>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and pleased to welcome back. One of our cube alumni, Christian rowdy, the VP of technology strategy at Citrix Christian. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. And thanks for having me. Great to see you again, and we'll be virtually at this time. >>Great to see you too. It's been a couple of years and quite a few things have changed since we got to sit down at synergy a couple of years together together. Citrix has an exciting new announcement. Let's unpack that. Talk me to me about what you're announcing and what it's going to deliver. >>Sure. You know, as you said, actually, I can't believe it's been a couple of years since we last saw each other. And I think, you know, time's kind of just disappeared within the pandemic. So it actually, as a result of some of those things that we've seen, you know, people get so tired of being stuck in the same place and tired of being on this constant stream of video. And one of the things that we wanted to do was, was actually a vital Citrix launch part, which is kind of our new announcement series that will be delivered via LinkedIn live. But he's really intended to be kind of a short burst approach to providing updates to some of them really important things that we're working on at Citrix. So, uh, hopefully, uh, people would love to say a reason and get some rich information from them. >>And there's going to be a series of three launchpad programs. Now we've seen so much change since the rapid pivot to work from home. Now this worked from anywhere hybrid environment. We've seen the, the massive adoption of cloud and SAS. We've also seen the threat landscape, the attack surface, just expand and expand. Talk to me about why Citrix is doing the launch pad series and then we'll go through each of the three series. >>Yeah, absolutely. So maybe I think just to set a little bit of context, you know, we, we were working on some pretty interesting things, uh, pre pandemic, you know, uh, as a result of the, kind of the, the evolution of Citrix as an organization, but perhaps more importantly, the journey that our customers were on globally, you know, every customer that we had in, in any industry across the world, we're all at various stages of their own digital transformation. And I think what the pandemic has done apart from all the really bad things, actually, if you look at it as a, perhaps one gleaming bit of light in the whole thing was that we've given organizations, whether we realize it or not the opportunity to try this huge remote work experiment. And I think what it has done above anything else has shown that remote work actually works. >>And so as a result of that, what we've seen coming out of the pandemic is that organizations are really going to use that as a springboard. So implement some new strategies, new technologies, and really drive the next generation of that business. So with one eye on that, I think if you were to categorize the three big things that we're looking at from a Citrix perspective, it's really about how to help, we'll continue to help our customers with that accelerated it modernization to really help them understand what it takes to have secure, flexible work in this new post pandemic world. And then also to think about productivity, what does productivity mean in a world of ever more distributed teams? And so the events that we're talking about and specifically the cloud one, we'll focus on some of the new offerings from Citrix, some of the new technologies and talk about the trends that we've seen within our customers. >>So, you know, one of the big things that Citrix has always been very proud of is our market leading position in virtual application and virtual desktop delivery. And even that itself has now begun to emerge into what we call desktop as a service. And there's a ton of new innovations that we've been working on in that space as well. But also if you think about what's happening in cloud, as you talked about, you know, the evolution of applications being from traditional on premises, wills to SAS applications, what we're also seeing is things like the network services that use to support those applications when they looked slightly different, which from a deployment perspective, and now all moving to cloud services, the security that you alluded to in terms of how complicated that is, but how important it is for it, organizations, those services also moving to cloud as the applications begin to look very differently in the future. So extremely excited about the cloud launch. Patino, we're going to talk a lot about those things that we're doing both in the public cloud, in the hybrid cloud. And I think it will resonate well with customers around the world. >>I think it will as well. And you mentioned there are glimmers of hope that we've seen in the last 18 months. And one of the things that this has proved is that work from home can be productive, can be successful. Employees need to be empowered to be able to do that. Let's go ahead and talk through the first, um, program accelerating it monetization. This is Tuesday, September 28th. Let's talk about some of the, of the Citrix innovations that you're going to be announcing. >>Yeah, so I mean, as I mentioned know, we, we, we think about sort of ecstatic. I see modernization in various parts. You know, we tend to start with the classic infrastructure and we've seen over the years that lots of infrastructure, you know, he's leaving the building. And by that we mean the traditional realms of on-premise data centers or co-location facilities, this constant evolution and migration of those services, uh, to, to infrastructure as a service providers from the huge cloud companies that are out there. And we can continue to see that as a, as a huge trend. Of course. Um, one of the things that off the back of that of course is our move from the traditional world of virtual desktops, which was a very on-premise concept into desktop as a service. So really the key around desktop as a service, it's a simplification, some cost optimization and the things that it are looking at in terms of how they can really bring things to the party for their organizations going forward. >>And of course, as we move into that world of everything being delivered as a service know, things like network services, security services, they almost follow. So some of the things that you'll hear about that is really around our application, delivering security and also our move from VDI to DAS. And, you know, you'll hear a lot about what we're doing with the world's leading cloud providers to really add more Citrix value or build on what we've already done with them, but lots, lots more, uh, and really support the, the, the notion of the, every customer is on a journey to cloud one way or the other. And of course, districts will be ready to help at any stage of that journey. >>Every customer is on the journey to cloud. And we've seen that accelerate so much in the last 18 months. Talk to me a little bit about if we, if we think of desktop as a service, as an evolution of VDI, is that what you're saying? >>Yeah. You know, you think about sort of the traditional VDI scenario was that your virtual desktops, where we were using instead of physical desktops, you know, in inside the usual office location, but during the pandemic, you know, we saw so many customers rely on moving to VDI, to cloud, for reasons of scalability and reasons of security, but then also needing to still in many cases, provide access to those sort of traditional physical PCs. And of course, Citrix has had solutions for that for fundamentally many, many years. Um, but what we're also seeing is that organizations are striving for simplicity. You know, the kind of the value of the