(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE, our first day of covering Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the next two days is Keith Townsend. And fresh from the keynote stage we're pleased to welcome David Henshall President and CEO of Citrix. David welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, Keith and I were both saying in our intro how excited we are to be here. The keynote was fantastic this morning, a lot of news. One of the things that I really liked that you started off acknowledging in the last year, since Synergy 2018, you've never delivered products faster. You guys are delivering across workspace, networking, analytics, this is a different Citrix. Tell us about this. >> It's very different, in fact, we've transformed the whole company, in a number of different dimensions, to make this possible. I mean, we've reorganized from a number of business units into a functional team. We brought in leadership to really drive end-to-end engineering products and many functions because the idea was moving from building individual point products to building really complete, integrated solutions for our customers. The benefit of that is that it's allowed us to go a lot faster. So, we're developing products today at a pace that's probably two or 3X what it was just a couple of years ago and we're doing it with higher quality, higher integration and overall just an eye from working backwards from what the customers need. So, I'm really happy with the pace we've seen in the company. >> Well David, you threw out a big number out there, $7,000,000,000,000 in wasted time. If you look at a $1,000,000,000 problem, that's a big problem. You look at a $7,000,000,000,000 problem as you guys did your research and looked at the data what was the logical reaction? Was it, you know what, we can play in our little space of network, security and presentation or dive into this deep business challenge of solving problems. How did you guys get there? >> The first step, actually, was nobody believed that it was a $7,000,000,000,000 problem. So, once we really understood the research and started to look at, what are the factors contributing to this broad, let's call it, disengagement, epidemic that's going on around the world, look at some of the factors that are really driving this. We've talked earlier today about most people, when they think about employee engagement and employee experience, they tend to look at traditional management factors. Things like their workplace environment, their manager, their hours and they forget to look at technology. The fact that technology, as rapidly as it's advanced around the world, has not made people's lives better in certain cases. In companies, you know, businesses assume that everybody's a power user and so you know the ins and outs of every single application. They assume that you understand the workflows of working through all of these moving parts, versus what are you really trying to get done. So, we're working backwards from understanding the steps that people need to just get their jobs done. The whole idea, frankly, is that people want to do great work. Across any industry, in any discipline. You got to give them the tools and the services to do that, because if not, it's just frustrating, it's work. And that's what's leading to this broad disengagement challenge that we've seen around the world. We think we can be part of solving that. >> One of the stats you mentioned this morning that really caught my eye, was you mentioned power users. You said, enterprise software is really designed for power users, which is 1% of the folks that are engaging with software. You also said, employees and I think we're all in this bucket, we're, on average, using seven to 10 apps per day. There's so much distraction. I loved a video that you showed this morning looking at Maria. the Senior Marketing Manager, just giving a glimpse into an enterprise day in, the life of. And going, wow, for the first 10 minutes of their day this person who wants to design and deliver killer marketing campaigns is bogged down with all these other distractions. I got to go check this app, oh, and this one, oh, and this one, oh, and this one. And, wait a minute, probably, you know, 10 minutes. How many times a day does that happen? And that productivity starts to go way down as does, probably, frustration. It's exciting to hear how Citrix is going to help your customers, really, tackle that problem. Because, at the end of the day, there are a ton of devices, what 65 billion interconnected devices in the next few years alone. And there are worker shortages. But, one of the things that can drive attrition is having a workflow that is really suboptimal. >> Absolutely, I mean, we look across all of these big challenges, there's just not enough people with the right skills in the right locations. There's a global war for talent. Really, just trying to attract the best and the brightest. When companies find these great people what do you do to make them productive? What do you do to make them engaged? And that's what drives retention. Our idea here is basically, remove and abstract away a lot of the complexity that is getting in the way of that engagement, just like Maria that you mentioned. She wants to build awesome marketing programs but the company has given her tools and systems where she's basically become a repetitive task worker over and over again. And that's what's leading to a lot of this disengagement problem that we talked about. So, we think that there's ways to eliminate that. Too much app usage, you know, too little functionality that's being deployed. And frankly, this context switching. My favorite stat on context switching is, you think about today, we're interrupted every two minutes. With like, a tweet, a notification, an email a phone call, you name it, every two minutes. And yet, it takes the average person 20 minutes to get back to what they were doing in the first place. Because the human mind just isn't wired for multitasking. People think it is, but the research shows that it's really not. So, I think we can make a huge difference by simplifying a lot of that and just making it in our words, easier for people to do great work on their terms. >> So, David, when we think of these digital transformations we think of huge SIs, management consultant companies that come in, help to re-platform applications. You guys gave some pretty, I think ambitious, concepts of taking data from an AS/400, extracting that and combined it, particularly, with Salesforce data. And then answering a simple question of did the deal close? When I think of these type of transformations I think of years of work, years of investment. I think of these other SIs. What is the future of work, when it comes to Citrix as a verb? Today, Citrix as a verb means, I can get to my applications remotely. When it comes to this type of transformation how do you view the definition of Citrix as a verb changing? >> It's an interesting question. I think that today, as you said, Citrix is about how do I remote into my applications. We've been doing that for 30 years now. I'd argue we do it better than anybody in the world. And we've pioneered new markets like app virtualization and BDI and app delivery to make that possible. Next generation of the Citrix workspace is about creating that platform for how work gets done. And do it in a way that can help guide people through their day and simplify and automate a lot of those common tasks. I think, hopefully, there's an opportunity to use Citrix as the word for how work gets done. It's like, did you take care of that yet? Yep, I Citrix'd it., We've just become very synonymous with a better way to drive work, therefore, higher productivity, higher engagement, better user experience. And we absolutely believe that's possible. That's what we're delivering inside the Citrix workspace. >> A couple things that jumped out at me, as a marketer, that we hear a lot. I've done a lot of customer marketing programs and so we talk about driving customer lifetime value. We talk about delighting customers. You guys talk about that with respect to the employee, the employee experience, delighting the employees. You did some things today with Citrix Workspace, intelligent enterprise. New capabilities like micro apps and virtual assistant. How are those capabilities, one, helping to differentiate Citrix and two, helping to increase the employee lifetime value and deliver awesome employee experiences. >> No, it's it's a great question. In fact, a lot of people in our industry talk about the end-user as a user, versus a