(suspenseful orchestral music) >> Every company is a cloud company today, right? Well, there's one company that was in the cloud long before it was fashionable. Citrix Systems, way back in 1989, was founded. Coming up on its 30th anniversary, and Citrix was a pioneer in the area of virtual desktop infrastructure, delivering desktops from servers to the, as a virtual machine, long before anybody was using the term cloud. Well, Citrix is still going strong 30 years later, and its Synergy Conference is coming up at the end of May, May 21st through 23rd in Atlanta. With me is Tim Minahan. I'm sorry, I was with Stu Miniman, our analyst. (laughing) Tim Minahan, who is the executive vice president of business strategy and the chief marketing officer at Citrix. Tim, welcome. >> Thank you, Paul, it's great to be here. >> I am Paul Gillin, this is The Cube, and with Synergy coming up, The Cube will be at Synergy, so we thought we'd take a chance today to look a little bit at where Citrix is going, where it's come from. A company that is still going strong, 50 acquisitions over the years, and really probably not the company that you would think of. People think of Citrix as desktop virtualization. I know you're still in that market, but I'm sure that Citrix is quite a different business today. So what business are you in? >> It absolutely is a much different business today, Paul. You know, this is not your father's virtualization company anymore. We still, as you point out, continue to lead that market both in market share as well as innovation. However, based on our customer needs as they've evolved to try to operate in this hybrid multi-cloud world, as they've tried to digitize their business, Citrix has also gone on a transformation journey. So really, I would organize it around three primary transitions. One is moving from a, let's say, disparate array of individual products to much more integrated solutions that more holistically address the needs of our customers around digital workspace, around networking and security, and around analytics. The second one, as you intimated in your introduction, is making our products, or our solutions, available not just on premise for customers to manage in their own data centers, but as cloud services, so that they can consume the technology in the way that they want and scale very quickly. But probably the most significant transition is moving from delivering application delivery products to really becoming this strategic platform for work. >> And when you talk about that in your messaging, It talks about powering a better way to work. What is a better way to work? >> Well, if you, Paul, if you think about today, really, as companies are beginning to digitize their businesses, they're trying to compete around the world, one of the things that continues to come to the top is the need to drive a superior employee experience. Those companies that can attract the right talent, develop the skills needed for today's modern age, and give them the tools and the flexibility to work where and how they want becomes a competitive advantage. And so when we talk about empowering a better way to work, we're bringing together our digital workplace, our networking, and our analytics technologies in order to empower companies to do that, to arm their employees with single sign-on access to everything they need to be productive in one unified experience that travels with them. Whether they're working in the office, whether they're on the road, at a client meeting, in a hospital room, really allowing them to power a better way to work. >> And you say that this is particularly important for attracting this new generation of knowledge workers. What are their expectations? How do you need to frame the workplace to make it appealing to them? >> Yeah, well, I think it's an interesting point you bring up. It's a misconceptions that, you know, it's all about the millennials. Well yes, we are introducing new work styles, new work types, and new generations into the workplace, but we have multiple generations in the workplace, each of which has different ways of which they engage with technologies, each of which has ways that they want to collaborate. But the one thing that is key to employee experience is, you know, gonna be a competitive advantage, what's holding us back. And it really is all this choice, all this technology that we've brought into the market, has created an unintended side effect, which is complexity. And employees are actually frustrated at work because they need to navigate multiple different environments, they need to remember multiple passwords, they need to spend time in a whole host of applications that may not be pertinent to their job, but it's something that they're required to do. So it's keeping them from their core job. And so really what we're trying to do is giving that unified experience, making it single sign-on to all of your applications, all of your content, regardless of where you are, and then literally bringing intelligence into the workspace to allow employees to actually be guided through their day so they don't need to log in to multiple applications, but presenting up the insights and the tasks that they need to do to remove the noise from their day and get on doing their core fulfilling work. >> Of course, this is not your father's single sing-on anymore. It used to be single sign-on was for primarily on-prem applications. Today everything's moving to the cloud. Citrix itself has undergone a sort of reinvention as a cloud-first company. Tell us what that involved and what that means for your customers. >> Yeah, well, the very first thing is I came from a host of companies that have made the transition to a cloud services model in the past. Most recently, SAP. And I thought I was coming here to help Citrix transition to the cloud, but it became very clear really quickly our job is to help our customers, you know, save our customers from the cloud, allowing them to pursue their very unique cloud strategies as everyone's on a different path on this journey, you know, this hybrid, multi-cloud environment, and to pursue that strategy with confidence. Giving them the latitude to be able to have portability of their workloads. If they want to move them out of the data center to maybe Microsoft Azure or AWS or Google Cloud platform or a private cloud, allowing them that flexibility, the interoperability, and the portability that they