desktop is being able to deliver it on demand to the end user securely from wherever they are in the world on whatever device they're on. And as we see this sort of establishment of these new working norms, and I'm not a great fan of the phrase, the new normal, I think we have a new now and that now will evolve. You know, they almost daily as we come through the other side of the pandemic. So the real key drivers for us there obviously flexibility, reliability, security, and also cost optimization, which of course is the bread and butter of most conversations we have with CIO and CTO is around the world. >>That's critical. And I'm going to borrow that, um, the new, now, if you don't mind, I'll cite you credit. But I like that. I agree that I hope this is not the new normal, but one of the things that we've seen in the new now on the security front is we've seen this massive increase in ransomware. Everybody went to work from home almost overnight. Suddenly you have millions of devices, IOT devices connecting to corporate networks. Security became the acceleration of security, became a huge challenge for customers in any organization globally. Let's talk about now the second announcement. This is going to be Tuesday, October 5th, empowering a secure distributed workforce. >>Yeah. And I, and I think you you've hit the nail on the head there. I think the one thing that was perhaps completely staggering to everybody was the speed in which organizations were forced to lock their employees out of the physical office locations and by force. I mean, for all the right reasons that are around the health and wellbeing. I mean, if I think back to my earlier career, you know, before I joined Citrix, I was in a large organization and we would, you know, perform these fire drills every so often where we would go through our disaster recovery business continuity plans and really play scenarios out. Like the office in London was unavailable or the office in LA was unavailable, but never once do I remember is doing every office. And every location is offline from tomorrow. And there's no negotiability. If you have a device at home, please use it. >>You know, we can't provide laptops quick enough, especially with the global chip shortage now as well. So whatever device you have, we'll do our best to, to make that secure. And I think there was, uh, an expectation that the employees would sort of play nicely in that scenario. But of course, you know, if you have your home device, you probably don't update it as much as a work device. So it really does require a new set of thinking. And of course, Citrix has been at the forefront of the zero trust evolution. Now the technologies that we have in place do permit remote work and have them for many years. But I think what we're seeing now is a slightly different type of remote work, you know, with different types of, of applications and devices, as you said, different locations, you know, needing to knit all of that together in a sort of a more contextual way so that we can understand, you know, combinations of the end user, their location, the types of applications that they're using the state of their devices, and sort of bring it all that together to really understand, you know, just exactly how much security needs to be applied. >>I think the traditional challenges are still there, you know, too much security and end users will find a way around it because it's not a good user experience. And, you know, perhaps too much user experience without the security leaves, big holes and big problems for organizations. So, yeah, I think this balancing act is really key. And of course, uh, as we go through the launch funnel security, we'll talk about some of the great innovations and solutions that are coming from central. >>You're right with the fact that, uh, you know, this rapid pivot security, the changes, the things that people are saying, the workforce needs to be empowered. You know, we saw this sudden dependence on all these SAS applications to communicate and to collaborate. We also saw with that rapid PennDOT to work from home ransomware, I was doing some research recently, Christian, and that's it, it's up almost 11 X just in the first half of 2021 DDoSs is massively up. People are, are working from home in environments that are just suddenly a bit chaotic. And it's challenging from a security perspective when you have so many distractions to be able to make sure that you're following all the right steps as an employee, um, that you're not clicking on nefarious links and that you're really doing your own due diligence. So having that zero trust and help from folks like Citrix is really key to this new. Now, as you say, >>It is, you know, the unfortunate thing is that wildlife, uh, no end user, or certainly I would hope that no one user would willingly cause a problem from a security perspective. I think just by the very nature of the way that end users thing, can they interact with links in emails or the, uh, you know, interact with attachments in emails? Unfortunately, relying on the human is always going to be the weakest link in the chain. And I think that's why we have to have new approaches to how we address the use of behavior. You know, can we actually, uh, you know, guide people in different ways. There are plenty of technologies that are out there now. And then many, many from Citrix that actually allow us to what we've lovingly said is, is to save the users from themselves. You know, we can't simply rely on every user to be diligent for every single email or every single link that they see. So, you know, being able to actually understand, you know, where the threats are as it relates to the end user and the likely interaction they have, and then being able to combat those threats in the technology at a seamless way is really part of the excited evolution of, of what we're doing with Citrix. And again, lots of great things to come as we go through the security. >>And the third announcement is around worker boosting worker productivity. That's been a challenge that we've all faced in the last 18 months of having, like I said, a minute ago, you know, people that have suddenly kids learning from home spouses, working people competing for bandwidth. Talk to me about some of the things that Citrix is doing to help those workers be more engaged, be plugged in and really be able to get their jobs done from anywhere. >>Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I can give you the benefit of my experience, you know, being, uh, in a, in a home office for, for, for almost 20 months has been completely the antithesis of the opposite of the rest of my career. You know, I've, I've always been very mobile, um, you know, kind of picking up different devices and using them for different things, just purely from a, you know, the perspective of what's most convenient to me. And I think, you know, if you take that and extrapolate it to, to every employee and every organization around the world who has had to invite work into their home, you know, and another soundbite that I use quite often now is that, you know, for the last 20 months, we really haven't been working from home. We've been living at work, you know, and, and, and it's, it's a fact, you know, we've probably done more hours than ever before. >>We've run the risk of burnout more than ever before. And, you know, prior to the pandemic, I know, talked to you and I talked about this very thing, uh, at synergy, you know, w we talked about the notion of needing to focus on employee experience and employee productivity. You know, we saw plenty of examples in customers with huge initiatives around employee experience and employee productivity. You know, CIO is partnering with HR leads and really trying to figure out a map, the