human being that's really trying to accomplish something. I've said before that people are not workloads. People are humans that are really just trying to make a difference day in and day out. So when we think about the customer, every customer wants to deliver amazing experiences for their teams because that's how they make them more productive. That's how they drive their own business results forward. I looked at, actually talked about, in the keynote some really cool results of looking at those companies that had the most advanced either, digital transformation projects or most advanced digital workspace projects and the results are staggering. It's like, 20% higher productivity, higher customer sat, higher growth, higher profitability, just across the board. It shows that the outcomes for those that really embrace these concepts can dramatically transform their businesses. I think that's what we're trying to drive forward. Make it easier for these companies to make that happen. >> We always say that you never get rid of complexity, you move it. Citrix is renowned for their CTP community. Super dedicated evangelists around making the technology consumable. As you continue to forge partnerships with cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, you reduce the complexity of the backend products. Tell us about the role of, I think a good majority of the attendees here, the administrators the systems engineers, the architects, how do you see those roles morphing so that companies can achieve these outcomes? >> The idea is really, giving back to the administrator in a lot of ways, so that they can focus on the projects that they really want to drive. I mean, everybody wants to drive digital transformation. They want their business to go be more effective, be more nimble, more profitable. They're bogged down. I mean, it's the old story about run versus grow. If the typical IT budget today is about 90% spent on just maintaining the core infrastructure that's just a tiny, little bit left over for innovation. If we can help simplify that, we'll give them more let's call it more time, more money, more flexibility, to go drive change for their own businesses. And that's really what they want to do. Great partners, like our Citrix CTPs that you mentioned, spent time with those guys yesterday. It's awesome because they can be on the front lines of leading this change. Helping customers understand the realm of the possible. What they can drive going forward and carry that message out there. Because this is truly applicable in every industry, every geography and really, every size business today. >> Connecting people, making the work, the employee experience, just so much more seamless. Taking out a lot of friction, boosting productivity, giving people back a day a week, all of it. Yes, yes, yes. Of course, people are the biggest security threat. Just by nature of, we need to get things done as quickly as possible. What is Citrix doing to help the IT folks ensure that all of these connected conversations are done securely? >> The great thing about Citrix for all these years is that most of our customers look at us as an integral part of their overall security story. One of the most secure ways to deliver an application is to virtualize it. So what we've done is leverage those 30 years of learnings to really deliver, now a platform, for all users, all application types and really all scenarios. So, we can add a lot of the same benefits to non-virtualized use cases, that we've done for all of these years. Providing much more insight into how and when people use technologies. Conditional access and conditional security policies to be able to layer on top. So that as people move through their day, different scenarios, different devices, different networks, we can contextually apply those policies to help people just have a much more secure experience overall. One tailored to what they want to drive for their business. So, I think it's just one example of what we're doing to make security just integral to the overall story. >> Well David, when you tackle a $7,000,000,000,000 problem the audience changes. You're not just talking to system administrators. Citrix is getting to take a seat at the table with the CIO, because you're driving direct value. When I think of automation and now we're bringing in security into the conversation. The first thing I think about is, man, I can move faster but I can move faster doing the wrong thing. Talk to me about how Citrix is going to help customers do things faster, but do them things faster in a secure manner and tackling the right things. I can spend a lot of time automating a process that really shouldn't be automated yet. >> Absolutely. One of the big investments we've been making over the last couple of years is, in both pre-sales teams, as well as teams around customer success. We want to make sure that we can provide as much architectural guidance and know-how about the best way and maybe the best prioritization to tackle a lot of these problems. We're doing that both inside Citrix and we're extending that out to our partner community to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to take that knowledge and help customers, pretty much across every industry and every geo. And that's going to be one of the big things. As we continue to transform from, what I think of as a transactional business which is the way most enterprise software companies have been over the year, to really a service-oriented model. Where it's a continuous engagement and you're proving your value every single day. That changes the entire company. And that means the way we build products, support customers and deliver new capabilities over time. That's part of the journey we're on inside of the company. We talk about it every, pretty much, every day. I expect us to be on this journey for several years. I'm just really happy with the progress we've made up to this point. >> So David, last question, speaking of partners. One of the things that you also started off your keynote with is talking about how Citrix has really invested in this great ecosystem of partners over the last 12 months. We saw some exciting news announced with Microsoft and what you guys are doing with Office 365, Microsoft Teams, tell us a little bit about that. >> Well, in general, I mean we've always been about partnering. People have talked about Citrix is almost a Switzerland approach over these. Because we can help bridge a lot of these ecosystems. Because customers, in general, they really just want choice in the infrastructure. And they recognize that their environment may have major portfolios of Microsoft technologies, Google technologies, Amazon technologies. And then a whole host of other service providers along the way. We can sit, uniquely, at the middle of all this, really helping bridge those different ecosystems. Because, at the end of the day, the idea is about how do we create choice in the way you manage and run your infrastructure. Recognizing the fact that it does change over time. And then, choice on the endpoints. So you can use the device of of your choice to get your work done. And that idea really permeates everything that we're doing right now. A lot of great examples today. Innovation with both Microsoft and Google, having them both on stage talking about all the work we're doing collectively. Those partnerships go back many, many, many years and so we're just going to keep pushing it forward. >> I'm going to squeeze one more question in. Because you've been at Citrix, you said this is your 17th Synergy. Digital transformation, critical, but cultural transformation is essential to that. Just, in the last few seconds or so, your perspectives on the cultural innovation and change that Citrix that has delivered. >> Citrix has always been a company that has a wonderful culture, I didn't invent the culture. My job is to nurture it and carry it forward and help train people on why culture matters. Culture, in our mind, is not just about the traditional factors of how we operate internally. But, really, more about how we think about empathy from a customer point of view. You walk a day in somebody else's shoes and work backwards and it gives you a lot more insight into the types of problems we're trying to solve, the types of software we build and then, of course, how we service and support downstream. Culture is one of the things that I think really sets us apart in the industry. There's a lot of people that are joining us here at this event. We had a record audience this year and I think a lot of that is because we're the kind of kind of company