customers. So, I hope we can chat about that with P.J. Hough, their Chief Product Officer, later today to just get a sense of what are some of the impacts that this solution is having on some of these beta customers? Are they seeing significant reductions or increases in workforce productivity, getting towards that, hey, one whole day back? That was the busiest booth, I hear, at the Solutions Expo yesterday. There was a very long line, so the interest, certainly, was definitely peaked, in terms of what they announced yesterday with the audience here. >> So, today's going to be a pretty exciting day of coverage. We're going to talk to, hopefully, a few customers. We're going to talk to P.J., and I'm excited to, kind of, peel back the layers on the announcement around the intelligent experience. Then, we cap off the day with talking to their CTO, Christian Reilly, who, you know, is always fun. So, one thing that we didn't talk a lot about today, you know, KubeCon is happening in Europe, the team is there covering that show. And we didn't talk much cloud, yesterday. While there was announcements around Azure and Google Compute Platform, we didn't get in to, kind of, the details of that, so I'm looking forward to talking to Christian later on today about how is Citrix relevant to the cloud conversation? This whole future of work, we can't talk about the future of work without talking about cloud. >> Absolutely. I know that their cloud revenue is up, but you're right, that isn't something that we got in to yesterday. We really focused a lot on , with our spectrum of guests, on the employee experience. >> Mm hmm >> And, also, got a really broad definition, you know. Employee experience isn't just about when I log in, as a manager, on all of the different tasks that I need to do before I can actually start my function. It starts back, up and to the left, when you even start recruiting for talent. >> Right. >> And, that was, eyeopening to me is they're right, it encompasses the end to end. I kind of thought of it as a marketing funnel, where you're nurturing prospects in to leads, converting them in to opportunities. And then, one of the most important things on the marketing funnel, that's very similar here, is turning those customers in to advocates. Same thing on the employee experience side, is turning those employees in to empowered users that are happy because they're able to be productive and do their jobs appropriately. And then, of course, their business has nurtured them well enough that they retain that top talent. >> We did get, at least, one customer on, yesterday. We talked to Adam Jones, the CRO, Chief Revenue Officer of the Florida Marlins. I got a opportunity to get a dig in on the Chicago Cubs, so that's always a fun thing. But, even from a customer's perspective, Adam brings the COO lens. So usually you're over HR, you're over vendor partnerships, et cetera, he talked about the importance of, one, giving his employees a seamless experience, so he talked about the employee experience, and, overall, keeping the motivation factor high. Speaking of motivation, we learned a new term yesterday, ToMo. >> Love that term. >> Total motivation? What was it? >> Yeah, total motivation. >> Total motivation, so I'm definitely going to look at my ToMo score for the couple of contractors I have on my staff. (laughing) Or at least try and develop one. I thought it was a great, a great, great acronym, but, more importantly, I think organizations are starting to understand. Employee satisfaction, employee experience equates to outcomes when it comes to customer experience. >> 100% >> If your employees are not having a great experience, we talked about onboarding experiences yesterday. If that isn't happening, then chances are, there's a direct correlation between customer experience and employee experience. >> It's a huge risk that companies can't ignore. Employee experience is essential. We talked, yesterday, like you said, about every employee engagement has some relation back to the customer. >> Right. Whether you're in marketing, and you're creating collateral to nurture prospects, or you're in finance, or legal, or you're in the contact center, you're a touchpoint to that customer. And so, you're experience, as an employee, they need to foster those relationships to turn those employees in to advocates. Because the customers, for whatever product or service you're delivering, 'cause we have so much choice these days. The ability to go, "Nope, this isn't working." "I'm going to go find another vendor "who can deliver this service." is a big risk, and so, we were talking to Maribel Lopez yesterday, of Lopez Research, you could really hear her passion in the research that she's done on the future of work. We talked about employee experience, to your point, absolutely critical for customer satisfaction. Employee experience is really essential for digital transformation because businesses really can't transform, successfully, if the employees aren't productive, aren't satisfied, and able to adapt to changing culture as a business digitizes itself. >> As we talk about that other 15 to 20% of innovation, it's odd that we're having this employee experience conversation at Citrix. Citrix isn't a HR software company, let alone a HR company, and we talked to David about this in the opening. How do they transition from just having this conversation with IT administrators, which is the primary audience, here, at Citrix Synergy, to having this conversation with CEOs, CIOs, CMOs, CDOs, the COOs, other C-suite executives. Does Citrix belong at the table, versus these traditional companies we think of? The management consultant firms, who specialize in HR and employee experience, or even other software companies, like SAP with HRM. I thought it was interesting that a lot of the executives that we talked to yesterday, had an experience with SAP. So, Citrix is, absolutely, going about this in a prescribed manner and injecting this culture in to their company. >> I agree with you. We talked to their Chief People Officer and EVP, Donna Kimmel, and with a number of other guests, about the employee experience being a C-level, not just a conversation topic, but an imperative. Because, all of the cogs need to be functioning in the same direction for this company to move forward, and as I mentioned earlier, as every product and service has competition, us consumers, whether we're consumers of commercial products, or technology buyers, we have choice. >> Right. >> And, so, an organization needs to bake in to their culture, the employee experience, in order to ensure that its survival rate and its competitive advantage can go, 'cause we actually did talk about talent attraction and retention as a competitive advantage. And Citrix has done a good job of, you're right, not producing technology for HR, but really being able to speak to that business case being horizontal across any type of organization. >> I thought it was a really interesting point, or at least something that I thought about yesterday, at Citrix, again, we have a bunch of network administrators, system administrators, VP of Infrastructures, that is the traditional audience. A lot of times, we can fill abstracted. That audience can feel abstracted from the business. When you're a call center, when you're in sales, when you're actually touching customers, employee experience, obviously, makes