employee journey, you know, what is it that they do every day? You know, how can we make their life easier? And perhaps interestingly, how can we reduce some of the mundane overhead, you know, approvals or requests or things that we see in our everyday life, but actually give the employees more time to be valuable and, and do great cognitive work, which is of course, what, what humans do best. >>And so, you know, you remember, we talked about the micro apps back then. We, we we'd completed the acquisition of Sappho, uh, as you and I talked last time when we unveiled micro apps and micro workflows, as a way to really help end users interact within Citrix workspace. So the systems that they use every day, but provide a new way to do that. And just earlier this year, we completed the acquisition and integration of Reich, which was a fantastic addition to the Citrix portfolio. And so we've really begun to think about, you know, how can we actually help employees to do their best work? You know, w w what are the new capabilities that we need within Citrix workspace? What are the new capabilities that we need in Reich? How do we bring all that together with some of the other solutions that we have Citrix Podio is a really interesting suite of productivity applications that we have really aimed at that number one problem, which is how can I get people to be productive, to stay engaged, to lower the burnout and help them do their best work. And I'm really, really excited because there's some fantastic things. So we announced that the work version of the launch pod, which is on October 12th, >>All of those are so critical. You know, I I've always said employee productivity employee is directly related to the customer experience. I've used Wrike myself before, um, for different projects and being able to have productivity tools that allow the employee to engage, to be able to empower them to move projects forward, especially in a time that is still somewhat chaotic is, is critical as is to your point, ensuring that there are the proper tools to facilitate folks so that they get what they need when they need it to help reduce burnout. That's been a big challenge. You're right. That the living at work thing is real, it's persisting, and we're going to be in this hybrid environment for some TBD amount of time longer. So having the ability to be empowered and productive in a secure way, leveraging cloud capabilities is really key. And it's exciting to hear what Citrix launchpad is going to announce over those three days and deliver. >>Yeah. You know, I, I would just say, you know, in, in, in sort of summary where we're, we're really excited about the three areas now, and they really do sort of all come together in some of those challenges that we talked about, you know, specifically around how we can help organizations to address that accelerated it modernization to drive secure, flexible work in the new now, and also to really reach that goal of having extremely productive, distributed teams as we come out the other side of the pandemic. So, you know, lots going on a fantastic time to, to be here and to talk to you and to be at Citrix, of course, with so many, you know, huge customer issues that we, that we have to solve. And we're really excited for the challenge. >>Excellent. And we all are looking forward to that, the Citrix launchpad series, Christian, where can folks go to register for these different programs? >>Yeah, sure. So it's pretty simple. So if we just go to HTTP bit dot Lee, bit dot L Y forward slash Citrix launchpad, and we can sign up through that. >>Excellent. I've already signed up. I'm looking forward to these series, this series, to learn more about what you guys are doing and kind of dig in double click on some of the things that you spoke about Christian. Thank you for joining me today, talking about the launch pad series and letting folks know where they can go to register. >>Thank you. Great to be on the great to see you again. >>Likewise, for Christian Riley, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a cube conversation.

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019! Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, two days, wall-to-wall coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I have been geeking out for two full days now, and speaking of geeking out, I think its going to continue because Christian Reilly is here, back on theCUBE, the vice president and CTO of Citrix. Christian, welcome back! >> Thank you so much, it's been a while. >> It has! >> It really has. >> Well, we hope to make it fun. We have had, like I said, such great conversations with your executives, customers, analysts, everybody is so excited about this obvious pivot that Citrix is making towards the general user. You know, the power users being that 1 percent, and what you guys started off yesterday showing, resonates with everybody. I get it. I want my work day to be far more productive. I want apps and actions brought to me, so I can actually get down to the business of what I was hired to do. And we also are hearing over and over again, how employee experience is now elevated to a c-suite imperative, that is so critical because it directly affects the customer experience. >> Yeah, it's super exciting, isn't it? You know, it's great to watch it all come to life, because, you know, we've been working on this for a number of years behind the scenes and, you know, it's just so great to see all the effort that goes in come out on the big stage. And your right, I mean, we've been very calculated about the approach here. We do a lot of research in trying to understand these problems and these challenges. And, you know, quite frankly, customers are looking for more innovation from Citrix, looking for better ways to work, and, you know, I think we've got a very privileged position in being so important in customer application delivery over the decades that Citrix has been around. And so the, you know, the move, even though it seems like it's a quantum leap, is actually a really natural thing for us to go do, because we've won the trust over three decades of being, you know, the vendor to deliver mission critical apps so this is just an extension of that, but it's, yeah, it's super exciting. >> Yeah, so we've talked about that for the past couple of days. Citrix is a verb within IT. You know, "I'm going to Citrix into the application," or, "Is that on Citrix?" Or, "Is it Citrixed yet?" It is, we commonly understand what it means to be Citrix. But that's something that you guys have built over 30 years, and I think what's really interesting, Dana Gardner, we had him on earlier, he said Citrix is much too modest, there should be a Citrix inside for so many SaaS offerings, so that end-users in end-users understand that the foundational technology for this SaaS service, whether it's some payroll software, or some other third party healthcare solution, is being brought to you. The underlying application didn't have to be rewritten because of Citrix. I think we're at another foundational moment now. What you guys announced yesterday was foundational. I tweeted out as David was talking, saying, "You know what? Citrix is going to be the future of work." Like you know what? We'll follow doing automation. Citrix can't possibly be the- be the future of work. And he announced it, but, I want to try and get you- get this in one answer, hopefully, because it's big, you've been working on this for years, it shows, it's natural for Citrix to say that they're going to go to the next step of integrating different applications because you've been there already. What's the foundational technology? As, you know, when Frame back in 1995 was the foundational technology for virtual applications, what's the