that they want to partner with. We'll be there as their environments change and as their technologies change, that's culture in my mind. >> Awesome. Well David, thank you so much again, for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this morning. Having theCUBE at Synergy for the first time in eight years, we are so excited for uncovering some great things for the next few days and seeing how your customers are Citrixing it. >> Welcome back, it's great to have you guys. >> It's our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Atlanta, Georgia Citrix Synergy 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE Conversation. We're talking about the Citrix Workspace Summit. It happened earlier today. And we've got one of the experts in the field, CUBE alumni and always a really fun guest to have on. Let's give a welcome to Tamara McCleary. She's coming to us from Colorado. She's the CEO of Thulium but you know her from social media and seeing her at all the conferences and speaking. And Tamara, it's great to see you again >> Jeff, it's so good to be here. Hey, next best thing to being in person, right? >> Absolutely. I mean, there is some good stuff. Neither of us had to get on an airplane today and we were able just to connect via the magic of the internet, which I think people forget how magic it truly is. So I looked up, we last spoke, it was mid-April. We were about a month into this thing after the kind of shutdown. And really the topic there was about this light switch moment on the work from home front. Now we're seven months into this, eight months into this, and clearly it's not going away anytime soon. And even when it does, it's not going to go back exactly to the way it was. So first off, how are you doing? 'Cause I know you spend a lot of time at conferences and traveling all over the world, so your life's been changed quite a bit. And then two, just your kind of perspective as we've moved from the light switch moment to the, that this is the new normal and will be the new normal going forward. Maybe not exactly how it is today, but we're not going back to the way that it was before. >> You couldn't be more spot on, Jeff. In fact, when you said April, to me, it almost feels like not seven months. It feels much longer ago. And since the last time I got on an airplane was the end of February, and that was a huge disruption to me in my life. I had always been in three, four cities a week, every week, and haven't traveled on an airplane since February. So the world is different, and it has shifted, and there's no going back. We can't step in the river twice and hit that same spot. I totally messed up that quote, but that's me. You're used to that already. >> Jeff: Exactly. >> But some things don't change. But I think when we look at work, and what we were talking about back in April is that now we're looking at the potential for kind of a hybrid approach, whether we're talking about work or even kids, some kids going back to school, there's a hybrid approach. And with that comes its own set of complexities that we have to consider. So not only has the culture shifted into a place where you have your workforce who has gotten used to working remotely, and there's a lot of things with working remotely that we didn't have when office was the centrical focus for the workplace. So there's a lot of flexibility when you work from home. And I think one of the interesting things with the Citrix Workspace Summit was when CEO David Henshall talked about how it's the people, right? So it's our workforce, our employees who are our most valuable, but also our most costly assets. So we have to make sure that the employee experience is one that is pleasing and helps us to have not only talent acquisition, but also talent retention in a really dynamic, competitive atmosphere. And I'm sure I just posed this question so we could go a million different places with this. Where do you want to go with it, Jeff? >> Well, I was going to say, and of course we can go forever, and we don't have forever, so at some point we'll have to stop talking at the end of this interview. But I just love having you on. And what I want to drill in is as we've talked about the new way to work for a very, very long time. This is not a new topic. And we've had remote work tools and we've had VPNs and we've had mobile phones now since 2007, but we didn't have this forcing function, and I think that's what's really different here is that now it wasn't a choice anymore. There was no more planning and talking about it and maybe or maybe not. Work from home was kind of a first-class citizen in terms of priority. COVID changed all that dramatically overnight. And it's driven home this other kind of concept which we talk a lot about generically in terms of the customer experience as they interact with our applications, which is the way that now they actually interact with the company. And we've talked a little bit about new way to work, but now it's really driven to the forefront, because as you said, there's a lot of benefits from working from home. You could eat dinner with your family, maybe can pick up a few more of the kids' activities, whether it's a sports game in the middle of the afternoon or something in the evening, but there's also a lot of stress. There's a lot of kind of this always on and this constant notifications, whether it's coming from email or text or Slack or Teams or Asana or whatever. So refocusing on the employee experience and elevating that up into a much more important thing, as you said, for both wellness and employee satisfaction, but also retention and getting new employees. It's really changed the priority of that whole set of, kind of point of view around the employee experience that wasn't there kind of pre-COVID. >> Absolutely. And I think you just tapped onto something that I think affects all of us who are juggling these multifaceted lives, and that is the constant interruption and distraction, and that costs money. And I think about that as the CEO of our organization is that how many of these distractions could be avoided to create efficiency and productivity. It also creates happiness for the individual. I don't think anybody likes to be constantly distracted, but when you have a bunch of different applications and you don't have them in one accessible place and you're constantly having to flip between these applications, it can cause a lot of friction and frustration. And I think genuinely that was my very first introduction to Citrix was the ability to really streamline and have everything in one place on a beautiful dashboard that was personalized to the individual. Not everybody in the organization needs to have all the applications, right? Some of your employees only need a few, and it just depends on who they are and what they're doing within the organization. And so I think decreasing that friction, making it easier for people, and certainly ensuring not only a frictionless experience at home but also ensuring security is huge. I mean, how many times have we talked about cybersecurity is not a bolt on afterwards. It has to be all the way up through the stack. And certainly we did have an increased threat landscape with work from home situations because there were all these security breaches and issues and vulnerabilities. So I know we're not talking security today, but I'm wild about it. But I think that all of these things, what I like about what Citrix is doing, and I enjoy the Summit, is the fact that they're blending everything into a single solution so that it just gets done. Work gets done from wherever you are, whether you're at home, you're in office, or in your car, work gets done. >> And not only work but I thought the theme that's interesting that came out in David's keynote is our best work. It's good work and high-value work. And there's really kind of two aspects of that. One, as you just said, is please help me with the distractions and use machine learning and artificial intelligence and this unified platform to decide whether I should or should not be distracted. Also help me prioritize what I should be working on kind of right now, which, again, a great opportunity for AI and ML to elevate that which is most important to the top of my inbox. But even more in one of the keynotes was integrating the concept of wellness, and not just wellness in the HR manual at the back after vision and dental and getting your health checks, but wellness even where the application suggests that you take a two-hour window in this particular period of time to be thoughtful and do some deep thinking. And someone mentioned the people we