need to do that at their own pace. >> Now, what are the implications then for your product line? Because, are you talking about actually helping customers to manage the multi-cloud, to shift workloads, or is this more in the area of creating a unified work environment where all these applications come together? >> Well, the first step was certainly to make our offerings available as cloud services. So customers that wanted to consume them that way, they could. The second step was indeed to provide a control plane that allowed IT to really unify their entire environment, whether that workload was in the data center or in any of the public clouds I just mentioned, and have the portability to move them between those environments as they saw fit. Related to that is unifying the employee experience so that they, to your point, have single sign-on access to everything they need to be productive. So not just their, as you point out, their on-premise apps or their virtual apps, but their SaaS apps, which are growing in popularity and use against the enterprise. Their mobile apps, their web apps, but not just their apps too. You know those traditional virtual desktops that they might need. Or, importantly, their content, which we all need to organize and have the information we need to make the right decisions at the right time. So you're content needs to be available in that workspace too, in a similar way, regardless of where it's stored. It could be stored in any of the public cloud storage service providers. It might be stored on premise in a SharePoint environment, and you need to be able to have that with you regardless of whether you're working on your laptop at the office or on your smartphone on the train. >> Now, you have a lot of cloud experience. You were at Ariba, which was a cloud-native company. You went to SAP during their transition of the cloud. Now at Citrix. What kind of expectations are you helping the company set for how customer relationships change in a primarily cloud environment? >> You hit the point right on the nose. The big change everyone thinks is, wow, it's making your products available as a service. Well, that's part of it, certainly. Well, it's about transitioning to more of a subscription model. Well, that's also part of it. But the real big shift is the way you engage and support customers. In a traditional on-premise world, you would celebrate when the deal gets done, right? In a cloud services model, you are an ongoing service provider. Your real goal is to help the customer drive adoption and achievement of their business outcomes. And so within Citrix, what we've done, as in the previous companies we had before, I was at before, is we've made investments in that post-sale adoption. We have a full customer success team that is really your coach. You come into the gym, we'll get you on the treadmill, we'll make sure you get the health benefits you want, right, that's the type of environment and mentality we need to have even from a marketing perspective. There's a whole adoption marketing team now that is focused on working in unison with that customer success team so that we are ensuring that customers have the information they need, how to leverage the products, what functionalities available to them, and how to drive the business outcomes they were hoping to achieve. >> Are you finding the customer retention is actually better in a cloud environment? Do customers tend to stay longer, despite the fact they're not paying these large licensing fees up front? >> I think the real secret to customer retention and driving that customer retention is ensuring, okay, number one, there's clear alignment on what the business outcomes are to begin with, and number two, that you have this infrastructure in place, or this coaching organization in place, to make sure that they're driving to success. And because oftentimes you've heard, you know, you've been in the business for a long time, that IT projects, well, the implementation goes on for too long, or you know, we've implemented it but now no one's using it, and really, in a cloud services model, that can't happen, right? It's similar to any service you subscribe to as an individual, whether it's your cable service or the like, if you're not using something-- >> Turn it off. >> At the end of that subscription term, you're gonna turn it off. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, in a cloud services model, the provider, like Citrix, is much more aligned with the business outcomes that the customer is hoping to achieve. >> Now, I know you're not development guy, but in the process of sort of overhauling the product line, there are a lot of new architectural tools that can be used, such as serverless computing, microservices. What have you done in terms of restructuring the way you build your products? >> Yeah, it's interesting, there's a few things. You know, the biggest one is, instead of, in an on-premise world, you would deliver a monolithic upgrade, here we go, every few, 18 months, two years, three years, and then work on helping your customers move that way. In a cloud services model, we're delivering innovation, you know, every week. And it just gets turned on as part of that service. So a much more agile development methodology. And yes, you know, behind the scenes, you mentioned microservices and the like that. What we're seeing within our customers as they're looking at how do I begin to abstract, you know, those monolithic applications and turn them into more microservices that are much more agile, that I can test things, I can deploy them very quickly. We're using those same type of techniques within Citrix ourselves. >> You've had a lot of experience with SaaS providers. How do you prepare a company culturally to make that leap from selling, you know, the big licensed package, to a subscription model? A lot of people are affected inside the company by a change like that. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. And part of it is transitioning literally from selling to being a trusted advisor, right? What is the business outcome you want to achieve? Let's land with this particular capability to get you going and then as you mature, as you begin to get the initial benefit, let's expand beyond that. And so what we were talking about with the customer success for post-sale adoption, really, to your point, moves back up the chain to how we engage customers even at the outset. >> The company has done more than 50 acquisitions, or I believe exactly 50 acquisitions. I know you weren't there for all of them, but do you have any thoughts, obviously very successful, the company does this very well. What are some secrets of making acquisitions work? >> I think one of the biggest opportunities and secrets to making such acquisitions work is having a really solid post-merger integration plan. And when I say post-merger integration, yes, you need to integrate that technology into your overall solution set so that it increases the value to the customers. Obviously, you know, having a clear roadmap on that, clearly articulating that both to the organization as well as to the customers. In fact, both your existing customers and the added value they're gonna get, but the ones of the company you've acquired. But I think the even, the bigger opportunity lies in making sure on the post-merger integration side you have a clear plan for how you're going to integrate that culture and the like. So as you acquire companies, particularly as you acquire SaaS companies, for example, infusing that SaaS mentality into your overall organization. You've acquired this company because they were doing well. They had a unique capability. Maybe they had unique skillsets that you need and making sure that you have a clear plan for how to help that thrive in your new environment. >> One of your roles is as head of marketing, and I understand you're sort of a data-driven guy. You're a big believer in data-driven marketing. >> I have more dashboards than you can imagine. (laughs) >> Really? Well, how, marketing and sales typically in B2B companies don't have the best of relationships. How are you using data to bridge that divide? >> Yeah, I think that's an excellent, that's an excellent question. And I do think data is the answer. You know, part of that traditional, kind of yin and yang, or friction between sales and marketing is a result of biases and opinions. When you organize around data, you begin to eliminate that. You get to the facts. And so I mentioned I have more dashboards than I care to note. But those dashboards are shared with my counterpart, the chief revenue officer, as well as his senior leadership team, so we're all looking at the same data. We're all identifying, hey, where we are with this customer, where we are with the overall pipeline growth. And it is going into a meeting and not spending the first 45 minutes disputing the data, but saying, "Hey, look, we are collectively seeing this." And, you know, looking at driving solutions on how to maybe accelerate something or provide a little extra service to a customer because we're all looking at the same data. Data is absolutely a great leveler at eliminating a lot of the traditional friction that is between sales and marketing. >> Citrix is one of the oldest, if that's a term, don't like to use that term in software, but it's been around a long time. >> 30 years young. >> One of the things, a big celebration coming up in April, I understand, your 30th anniversary. One of the things that happens to companies that have been around a long time is they acquire misperceptions. Customers tend to view them as they were many years ago. What misperception about Citrix would you most like to correct? >> I think, you know, the biggest misperception is the one you started with. That, hey, you know, Citrix is the virtualization company. And yes, we were the pioneer in virtualization, because at a time, when we burst onto the scene 30 years ago, you had this new rising information worker, you had client server technologies, and that worker wanted to work outside the office, and what were going to do? Well, Citrix provided an answer. Well, over the years, we've continued to innovate as companies moved to mobile, and now as they move to the cloud, and they want to embrace entirely new work models that allow them to give their employees, full time, contractors, gig workers, access to the tools they need to collaborate and be very effective and fulfilled in their jobs. We're there now, right? So we've continued to evolve with and even ahead of the market. So virtualization, still relevant for some key customers and some of the most mission-critical applications. But they have these other needs too, and Citrix has evolved to support those as well. >> And in two months, end of May, you'll be bringing your users together at Citrix Synergy in Atlanta. How many people do you expect to have there? >> Just about 6,000 or so. >> About 6,000, huge crowd. What are you gonna tell them? What are the messages you want them to take away? >> Well, the top line team for the conference is really, you know, how the future works. You know, we've talked a lot about this is the future of work, and it's coming, well guess what, it is here. We have multiple generations working in the workforce today. We have entirely new work styles. We have, as I mentioned, these gig workers, contractors, full time employees. We have entirely different devices and applications that have come into this environment and people want to collaborate through different channels, Teams, and Slack, as well as traditional email. So how do we bring all of that together? We believe that we're delivering this today. Our customers are seeing real benefit by having this unified digital workspace experience and making that available to their employees. You know, we're now injecting, like I mentioned, machine learning and simplified workflows or micro-apps into that environment to make employees even more productive within the workspace than outside of it, really guiding them through their day. So when we say this is how the future works, you know, the key message is, you know, we're, the future is here today. We're delivering the experience, the security, and the choice that employees and organizations need to drive innovation, to engage customers and employees in new digital ways, and to be productive any time, anywhere. >> Well it's a huge agenda in Atlanta, and if you're a Citrix customer you'll certainly want to be there. Even if you're not a Citrix customer, you'll want to follow us on The Cube, as The Cube will be on the ground in Atlanta at Citrix Synergy. Tim, have a great conference. Thanks very much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Paul. Look forward to seeing you in Atlanta. >> I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (upbeat electronic music)