foundational capability that you're giving businesses today, that we're going to look back 20 years from now and say, "Obviously, that was the innovation"? >> Yeah, so that's a great question, I think there's a of couple things really, you know, We talked about it in the keynote extensively yesterday about the analytics piece. So, I wouldn't say that analytics is the only thing, but certainly when you think about the way we lined up the analytics conversation around security performance and then productivity. So that's the foundational element, and we're going to look back at that in a few years time and realize that we were very privileged to be in the path of user transactions, and the more you're in the path, the more transactions you get. The more transactions you get, the more source data you get. The more source data you get, the more you can feed the machine learning model, and the more accurate you can be about delivering the context of the workspace, so I think that's super important. The next bit, of course, would be the acquisition that we made of the Sapho technology back in November of 2018. And I think, you know, what you see there in the micros and the micro work flows, is really that big shift from the version 1 of the workspace, which was still very much about the traditional applications, traditional desktops, and then bringing together web and SaaS applications, but we sort of always knew that there was a bigger play, which was really to try and, as PJ talked about yesterday, how do we take work and break it down into atomic units? So we don't think about just the application, we think about the why. Why do people use applications? What is it that they do? And if you think about how that plays out with analytics, the more intelligence that we gather, the more intelligent we make the workspace. So I think with a couple of things, we'll look back at the Sapho acquisition as a key technology piece, but we'll look back at analytics as maybe the thing that helped to be the flywheel to deliver that intelligence within the workspace environment itself. >> And the power that that intelligence has to deliver a personalized experience to each user is huge. If we look at the consumerization and the expectations that we all bring to our business lives we want things to be smart enough to serve up just what I'm looking for. To make my life easier, so that the intelligence and the analytics has huge implications on being able to help companies use their applications better. If I'm having to go in and learn sales floors and try to talk glamor and all these things that as a marketer, I don't need to do, but if I could have technology that's under the covers- under the bonnet, is evaluating that and going to learn, "this is all that she needs to do for her role," how much happier am I going to be? How much more productive am I going to be? It's game-changing. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think that the most important thing to remember about the whole of the the strategy around analytics, is it's constantly learning, so it's not like we just do it once. And if you think about where that goes along the term, you know, we're talking about, obviously, gathering user transaction data that I talked about. That will help us to generate the most valuable micro applications. But then if you think about that a little bit further on, you know, how do we actually then begin to get analytics on the micros themselves, and even begin to free up more productivity. So there's a continuum here that we see. You know, automation, as you mentioned, will be critical, you know, and if you think about what's happening and the industry in general. You know, robotic process information has skyrocketed to the game as organizations look to kind of do exactly what we're talking about, which is to free up the very scarce human capital to work on things that really matter, not on these mundane tasks. And you know, we talked to lots of customers about this, you know, the notion of how much application do you really use, and you know, it's been quite common, and one of the foundation- I guess foundational components that we talked about of why we did what we did was, we looked at enterprise applications that we were delivering through our traditional technologies, and they were really complex for some things that were really actually quite simple. And of course the Pareto thing holds true there that the 80% of people only want to get something out and 20% of people put something in. So that was obviously a key decision point for us to move ahead with, with the intelligent workspace, the micros that you saw. The other thing that's really interesting that we don't really talk about so much is that from a security perspective as well, being able to deliver just a part of the application actually minimizes the entire sort of attack surface, if you like. Whether that's for, you know, nefarious employees internally, or for true people who want to come in or sort of hack into your systems. The less that we can expose generally, then I think that's better overall. So there's actually some other upsides that we don't necessarily talk about in the context of intelligence, but when we talk to CIOs and we talk to the people in the business who really are interested in these technologies and these solutions, then we tend to expand the conversation a little bit into some things that we don't necessarily talk about all the time. >> Yeah, it's surprising how many questions you guys have answered for me today. I was at SAP, sapphire a couple weeks ago, and they were talking about X data, O data, X data being experienced data, and this is the output of digital transformation, and I was having a really tough time wrapping my head around the concept of X data. And I think this is hopefully something you could further along the discussion. When I think of just the access that Citrix has to this raw data, maybe the only other company that has more user data, or more access to user data, would be Microsoft via Windows. But Citrix presents SAP, which 80% of the world's transactions run through, is presented via Citrix a good majority of the time. Your CRM solutions and cloud-based options and sales forces presented again, through Citrix, so you're collecting a ton of data, as customers, you know, say, "okay, what's the account balance out of SAP, let me put it into this CRM solution and sales force". You're capturing that x data. How do you make sense of it? I think is the question, this is where the AI comes in. From a person looking at the process, and they come to Citrix and say, "Christian, you guys have the X data. Help us understand how that X data translates into business productivity. How do I personalize the experience for a individual use?" >> Yeah, absolutely, so I'll give you an example, you know, CTOs like to have a vision, right? So we'll talk a little about the vision. So I'll give you a relatively straight- forward example. So, we tend to see used cases around reviews and approvals and those kinds of things, whether it's expense reports or PTO requests, all the things that we've typically shown in the keynotes and the various demos that we've done as we've grown the solution. So here is what we kind of think about, so let's say, for example, that you have an employee. That employee submits expense reports on a fairly frequent basis and they tend to submit them for under $500. You may get to the point where you say, "actually, why do I keep approving these, because my level of trust with the employee is high, the dollar values of the individual reports is relatively low". So why would the system not just handle that and automatically approve them, until something was an anomaly. So if one came in that was $750, $1000, then I