talk about in automation and getting rid of drudgery and errors and all the bad stuff that comes from doing crappy work, not only is it not fun, but super error prone. This is a really different to use technology to help the employee, as you said, not only just get work done, but get good work done, get high-value work done, prioritize good stuff, and not just deal with the incessant henpecking that is the notification world that it's really easy to fall into if you don't turn some of that stuff off or at least tone them down a little bit. >> That's so true. I don't know if you saw this, but there a study by Stanford of, I think it was 16,000 workers, and over a nine-month period, they did this study, and it was a study looking at work from home and whether productivity was increased. And every, 'cause at first you remember what it was, Jeff. I mean, in the old regime, we would thought, oh dear, we don't want a remote workforce because everybody's going to be hanging out in their pajamas and screwing around and not doing work. And that's not true. What ends up happening is that this study showed that productivity increased by 13%. And, I mean, that's huge, right? So there was a huge bump in performance. And in this particular study, the variables that they cited was perhaps that they had a quieter workspace. I mean, you're not getting barraged by all the endless meetings, unless you have endless Zoom meetings, but that's a whole nother conversation. But you're having more time to focus and flexibility on when you work, which also increases focus. But I thought what you mentioned, the wellness piece was important, because then if you look at other studies, there was a Forbes article that cited that the average worker starts at 8:32 a.m. or something like that and works until 5:38 p.m. And I think the days of the week that were the most productive were Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But this was interesting, I thought. Telephone calls were up by 230%, so the calls that employees were making, and CRM activity was up by 176% and email up by 57% and chats up by 9%. So what we're seeing is that people are trying to find creative ways to remain connected and communicate, but in different ways. And I think that's where the wellness piece comes in and kind of what you were saying with that. I think it's a microapp that Citrix has on their Workspace, their workspace dashboard that pops up a reminder and says, hey, you think you should take a break or get up from your desk. But I think that what's nice about that is it's easy to get sucked into your computer all day. I'm guilty. I will definitely say I can start off pretty darn early in the morning or usually around by five and go till late at night. But, and it's all in front of the computer screen. So maybe I need that Citrix workspace solution to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go take a meditation break. >> At least one of those watches that'll tell you to get up and twist around. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. They had Satya Nadella on, and Satya is a phenomenal executive, been super successful turning that big, very large boat, Microsoft, into really a cloud company and a SaaS company, and nothing but great success. Always happy to hear him. He had some interesting comments I want to run by you. One of them he said is we were dogmatic about work before, but don't replace what we were with just a new dogma. And what he really highlighted, A, obviously without the technology platform and cloud and all these tools that we have in place, this couldn't have happened. But more importantly, he said it really highlights the need for flexibility and resiliency, and to really, again, kind of elevate those as the first class citizens as to what you should be optimizing for. And really the highlight within this sudden shift with COVID that if you've got those capabilities, you're going to be successful, and if you don't, you're in real trouble >> I'm glad you brought Satya up, because he also said something really cool that I think is true, and that is we are running right now, currently we are running a global scale experiment. Do you remember him saying that? >> Yeah. >> And it's so true. I think right now the social scientists are going wild because finally they've got their captive collection of their study, their guinea pigs. But the other thing he was saying, too, is that we're going to be harnessing all these technologies to be able to re-skill and up-skill. And how long have we been talking about this, Jeff, with the future of work, that it will be a re-skilling and up-skilling of the workforce. He even mentioned holographic technology. He didn't go into it, but just the mention of it got me thinking about how we are currently using some of those nascent technologies to be able to up-skill and re-skill our workforces and also protect a workforce that doesn't necessarily need to be on scene on the edge of it all. And then he gave an example of an engineer being able to communicate with a first-line worker without having to be actually in the physical presence. And so I think this crucible that we're in called a global pandemic, forcing our hand, really, to do all the things that we've been talking about at all these conferences that we've been to, for me, maybe the past two decades, is that it's show, don't tell. So we're not talking about it anymore. We actually have to do it. And another thing that Satya said was that nine to five is definitely not true anymore with work. It's flexibility. And it's really... He also mentioned this EEG study into meeting fatigue. >> Jeff: Yes. >> I thought it was pretty wild. An EEG study into meeting fatigue. And I bet even without reading that study, all of us who are on video conferencing systems can probably tell what the outcome of that was. But concentration wanes very quickly. In fact, I think in that study it was after 20 minutes. But, so kudos to Citrix for putting on their summits, because did you notice for once we had the enjoyment of all these just really contents, deliciously packed segments that were short. >> Jeff: Right. >> Whereas at live events, they went on way too long. I mean, even customer stories went on way too long. And I really love the staccato nature of these customer stories and partnerships and what was working, and I just thought that they did a really nice job, and it was interesting because it met perfectly with staying underneath that 20-minute window before attention wanes. >> Right, right. And they even broke it up into three conferences, right? It was Citrix Synergy before. >> Right. >> Now it's workspaces, it's cloud, and then the third one will be security. But I want to double down on another concept. We talked about it last time with you and with Amy about measuring work and about kind of old work paradigms in terms of measuring performance that were really based more on activity than output. And this concept that work is an output, not a place. And it kind of makes you think of talking about cloud and a cloud-centric way of thinking about things. It's not necessarily the delivery method. It's about adopting quick change and rapid pace and having everything available that you need anywhere you are at the same time. So it seems strange to me that it took this to drive people to figure out that they should be measuring output and not activity. And were some early applications that came out when this all went down that are going to report back as to how often are you looking at your Zoom calls and how often are you sitting in front of your desk and all this silly stuff that just, again, misses the point. And I think this whole employee experience is, as you said, make 'em happy, make 'em feel fulfilled. They want to do meaningful work. They want to do high-value work. They just don't want to be an integration machine between the email system and the accounts receivable system and the accounts payable system. There's so much of an opportunity to get more value from the people, which, oh, by the way, makes for happier people. So do you think finally we're at a point where we can start getting away from just measuring activity unless that's your job to put a widget on a screw and really focus on output and high-value output and innovative output and deep thinking output versus just checking another box and passing the paper down the line? >> You know, Jeff, that reminds me of what Erica Volini, I think she's global human capital practice at Deloitte. I really loved her presentation. I also like the fact that I felt like she was speaking from her home, and she mentioned she's a