sense then. But, I thought the demonstration with the marketing manager really helped this audience connect with more of those frontline employees and helping to improve their experience and bringing meaning to that traditional network or sysadmin job. You know, when you feel like you're absolutely moving the productivity ball forward. This is generational. Adam Jones of the Marlins said that he's in a generational opportunity. To affect change, administrators will find themselves in a generational opportunity to affect change, to move more than just, you know what, we're going to turn knobs, to actually impacting business processes. >> You talk about generational opportunities. One of the things we talked about yesterday is not just that there are five generations in the workforce today, who have differing levels of technology expertise, but, this morning in the Super Session, we got the opportunity to hear from Dr. Madelyn Albright, the 64th Secretary of State of the United States, the first female Secretary of State. And, I loved how she talked about diplomacy, and democracy, and all of the experiences that's she's had in relation to how technology can be an enabler of that. When I Wiki-ed her, I thought, "She's 82 years old." >> 82? "And there's Madelyn Albright, who is still "professing at Georgetown University." I thought that was pretty outstanding. >> You know, you made the point, in our pre-discussion, about she started at Secretary of State, didn't have a computer on here desk, to riding in the driverless car, and obviously, speaking at a technology conference, I thought it was a great testament to where technology has moved, her ability to embrace change, but, more importantly, what it will take. I think she was a model of what it will take. Another interesting point that she made today was trust and knowing whom you're doing business with. We talked about security a awful lot yesterday. Just from a practical technical sense, being able to trust that the person that I'm talking to on the other end of the phone, is actually who they say they are, or on the other end of a transaction. As we start to share data, make the flow of data allow frictionless sharing of data, we need to be able to trust who we're talking to on the other end. She said, any time something happens in the world, the first piece of information she gets is always wrong is her approach to validation. Trust, but validate. I thought there was a lot of great parallels in that to technology. >> I did as well. On the security front, we talked, yesterday, about, not just the digital workspace of Citrix, but what they're doing on the security and the analytics front to really understand and ensure that the data that they're getting off of users interacting through workspace, is ensuring, that, okay, this person is authorized to be in this application and this particular area of this application. What were some of the things that you heard, with respect to security, that you think Citrix is getting it right? Because, as we know, people; number one security threat, anywhere. >> Well, you know, Citrix has, traditionally, been a leader in products like Single Sign-On, the ability to make the technology frictionless. There's a reason why we have a Post-It Note, right here, with the ID, you know. For our user name and password, it's 13 characters, has to be alphanumeric, et cetera, and then it expires every 30 days. That's not frictionless security. Citrix has made waves in Single Sign-On in making sure that the user experience is frictionless, so that security, as users, we don't try and bypass that security. I think that's just a simple concept that organizations should follow. Then, even on the side of analytics, we have Kevin Jackson of >> GovCloud. >> GovNet on, and he talked about how monitoring employees changes their actions. So, as we're collecting analytics and data to automate processes, how Citrix is making it seamless, and in the course of that, anonymizing the data, so that employees don't feel like big brother is watching. >> Yeah. I thought, you know, the more exposure I get, through theCUBE, to different technologies, the more I've changed my perspective on that. Is it big brother watching me? >> Right. >> Even in call centers, when, this call may be recorded, you think, "Oh, great." Actually, they're using that data, to your point, as Kevin talked about yesterday, its anonymized, but the goal is to make the product and service and communications better. And another thing that it can facilitate, where Citrix is concerned, is making that workspace and that employee experience personalized. >> Yeah. >> Which is what we all expect as consumers. When we go on Amazon, and we want to buy something, we don't want them to show it again. We expect that they know. I've already bought this, maybe service something to me that would be a great addition to whatever I bought. We want that personalized experience to make our lives easier, and that personalization is another big element that they talked about delivering yesterday. And the security and the analytics, I think, are two pieces that can be facilitators of that. Could just also be, sort of, a messenger to make sure more of the users understand the anonymization and how that data about their interactions are actually going to make their experiences better. >> I bought a new laptop, by Microsoft, a week ago, and I was on Facebook, and all of the sudden, I got a ad from Microsoft on Facebook about laptop and laptops accessories. At first, I thought, "Wow, that's weird." But, that may be the first Facebook ad I've ever clicked on because that actually added value. While I felt a little strange about them knowing that I bought a new laptop, Facebook gave me the option to find out how did the ad get served up. Well, Microsoft uploaded a HashSet of email addresses, and my Surface purchase came up, and actually it added value. I was like, "Okay, I can find out what "other material." So, at the end of the day, when you're transparent about what you're doing, and you inform users, and you add value, the end of the day's the key part, you have to add value, doesn't help to advertise Surface laptops after I already bought one. Now, and to, that next stage, to show me accessories and make my experience, my relationship with Microsoft even better, is a great example of that. >> Exactly. Jeff Fritz calls that the line between being creepy >> Yes. >> and being magic, but I like how you add that part of that magic is adding value. >> Exactly. >> 100%. Well, Keith, I'm excited for today. We have, you mentioned, P.J.'s on today, Calvin Hsu is also on today. We're going to be talking with the three Innovation Award nominees. That's a very cool, kind of, American Idol-style voting process, where the public can vote on the Innovation Award winner, which will be announced tomorrow. So, excited about everything we're going to talk about today, and, as you mentioned, we're capping things off today with Christian Reilly, CTO, who we already see, through Twitter, is very excited to be theCUBE with us. >> All right. >> All right, have a great day, yeah? >> Yes. >> All right. >> Let's get to it. >> That's a deal. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and, again, we are live at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. Keith and I will be back with our first guest after a break.