would get an alert. So I think when you talk about the X data, absolutely. The interaction with the X data is really where we see the value from the Citrix perspective, because we can learn how you actually deal with those notifications and those actions. So if there's an example of a micro application which gives you an expense report from let's say SAP Concur, and you never actually open it, you just click the approve button, then is there a real reason for you to continue to see the opportunity to open it? Because, you know, as I've said, the level of trust is high, the dollar value is low, and I could get productivity back that way, by actually looking at it from a sort of, "why should I actually approve this in the traditional way? I'll let the system take care of it until there's something that exceeds the threshold that I've learned that you're comfortable with". >> What- oh, sorry Keith, I was going to say, on that front though, where are enterprise companies in terms of letting that control go to the intelligence in the system? I mean how many times have we all submitted expense reports and maybe some of us like me go to Starbucks twice on the same day, hey, it happens, and you get rejection because it's the exact same dollar amount, and it's wasting all these cycles. But where is the appetite and maybe the trust from some of those larger organizations that culturally say somebody in procurement or finance has to click on every single funding and evaluate every single line item? >> Yeah, so I think the, sort of the beauty of what we've built here, certainly with what you saw yesterday and what we've been talking about at the show here. We're not actually changing any existing business rules or business work flow and gen components, right? So I think that's a really interesting point for us to bring up and to make sure that everybody understands, you know, right now, in the version that we're talking about for release later this year, you know, we're actually honoring most of the business rules and the work flows that are in the system of records. So that could be, you know, the HR system, the finance system, all the ERP system or whatever. So you know, I think when audit perspective, then we're good from that perspective, because you know, when we actually submit things back into the system of record from the micro apps, we're doing it on behalf of the user. So the transactions are still valid as if they were coming from the native experience. So I think that's great that we don't mess with any of that, because I think the higher, you know, we kind of make the hurdles for people to adopt by, and then, you know, whether it's cultural or whether it's regulatory, that obviously, you know, there's a downside to that. So, I think that's a good sort of first pass for us. I would suspect that as we go through this a little bit later though, there's going to be some potentially interesting questions that come up about, certainly of highly regulated environments about, you know, the legality of a robot, or digital assistant, or some kind of, you know, ancillary system being able to submit and do things on your behalf. So, you know, that's- this is not a GDPR thing by the way, or anything of that nature, it's more a, you know, if something was to happen in the system that wasn't intended, who's responsible? Is it the robot or is it the individual that's allowed the robot to work on their behalf? So I think there will be some interesting questions that come up along those lines, but I think, you know, in the v1 we're honoring the business rules, we're honoring the business logic and the work flow. And so, you know, I'm expecting that most customers will look at this and say, "yeah, I kind of get it," and you know, it's more valuable than it is a problem. That's certainly the goal. >> So let's talk about scale of this new foundational capability. Like I can easily see this working inside of your existing set of VDI products. You have visibility into the analytic data, but at some point, you're going to have enough data that the VDI isn't needed to create these work flows and these solutions. I can see this actually freeing up desktops for some employees where the only reason why they ever needed a desktop because they had to go on to Concur or the time management solution. If I do 40 hours every week for 52 weeks, I don't need to log into a portal to do that. How tied to your existing set of products is this capability? Is this something that, from a total addressable market that you- whether it's a mobile app or mobile first app that you guys can ingest this type of capability into? >> Yeah, so you know, as you know well, Kieth, we've been talking about the death of the PC in the industry for a decade, right? And it's- the reality is that most customers have an application portfolio that's heavily reliant on Windows. Now, having said that, there are obviously cases- and we look at sort of, some of the, what we call the customer jobs to be done, okay? Which is a Harvard business thing that came from Clayton Christianson. And it's a really interesting way of making sure that the innovations that we bring are actually addressing things that customers need to get done within their own environments. So if you take a used case, let's say it was a field technician. So you're going out, you're going to fix a faulty gas meter, or you're going to go out and perform some kind of maintenance work. It's highly likely that you're going to use a mobile device. And so, what we showed yesterday with the mobile version of the intelligent experience, what we show with the work space assistant, absolutely. I see used cases where we can give them instant productivity. So you know to pull and to push data into the systems of record, where the underlying operating system on the mobile device is kind of academic. But there will certainly be used cases where VDI or physical Windows desktops will be around for a very long time. So I think the value that we have is making sure that all those user transactions go through the workspace one way or another, so that helps us with the analytics piece. But I think I'll look a little bit further out, you know, again, we showed some demos of it yesterday, in one of the CTO breakout sessions that we had. The real ultimate goal is to think about the work space overall as more of an experience that will evolve. It's not necessarily an app, an app is one way to consume it, but we want to build a platform that can consume and be consumed by other things. So whether that's Microsoft teams that we showed yesterday, whether that becomes slack, Facebook for work, or whether it's an integrated voice assistant within, you know, an Apple device, or a Microsoft device, or a Google device, or a Samsung device. See, the value of that from a choice perspective is that we really then don't demand what the customers use, and ultimately their end use. So I think when we get a little bit further along in the thinking on the platform itself, it opens up endless possibilities to interact with the information you need. And it's not predicated upon any operating system because hopefully we can be ubiquitous. >> So, Citrix has over 400,000 customers worldwide. I think I read 98-99% of the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100, intelligence experience goes generally available later on this year, there's some customers in beta. What are you looking forward to as 2019 continues, coming off the high that is Citrix Synergy 2019? >> Well, you know, so like I said at the start here, I've been working on this thing with, frankly, the brilliant team we have here at Citrix for just about three years, so I wouldn't say it was quite stealth, but we've gone through these kind of programmatic changes internally. I'm