new mom, and so there was this warmth and connection there which also I think is something really that we don't think about being, but it is a gift since we've all had to work from home is being able to see kind of executive individuals in a regular environment, and it humanizes it all, right? She said something really interesting in her talk. She was talking about rearchitecting the future of work, and she was talking about essentially, the premise was that human beings need, crave, have to have work that's meaningful and real. And part of this whole experience piece, part of this removing the friction from the experience of the employee and providing opportunities, stimulating growth opportunities for employees to give them that sense of meaning. But also she talked about the relationships. I mean, work is a huge part of the relationships in our life. And so this meaningful relationships and connections and in her architecting the work of the future, it's harnessing technology in service to humans to do a better job. And I think the word she used was augmentation, right? So the augmentation piece would be as we think about reinventing or re-imagining or re-architecting, we look at what's going to happen when we have the human working with the machine, but the machine in service to augmenting that human being to do, potential is what she was talking about, to really reach their potential. And so it's not about being replaced by technology. It's not being replaced by artificial intelligence, with machine learning algorithms. It's actually working in tandem so that technology potentiates the human that is using the technology. And I think that was a really good way of putting it. >> Right, right. I mean, we talk, it's one of our taglines, right? To separate the signal from the noise. And the problem is with so many systems now, and I forget, you may know off the top of your head, the average number of applications that people have to interact with every day to get their job done. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> It's a lot. So, so there is a lot of noise, but there's also some signal. And so if you're not paying attention, you can miss the signal that might be super, super important because you're overwhelmed by the noise. And so I think it is a real interesting challenge. It's a technology challenge to apply the machine learning and artificial intelligence, to sort through the total flow, to be able to prioritize and separate the signal from the noise to make sure we're working on the stuff that we should be working on. And I think it's a growing challenge as we just seem to always be adding new applications and adding new notifications and adding new systems that we have to interact with versus taking them away. So Citrix has this approach where we're just going to bring it all in together under one place. And so whether it's your Salesforce notification or your Slack notification or Zoom meeting, whatever, to have it orchestrated as a single place so I don't have 18 tabs, 14 browsers, and two laptops running just to get my day job done. >> You're going to make me self-conscious of all the tabs I have right now. Thanks a lot, Jeff. But, it's kind of, I like hearing stories, right? I think stories communicate to me kind of these practical applications. And I think Citrix did a brilliant job in the Workspace Summit of highlighting some of these customer stories that were really inspiring during the pandemic. One of 'em was City National Bank and Ariel Carrion? This is a test of my memory. He's the CTO, right, of City National Bank. And he's talking about that they had already had a partial migration to the cloud prior to the pandemic. So obviously there was an advantage for those organizations that already had their toe in the water. So, but when the pandemic hit, then it really catalyzed that movement all the way into the cloud and essentially creating a digital bank. And what was really interesting to me is that they funded 9600 loans and taking on new clients during that time of transformation to a digital bank. And one of the coolest things that he said to me was that in a regular program, it would've taken, mind you, get this. It would've taken 14 years, 14 years to accomplish what they did in three months. >> That's a long time. >> I was blown away, right? Just to me, that speaks a lot, because what we're talking about here is their clients are small business, and who do you think was impacted most during the pandemic? Small business. So the ability to get loans was critically important to the survival of a lot of companies. And the same story they had with eBay and David Lessor was talking, he's a senior manager in the office of the CIO, I think I remember. And he was talking about how obviously eBay is a digital platform, right? But if you think about the pandemic when we were all had these shelter in place orders, lots of people were able to still make money and earn a living because they were able to do business on eBay. And both eBay and City National Bank are obviously customers of Citrix. But I just found this to be really inspiring, because for eBay pre-pandemic, it was like, I don't know. I think they said they had 11,000 connected users prior to the pandemic, and a lot of those were in physical call centers. >> Jeff: Right. >> And then post-pandemic, I think he was reaching, saying end of Q4 was going to be something like 14,000 connected users. That's huge from 11 to 14. >> Yeah. >> And again, to your point, it's kind of forcing our hand into really not only pivoting, but increasing our speed in this ever-changing dynamic environment. >> Right. >> You know, one of the other things that came up, before I let you go, that it's always nice to have frameworks. Sometimes it just helps us organize our thoughts and it's kind of a mental cheat sheet. And they talked about the four Cs, connectivity, content, collaboration, and culture. And I would have to say they're in inverse order of how I would potentially have prioritized them. But I just wanted to zero in on the culture piece, 'cause I don't think people focus enough on culture. And one of the things I think we talked about in April, and I've certainly talked about a number of times going through this thing in leadership in these crazy times is that the frequency and the type and the topics in communication within your internal world have gone up dramatically. I think we had the, we had a CMO on the other day, and she said internal comms, this is a big company, prior to COVID was important, but not that important within the list of the CMO's activity. But then once this thing hit, right, suddenly internal communications, again, in terms of frequency and the types of topics you're talking about and the forums that you talk about and the actual vehicles in which you talk about, whether it's a all hands Zoom call or it's more frequent one-on-ones with your manager, really, really increase the importance of culture, and then I think probably is going to show over time the people that have it right, getting some separation distance from the people that got it wrong. I wonder if you could just talk about, 'cause you're a big culture person and you know how important the people part of the whole thing is. >> Yeah, culture drives everything. You're right. And that was Citrix's CIO who gave those four Cs, I think, Meerah Rajavel. >> Yeah, yeah. >> She gave those four Cs. And you couldn't be, you couldn't have tapped into something that I think is the soft underbelly of the organization, which is what is the culture. And anyone who's worked in an organization with a sick culture knows that it's just, it's cancerous, right? It grows and it causes decay. And I don't care how much innovation you have. If the culture is sick, you just, you're going to lose your best people. It's hard to work in a sick culture. And so I think what we had to do is when we all started working remotely, that was a culture shift, because we were siloed off of it. We weren't actually hanging out in physical space. Some of the things that we enjoyed about meeting with other human beings physically changed. And so it really behooved organizations to take a look at how they were going to foster culture digitally, how they were going to create that sense of bonding between not only those within your departmental area, but cross over into other areas. And I think that creating that culture that says I don't have to be in the exact same physical space, but we can still connect. I mean, you and I are doing this. We're not in the same physical space. >> Jeff: Right. >> But I'm still going to feel like we met