looking for- I'm most looking forward to when customers understand the power of what we're going to give them with the builder. So the builder, again, is something we showed yesterday, but, you know, you think about the approach that we have is that we're going to, obviously, help customers to get productive and to get going with the intelligent experience by creating these out with the box micro apps and micro work flows for many of the most popular SaaS applications. The real big thing I'm looking forward to is when people can actually take the builder that we've developed and give it to their line of business people and say, "hey, you can create as many micro apps as you think are necessary within the constructs of your business process to enable your people". So that, to me, is kind of like, going to be the ultimate wow, when people say, "actually, I can give this to a person who is capable of creating a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel," as an example. And they can then actually use the technologies that we provide to create the micros and micro work flows for their own part of the business without the help of traditional development. I think that's going to be huge and I can't wait until we've got, you know, the first examples of people who have said, "hey, you've made my life easier, I can't work without Citrix". >> While businesses can be built on that, the new Excel uh, Citrix builder, the new Excel. >> I hope so, I hope so. >> Well, we'll all be excited to- and be watching with close eyes. Christian, thank you for joining Kieth and me on theCUBE, but Synergy 2019! >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Kieth Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching! (electronic 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.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCube, covering .Next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back, this is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and this the wrap of .Next, Nutanix's customer event, #NEXTConf and this is theCube, the leader in the live tech coverage for enterprise technology. Stu, second day. I got to say, Nutanix has always done a good job, innovative venues, they do funky, fun stuff with marketing, we haven't seen the end of it. We have another keynote today, there's a keynote tomorrow morning, big names, Bill McDermott's here, we just saw Peter MacKay, Chad Sakac is here. Who am I missing? >> Stu: Diane Greene >> Diane Gree was up yesterday. >> Y'know, thought leaders, had the CEO of NASDAQ on this morning Dave, y'know really good customers, thought leaders, Nutanix always makes me think a little bit, which I really enjoy. My fourth one of these Dave, usually by the fourth show I've gotten to, it's like I've seen it. Have we made progress, where are we going? >> I thought Sunil Podi's comment was really interesting, he said, "Look, we saw the trends, "we knew that hardware was going down." I mean, they're essentially admitting that they were a hardware oriented company, infrastructure company, we saw what was happening to infrastructure and hyper-converge, and we could just packed it up then, sold the company for a bunch of money, there were rumors floating around, you know they were pre-IPO, they easily could have sold this thing for a billion plus, all could have cashed out and made a buncha dough, and they said, "Y'know what, we're going to do something "different, we're going to go for it." You got to love the ambition, and so many companies today just can't weather that independent storm. I mean, you've seen it over and over and over again. The last billion dollar storage company that remained independent was NetApp, that was 14 years ago, now Nutanix isn't a storage company, but look around here, look at the analysts, a buncha storage guys that have grown up, and it's to me, Stu, it's a representation of what's happening in the marketplace. Storage as we know it is going away, and it always has transformed, y'know it used to be spinning disc drives, then it was subsystems, then it was the SAN, now it's evolving, these guys call it invisible infrastructure, call it whatever you want, but it's moving toward infrastructure as code, which is just a stepping stone to cloud. So your thoughts on the event, the ecosystem, and their position in the marketplace. >> Right, they reach a certain point, they've gone public, can they keep innovating? Look at a number of announcements there, we spent a lot of time talking about the new CloudZi service out there. >> Si? >> Zi. >> Zi, zi, sorry, you got it. (chuckles) >> Pronunciation of some of these, "it's Nutanix, right?" >> Nutonix, Nutanicks, (chuckles) >> They made jokes about the company last year, but this year, that's product, we're talking vision. The ink is still drying on the relationship with Google, doesn't mean they haven't been working for a while, but where this deal goes, interesting to see where it is six months from now, a year from now, because also Google, small player, I mean it wasn't to be honest, I was at the Red Hat Summit and they had a video of Andy Jassy saying, "We've extending AWS with OpenShift." And you're like wow. Red Hat has a position in a lot of clouds, but for Andy Jassy to make an appearance, Amazon, the behemoth in the cloud, that's good. Look, getting Diane Greene here, I said number one, it gives Nutanix credibility, number two it really pokes at VMware a little bit, she's like, "Oh, I did this before." And everybody's like, "Well, she's here now at Nutanix." Nutanix wants to be, that they've compared themselves to both Amazon, I think we hear it was Sunil or Dheeraj in an analyst session said they "want to be like the A Block." Not the V Block that EMC did, but the Amazon Block for the enterprise, or the next VMware, they talked about the new operating system. It's funny, in a lot of my circles, we've been trying to kill the operating system for a while, I need just enough operating system, I want to serverless and containerize all of these things because we need to modernize, and the old general-purpose processor and general-purpose operating system has come and gone, it's seen its day, but Nutanix has a play there. When I look at some of the things going on, we're talking about microsegmentation Dave, we're talking about multi-cloud and some interesting pieces. I like the ecosystem, I like that balance of how do you keep growing and expand where they can go into, leading the customers, but they're delivering today, they've got real products, they've got real growth, sure they have some challenges as to that competitive back and forth, but you asked Chad Sakac if this reminded him of Dell EMC, and kind of that partnership that they had for years, reminded me a little bit of kind of EMC and VMware too, once EMC bought VMware, VMware, the relationship they had, HP, and IBM, and other companies that they needed to treat as good or better than EMC. They're some of those tough relationships, and Dell with Nutanix, their partner, not only do they do Dell XC, but now they're doing like Pivotal on top of it, they can do Hyper-V deployments, Lenovo's another partner, Nutanix is broadening their approach, there's a lot of options out there and a lot of things to dig into, interesting, they keep growing their customers, keep delighting their customers, it reminds me of other shows we go to, Dave, like Amazon re:Invent, customers are super excited, You tell me about the Splunk conference and the ServiceNow conference where those customers are in there, they're excited, and Nutanix is another one of those, that every year you come, there's good solid content, there's a customer base that is growing and exciting and sharing, and that's a fun one to be part of. >> So, I want to ask you about VMware, it's kind of a good reference model. EMC paid out, I don't know, $630 million for VMware, which was the greatest acquisition in enterprise IT history, no question about it in terms of return. A couple questions for you, you were there at the time, you signed the original NDA between EMC and VMware, kind of sniffed em out. Would VMware's ascendancy been as fast and as successful, or even more successful, without EMC? Would VMware have got there on its own? >> I don't think so Dave, because my information that I had, and some of it's piecing together after the fact is VMware was really looking for that company to help them get to the next state. The fundraising was a little bit different back in 2003 than it was later, but rumors were Semantic was going to buy them. Everybody I talked to, you'd know better than me Dave, if Semantic had bought them, they would have integrated into all their pieces, they would have squashed it, the original talent probably would have fled much sooner. EMC didn't really know what they had, I had worked on some of the due diligence for some of the product integration, which took years and years to deliver, and it was mostly we're going to buy them. Diane had a bit of a tense relationship with Joe Tucci kind of from day one, and it was like okay, you're out there in Palo Alto, we're on the other coast, you go and do your thing, and you grow, and by the time EMC had gotten into VMware a little bit more, they were much bigger. So I think as you said, they're one of the great success stories, EMC did best in a lot of its acquisitions where it either let it ran a division and go, or let it kind of sit on its own and just funded it more, so I think that was a-- >> Well, and the story was always that Diane was pissed because she sold out at such a low price, but that's sort of ancient history. The reason I brought that up is I want to try to draw the parallel with Nutanix today, and come back to what you were saying about the A Block. When you look at Amazon, we agree, they have a lead, whether that lead is five years, seven years, four years, probably more like five to seven, but whatever, whatever it is, it's a lead, it's substantive. Beyond the infrastructure, the storage and the compute, they're building out just all kinds of services, I mean just look at their website, whether it's messaging, on and on and on, there's database, there's AI, there's their version of VDI, there's all this big data stuff, with things like Kinesis, and on and on and on, so many services that are much, much larger than the entire Nutanix ecosystem. So the reason for all this background is does Nutanix need a bigger, can Nutanix become it's ambition, which is essentially to be the next VMware, without some kind of white knight? >> So my answer, Dave, is if you look at Nutanix's ambition, one of the challenges for every infrastructure company today, if you think okay, we've talked about True Private Cloud, Dave, what services can I run on that? How can I leverage that? Look at Amazon, y'know a thousand new services coming every year, look at Google, they've got TensorFlow, really cool stuff, they've got those brilliant people coming up with the next stuff, how do I get that in my environment? Well, Nutanix's answer, coming at the show was we're going to partner with Google, we're going to have that partnership, you're going to be able to plug in, and you want to do your analytics and everything, use GCP, they're great at that, we're not, we know that you need to be able to leverage Google services to do that. The Red Hat announcement that I mentioned before, another way how I can take OpenShift and bridge from my data center and my environment and get access to those services. The promise of VMware on Amazon, yeah we're going to have a similar stack that I can go there, but I want to be able to access those VMware servers. Now, could it suck them eventually into all of Amazon and leave VMware behind? Absolutely, it's tough to partner with Amazon. So, the thing I've been looking at at almost every show this year is how are you tying into and working with those public clouds, we talked about it at VMON, Dave, they have Microsoft up on stage, they have partnerships with the public cloud-- >> David: HPE was up there. >> But the public cloud players, if you're not allowing your customers and the infrastructure that you're building to find ways to leverage and access those public cloud services, which not only are they spending $10 billion a year for each one of the big guys on infrastructure to get all around the globe, but it's all of those new services ahead, moving up the stack. To stitch together that in your own environment is going to be really challenging, how many different software pieces, how do I license it? How do I get it on, as opposed to oh, I'm in the public cloud, it's a checkbox, okay I want to access that, and I consume it as I need it, that consumption model needs to change, so I think Nutanix understands that's directionally where they want to go, I look at the Calm software that they launched and say hey, you want to use TensorFlow? Oh, it's just a choice here, absolutely, go. Where is it and how do I use it? Well, some of these details need to be worked out, as Detu said, "it's not like it's one click for every application, any cloud, anywhere." But that's directionally where they're going to make it easy, so all that cool analytic stuff that we cover a lot on theCube, a lot of that is now happening in the cloud, and I should be able to access it whether I'm in my private cloud or public cloud, and it's just going to be consumption model, whether I have certain characteristics that make it that I'm going to want to have that infrastructure for whether that's governance or locality, we talked to Scholastic yesterday, and they said, "Well when you've got manufacturing "in books, I need things close "to where they're coming off the production line, "otherwise there's things that I'm doing "in the public cloud." So that's there we see, when I talk to companies like I do here, at the Vienna show last year, when I talk to Christian Reilly with Citrix, who had been at Bechtel for many years, there's reasons why things need to live close to what's happening, y'know we've talked a lot about Edge, and therefore public cloud doesn't win it all, I know we had one guest on this week that said, "Right, depending on what industry you're is, "is it a 30/70 mix or a 70/30 mix?" There's a lot of nuance to sort this out, and this is long game, Dave, there's this change of the way we do things is a journey, and Nutanix has positioned themselves to continue to grow, continue to expand, some good ambition to expand on, like the five vectors of support that they have, so I've liked what I've heard this week. >> So in thinking about what we're talking about VMware, the imperative for virtualization was so high in the early 2000's because we were coming out of the dot com bust, IT was out of favor, VMware was really the only game in town, there really wasn't a strong alternative, had by far the best product, Microsoft Hyper-V was sort of in-concept, and KVM and others were just really not there, so there really was no choice, it appealed to 100% of the IT shops, I mean essentially. So I wonder though, today, is the imperative for multi-cloud the same? The fundamental is yes, everybody has multiple clouds. But this industry has lived in stovepipes forever, and has figured out how to manage stovepipes, it manages them by fencing things off. So I wonder is the imperative as high, you could maybe make an argument that it's higher, but I'm still not quite getting it yet, as it was in the early 2000's, where the aspirin of virtualization to soothe the pain of do more with less was such an obvious and game changing paradigm shift. I don't see it as much here, I see people still trying to figure out okay, what is our cloud strategy? Number one, number two is the competition seems to be much more wide open, it's unclear at this time that any one company has a fast-track to multi-cloud. >> I think you've got some really good points there, Dave. A thing that I've pointed out a few times is that one of the things that bothered me from the early days with VMware is from an application standpoint, it tended to freeze my application. I didn't have a reason to kind of move forward and modernize my application. Back in 2002 it was like oh, I'm running Windows NT with a really old application, my operating system going to end of life, well maybe it's time to uplift. Oh wait, there's this great virtualization stuff, my hardware's going end of life too. No, shove it in a VM, let's keep it for another five years. Oh my god, that application sucked then, it's going to suck even more in five years, and workforce productivity was way down. So, the vision for Nutanix is they're going to be a platform that are going to be able to help you modernize your environment and how do we get beyond, is it virtualization, is it containerization, is it a lot of the cloud-native pieces, how does that fit in? Starting to hear a little bit more of it, a critique I'd have on HCI about two years ago was it was the same applications that were in my VMware SAN, not VSAN, but my just traditional storage area network was what was running on Nutanix. We're starting to see more interesting applications going on there, and look, Nutanix has a bullseye on them, there are all the HCI direct replacements, there is the threat of the cloud, and I haven't heard as many SAAS applications living on Nutanix as I do when we talk to all flash-array companies, Dave, every single on of them can roll out, here's all these SAAS deployments on our environment, just scalable environments that build that for the future. I haven't heard it as much from Nutanix. >> So VMware was aspirin , Nutanix originally started as aspirin, and now they're pivoting to vitamin. Who are they up against? Who do you like? Who are the horses on the track? Let's analyze the race and then wrap. >> Yeah, so when Nutanix got into this business, it was well, they're helping VMware environments, it was 100% VMware when they first started that relationship with VMware was really tough, they've lowered that too, they've now got what, 28% is running HV, they've got a little bit on Hyper-V, but they've still got about 60% of their customers are VMware. So VMware, y'know, huge challenge, VSAN has more customers than anyone in the hyper-convergent infrastructure space, easy, number of customers, but virtualization admin has taken that. Microsoft, huge potential threat, Azure Stack's coming this year, it's been coming, it's been coming, it's really close there, all the server guys are lining up. Microsoft's a huge player, Microsoft owns applications, they're pulling applications into their SAAS offerings, they're pulling applications into Azure, when they launch Azure Stack, even if the 1.0, if you looked at it on paper and say Nutanix is better, well, Microsoft's a huge threat to both VMware, which uses a lot of Microsoft apps, as well as Nutanix. So those are the two biggest threats, then of course, there's just the general trend of push to SAAS and push to public cloud where Nutanix is starting to play in the multi-cloud, as we talked about, and COM and the DR cloud services are good, but can Nutanix continue to stay ahead of their customers? They're ahead of the vast majority of enterprises, but can they convince them to come on board to them, rather than some of these big guys? Nutanix is a public company now, they're doing great, but yeah, it's a big TAM that they're going after, but that means they're going to have a tax from every side of the market. >> I see HCI as one where you got a leader, and that leader can make some good money. I don't see multi-cloud as a winner-take-all market because I think IBM's going to have its play in multi-cloud, HPE has its play in multi-cloud, Dell EMC is going to have its play in multi-cloud. You got guys coming out of different places like ServiceNow, who's got an IT operations management practice, builds business big, hundreds of millions of dollars of business there, coming at multi-cloud, so a lot of different competitors that are going to be going for it, and some of them with very large service organizations that I think are going to get there fair share, so I would predict, Stu, that this is going to continue to be, multi-cloud is going to be a multi-stovepipe cloud for a long, long time. Now, if Nutanix can come in and solve that control plane problem, and demonstrate substantial business value, and deliver competitive advantage, y'know that might change the game. It's difficult at this point in 2017 to see that Nutanix, over those other guys that I just mentioned, has an advantage, clear advantage, maybe from a product standpoint, maybe. But from a resource standpoint, a distribution channel, services organization, ecosystem, all those other things, they seem to me to be counterbalancing. Alright, I'll give you last thought. >> Yeah, so it's great to see Nutanix, they're aiming high, they're expanding into a couple of areas, and they keep listening, so I hope they keep listening to their customers, expand their partnerships, SAAS customers would be really interesting, service provider is something that they've gotten into little bit, but plenty more opportunity for them to go there. Dave, personally for me, to it have been a company I've watched since the earliest days, it's been a pleasure to watch, y'know I think back, right, VMware you said, I think it was a hundred person company when I first started talking to them and Diane Greene, and I look at where VMware went. I've been tracking VMware for now five years, and reminds me a lot of some of those trends, for a 20 person company, I said to hear almost 3000 boggles the mind, I've been to their headquarters a bunch. So it's been fun to watch the Newton army, and they've been loving watching it from our angles. >> Well and these events are very good events, and so there's a lot of passion here, and that's a great fundamental for this company. So I'm a fan, I think it may be undervalued, I think it very well may be undervalued. >> Wall Street definitely doesn't understand this stuff. >> Alright Stu, great working with you this year, (chuckles) this month, this quarter, this month, certainly this show, so great job. I really appreciate it >> Stu: Thanks, Dave. >> There's a big crew behind what Stu and I, and John Ferrier, and Jeff Frick, and others do here. Here today with us Ava, Patrick, Alex, Jay, you guys have had an awesome spring. Brendan is somewhere, I guess Brendan is doing the keynote right now. So, fantastic job, as always, Kristen Nicole and her team, writing up the articles. Jay Johanson back at the controls, Bert with the crowd shots. Everybody, really appreciate all your support, thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you, we got a little break, I think, in the action, cause it's July Fourth, well it's Canada year, or Canada week-- >> Canada Day and Independence Day next week. >> And Independence Day in the United States, and then we'll be at Infor Inforum, second week of July, I'll be there with Rebecca Knight and the crew, so watch for that, check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news, Wikibon.com for all the research, and theCube.net to find all these videos, Youtube.com/SiliconAngle, it's everywhere, if you can't find it, you're not on Twitter, you're not on social. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we're out. (lo-fi synthesizer music)