today. >> Jeff: Right. >> You can create that for your employees. And it also means that we learned that we don't have to be in that same physical space, right? And I thought that was a really interesting position when Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, was talking at the summit and saying that even when we look at creating culture with employees who aren't necessarily, maybe it's a workforce from all over the world that you're using, a remote workforce. And when you're using things like employees, if you've got work to do and you can find a really good talent and you can grab them for what it is that you need, you're actually increasing your ability to be able to deliver on things versus having to worry about whether you have that person in house, but you still can create that culture where everyone is inclusive, where someone can be in Australia and someone's in San Francisco and someone's in the UK, and you still have to create a cohesive, inclusive culture. And it matters not anymore whether or not you are a full-time employee or if you're a contract worker. I think in today's space, and certainly in those future of work conversations, it's more about, to the very first thing you said at the beginning, it's more about output. How's that for tying it back up again? >> Jeff: Yeah, very good. >> And that was totally unplanned. But it is about output, and that's going to be the future of work culture. It's not going to be the title that you have, whether or not you're a full-time employee or a part-time employee or a contract worker. It's going to be who are you meeting with? Who are you having these digital interfaces with and Slacking with or using any sort of platform application that you want to use. It's remaining in touch and in communication, and no longer is it about a physical space. It's a digital space. >> Right, right. All right, well, I'm going to give you the last word. You are a super positive person, and there's reasons, and for people that haven't watched your TED Talk, they should. I think it's super impactful and it really changed the way I look at you. So of all the negatives, wrap us up with some positives that you see as we come out of COVID that going through this experience will make in our lives, both our work lives as well as our personal lives. >> Well, since you're going to allow me to go deep here, I would say one of the things that COVID has brought us is pause. It caused us to go in. And with any dark night of the soul, we have to wrestle with the things that are real for us, and the things that fall away are those that were false, false perceptions, false ideas, illusions of even thinking who we are, what we're doing. And we had to come home to ourselves. And I think one of the things that COVID gave us through uncertainty was finding a center in that uncertainty. And maybe we got to know our beloveds a bit more. Maybe we got to know our kids a bit more, even if they drive us crazy sometimes. But in the end, I think maybe we all got to know ourselves a little bit more. And for that, I think we can harness those seeds of wisdom and make better choices in the future to co-create together a future that we are all pleased to wake up in, one that is fair, one that is equal, one that is inclusive, and one that we can be proud to have contributed to. And that's what I hope we've taken from this extremely hard time. >> Well, Tamara, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. Really appreciate it. And great to see ya. >> Good to see you, too, thank you. >> All right, she's Tamara, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Woman: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios to have a Cube conversation with a real leader in the industry he's been publishing for a long, long time. I've been following him in social media. First time I've ever get the met in person and kind of a virtual COVID 20, 20 way. And we're excited to welcome into the studio. Bob Evans. He's a founder and principal analyst, the Cloud Wars Media coming to us. Bob where are you coming to us from today? >> In Pittsburgh today. Jeff. Good to see you. >> Awesome. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Fricks in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania cause Henry Clay was there many moons ago so that's a good town. So welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks. Great to be here. And I look forward to our conversation. >> Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So I know you attended today, the Citrix Cloud Summit you know, we've covered Citrix energy in the past this year, they decided to go we'll obviously virtual like everybody did but they, you know, they did something a little creative I think as, and they broke it into pieces, which, which I think is the way of the future. There's no reason to necessarily aggregate all of your news, all of your customer stuff, all your customer appreciation, the party the partners, all for three days in Vegas. Cause that's the only time you could get the Science Convention Center. So today was the Cloud Summit all day long. First off, just, you know, your general impressions of the event, >> Jeff, you know, I just thought that the guys had hit a really good note about what's going on in the outside world. You know, sometimes I think it's a little awkward when tech companies come in and the first thing they want to talk about is themselves, which I guess in some ways fine but I think the Citrix guys did a really good job at coming outside in here's what's going on in the outside world. Here's how we as a technology player trying to adapt to that and deliver the maximum value to our customers in this time of unprecedented change. So I thought they really nailed that with cloud and some of the other big topics that they laid out >> Great. And you've been covering cloud for a long time and, and you know, COVID is, we're still in it. There's a lot of really bad things that are happening. There's hundreds of thousands of people that are dying and a lot of businesses are getting crushed especially hospitality, travel you know, anything that relies on an aggregation of people. Conversely though we're, we're fortunate to be in the IT industry and in the information industry. And for a lot of industries, it's actually been kind of an accelerant. And one of the main accelerants is this, you know kind of digital transformation and new way to work. And some of these things that were initiatives in play but on March 15th, approximately it was go, right? It was Light switch no more planning, no more talking, it's here now. Ready, set, go. And it's in, you know, Citrix is in a pretty good position in terms of the products that they offer, the services that they offer, the customer base that they have to take advantage of that opportunity and, and you know, go to this, we've all seen the social media memes right? Who's driving your digital transformation the CEO, the CIO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer to the question is. They're pretty well positioned and it seems like, you know, they're doing a good job kind of doubling down on the opportunity. >> Jeff. Yeah. And I'd sure echo your, your initial point there about the nightmare that everybody's experienced over the last six or seven months. There's, there's no way around that yet. It has forced in these categories like, you know, that we've all heard hundreds of thousand time digital transformation to the point where the term almost becomes a cliche but in fact right? You know, it has become something that's really you know, one of the driving forces, touching everybody in the planet, right? There's, and I think digital transformation. Isn't so much about the technology, of course but it's because, you know, there's a couple billion people around the world who want to live digitally enhanced digitally driven lifestyles. And the pandemic only accelerated that as you said. So it triggered things you know, in our personal lives and our new set of requirements and expectations sort of rippled up to the B2C companies and from them back up to the B2B companies So every company on earth, every industry has had to do this. And like you said, if they were, deluding themselves maybe telling themselves these different companies that yeah, we're going fast, we're aggressive. Well, when this thing hit earlier this year as you said, they just had to really slam their foot down. I think that David Henshall from Citrix said that they had some companies that had, they were compressing three years into five months or he said in some cases even weeks. So it's really been extraordinary. And cloud has been the vehicle for these companies to get over into their digital future. >> Right. And let's talk about that for a minute because you know, Moore's law is my favorite law that nobody knows which was, you know, we tend to underestimate, excuse me we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term of specific technology and underestimate the longterm impact. You know, Gardener kind of uses a similar thing with the hype cycle. And then you know, the thing goes at the end, you know, had COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago you know, the ease in which the information workers were able to basically just not show up and turn on their computer at home and have access to most of their tools and most of the security and most of their applications that wasn't even possible. So it's a really interesting, you know, just validation on the enabler that we are actually able to not go to work on Tuesday the 16th or whatever the day was. And for the most part, you know, get most of our work done. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I've thought about it a lot over the last several months. Remember the big consultant companies used to try to do these measures of technology and they'd always come out and say, well, we've done all these studies. And despite the billions of dollars of investment we can't show that IT has actually boosted productivity or, you know, delivered an ROI that customers should be happy with. I was always puzzled by some of the things that went into those. But I would say that today over these last six or seven months to your point, we have seen extraordinary validation of these investments in technology broadly. But specifically I think some of these things that are happening with the cloud, you know, as you've said how fast some companies have been able to do this and then not remarkable thing, Jeff right. About human nature. And we hear a lot about in, in when companies change that relative to changing human behavior changing technology is somewhat easy but you try to change human behavior and it's wicked. Well, we had this highly motivating force behind it, of the pandemic. So you had a desire on the part of people to change. And as you pointed out, there's also this corresponding thing of, you know, the technology was here. It was right. You've got a fast number of companies delivering some extraordinary solutions. And, you know, I thought it was interesting. I think it was a Kirsten Kliphouse from Google cloud. One of Citrix's partners who said that we're two best of breed companies, Citrix and Google cloud. So I thought that, that coming from Google you know, that is very high praise. So again, I think the guys at Citrix are sort of coming into this at the right time with the right set of outside in-approaches and having that flexibility to say that we're moving into territory nobody's ever been both been in before. So we better be able to move as fast as possible. >> Right. Right. And, and just to keep going down the quote line, you know once everyone is taken care of and you, you deal with the health and safety of your people which is a number one, right? The other thing is the great Winston Churchill quote which has never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think you know, David talked about in that, in his keynote that this is an opportunity, He said to challenge assumptions, challenge the models of the past. So, you know get beyond the technology discussion and use this really as a catalyst to rethink the way that you do things. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting moment because there is no model right? There is no, there is no formula for how do you reopen, there was no playbook for how do you shut down? You know, it was, everybody's figuring it out. And you've got kind of all these concurrent processes happening at the same time as everyone tries to figure it out and come to solutions. But clearly, you know, the path to, to leverage as much as you can, is the cloud and the flexibility of the cloud and, you know the ability to, to expand, add more applications. And so, you know, Citrix again, right place, right time right. Solution, but also you know, taking an aggressive tact to take advantage of this opportunity, both in taking care of their customers, but really it's a real great opportunity for them to change a little bit. >> It is. And Jeff, you know, I think if I could just piggyback on you know, your, your guy there Winston Churchill, one of his other quotes, I love it too. And he said, if find yourself crawling through hell, keep going. And I think so many companies have really had to do that now. It's, it's not ideal. It's not maybe the way they plan it but this is the reality we're facing here in 2020 and a couple of things right? I think it requires a new type of leadership within the customer companies right? What, how the CEO gets engaged in saying, I, I'm not going to relegate this to the CIO for this to happen and something else to the CMO. They've got to be front and center on this because people are pretty smart. And then the heightened sensitivity that everybody in every business has around the world today if you think your CEO is just paying lip service to this stuff about digital transformation and all these changes that everybody's going to make, the people aren't going to buy into it. So you've got the leadership thing happening on the one side and into that it's not a vacuum, but into that void or that opportunity of this unprecedented space that you mentioned come the smart, capable forward-looking technology companies that are less concerned with the stuff that they've dragged along with them for years or decade or more. But instead of trying to say, what is the new stuff that people are going to be desperately in need of and how can I help these customers do things that they never did before? It's going to require me as a tech company to do stuff that I've never done before. So I, I've just been really inspired by seeing a lot of the tech companies doing what they are helping their customers to do which is take a product development cycle, look at all the new stuff that came out around COVID and back to work, workspaces. And so on what Citrix, you know others are doing like this, the product development cycles Jeff, you study this stuff closely. It's, it's almost unimaginable. If you had said that somebody within three months within two months, we're going to have a new suite of product available we would have said it just, it's not possible the nice idea but it can't work, but that's happening now, right? >> Yeah. Isn't it interesting that had you asked them on March 10th, they would have told you it's not possible. And by March 20th, they were doing it. >> Yeah. >> At scale, huge companies. And to your point, I think that the good news is they had kind of their own companies to eat their own dog food and get their own employees you know, working from home and then, you know, bake that into the way that they had their go to market. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about work from home or work from anywhere or the new way to work. And it's funny cause that's been bantered about for, for way too long, but now, now it's here. And most indications are that for many people, many companies are saying you're not going to go back for a while. And even when you do go back it's going to be a lot different. So, you know, the new way to work is really important. And there's so much that goes into that. And one of the big pieces that I'm encouraged to hear is how do you measure work? And, you know, there's a great line I heard where, you know work is an output. It's not a place to go. And, you know, I had Martin Michaelson early on in this thing, and he had the great line, you know it's so easy to fake it at work, you know, just look busy and walk around and go to all the meetings where with a work from home or work from anywhere. What the leadership needs to do is, is a couple of things. One, is measure output right? Not activity. And you know, it's great. People can have dinner with their family or go see the kid's baseball game. Or I guess they don't have a baseball games right now but, you know, measure output, not activity which is, doesn't seem to be that revolutionary. But I think it kind of is. And, and then the other thing is really be an enabler and be a, an unblocker for people in terms of a leadership role right? Get out, help get stuff out of the way. And, but unfortunately, the counter is, you know how many apps does a normal person have to interact with every day? And how many notifications do those apps fire off every day between Slack and Asana and Salesforce and, and texts and tweets and everything else. You know, I think there's a real opportunity to take a whole nother level of productivity improvement by removing these, these silly distractions automating, you know, as much of the crap away as we can to enable people to use their brains and have some quiet time and think about things and deliver much better value than this constant reaction to nonstop notifications. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I loved your point there about the difference between people's outlook on March 10th versus on March 20th. And I believe that, you know, all limitations are self-imposed, right? We tend to form constructs around how we think and allow those then to shape and often restrict or confine our behavior. And here's an example of the CEO of Novartis Pharmaceutical Company. He said, we have been brought up in the pharmaceutical industry to believe that it is immutable law of physics that it's going to take 12 and a half years and two and a half billion dollars to get a new drug approved. And he said in the past with the technology and the processes and the capabilities that that was true it is not true today yet too often, the pharmaceutical industries behave like those external limitations are put in there. So flip that over to one of the customers that, that was at the Citrix Cloud Summit today Jim Noga, who's the CIO at Mass General Brigham. I thought it was remarkable what he said when you asked about how are things going with this work from home? Well, Jim Noga the CIO there said that we had been averaging before COVID 9,000 virtual visits a month. And he said since then that number has gone up to a quarter of a million virtual visits a month or it's 8,000 a day. So they're doing an a day what they used to do in a month. Like, you said it, you tell them that on March 10th, they're not going to believe it but March 20th, it started to become reality. So I think for the customers, they're going to be more drawn to companies that are willing to say, I see your need. I see how fast you want to move. I see where you need to go and do things you never did before. I'm willing to lock elbows with you, and go in on that. And the tech number is that sort of sit back and say, ah well, I'd like to help you there, but that's not what I do. They're going to get destroyed. They're going to get blown out. And I think over the next year or two, we're going to see this massive forcing function in the tech industry. That's going to separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers versus those that are trapped by their past or by their legacy. And it is, going to be a fascinating talk. >> So I throw on a follow up to make sure I understand that number. Those are patient visits per unit time. >> Yeah. At Mass Brigham. So he said 9,000 virtual visits a month is what they're averaging before COVID. He said, now we're up to 250,000 virtual visits per month. >> Wow. >> So it's 8,000 a day. >> Wow. I mean the thing that highlights to me, Bob, and the fact that we're doing this right now, and none of us had to get on an airplane is, you know, I think when people think back or sit back and look at what does this enable? right? What does digital enable? Instead of saying instead of focusing what we can't do, like we can't go out and get a cup of coffee after this is over and we can't and that would be great and we'd have a good time but conversely, there's so many new things that you can do right? And you can reach so many more people than you could physically. And, and for like, you know, events like the one today. And, you know, we cover events all the time. So many more people can attend if they don't have the expense, of flying to Vegas and they don't have to leave the shop or, you know, whatever the limitations are. And we're seeing massive increases in registrants for virtual events, massive increase in new registrants. Who've never attended the, the events before. So I think he really brings up a good point, which is, you know, focus on what you can do and which is a whole new opportunity a whole new space, if you will, as opposed to continuing to whine about the things that we can't do because we can't do anything about those anyway >> No, and you know, that old line of a wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first (laughs) you know, one of the other guests that that was on the Cloud Summit today Jeff, I don't know if you got to see 'em, but Steve Shute from SAP who heads up their entire 40,000 person customer success organization he said this about Citrix. "Citrix workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud based access for this new generation of remote workers." So you get companies like SAP, and, you know, you want to talk about somebody that has earned its way into the, you know the biggest companies in the world and how they go along. You know, it's pretty powerful. They end up, your point Jeff, about how things have changed, focus on what we can do. The former CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott. He recently said, we think of phones as, you know, devices that help us be more productive. We think of computers as devices that help us be more productive. He said, now the world's going to start thinking of the office or the headquarters. It's a productivity tool. That's all it is. It's not the place that measures Hey, he was only at work, four days today. So, you know, he didn't really contribute. It's going to be a productivity tool. So we're going to look at a lot of concepts and just flip them upside down what they meant in February. Isn't going to to mean that much after this incredible change that we've all been through. >> Right. Right. Another big theme I wanted to touch base with you on it was very evident at the at the show today was multicloud right and hybrid cloud. And, you know, I used to work for Oracle in, in the day. And you know Amazon really changed the game in, in public cloud. The greatest line, one of Jeff's best lines is you know, we had seven year headstart. Nobody even was paying attention to the small book seller in Seattle and they completely changed enterprise technology. But what came across today pretty clearly right? As horses for courses, and really focusing at the application first right? The workload first and where that thing runs and how that thing runs, can be any place in that in a large organization you know, this is pick an airline or, or a big bank right? They're going to have stuff running at Oracle. They're going to have stuff running at AWS. They're going to have stuff running on Google. They're going to to have stuff running in Azure. They're going to have stuff running in their data center. IBM cloud, Ali Baba. I mean there's restrictions for location and, and data sovereigncy and all these things that are driving it. And really, you know, kind of drives this concept where the concept of cloud is kind of simple but the actual execution day to day at the enterprise level and managing and keeping track of this stuff, it is definitely a multicloud hybrid cloud. Pick your, pick your, your adjective but it's definitely not a single cloud world. That's for sure. >> Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff, you know, the Citrix customer that I mentioned earlier, Jim Noga is that the CIO at mass General Brigham, one of the other points he made about this was he said he's been very pleased about some of the contributions that cloud has made in, in, in his hospital organizations, you know transformation, what they've been able today and all the new things that they're capable of doing now that they were not people poor. But he said, you know, cloud is a tool. He said, it's not Nirvana. It's not a place for everything. He said, we have some on-premises systems. He said, they're more valuable now than they were a couple of years ago. And then we've got edge devices and we have something else over here. He said, so I think his point was it's important to put the proper value on cloud for all the things it can do for a specific organization, but not the thing that it's a panacea for everything though, big fan, but also a realist about it. >> Great. >> And so from that to the hybrid stuff and multicloud and I know all the big tech vendors would love it and say Oh no, it's not a multicloud, but just be my cloud. Just, just use my stuff. Everything will be easy, but that's not true. So I think Citrix position itself really well big emphasis on security, big emphasis on the experience that employees need to have. It isn't just sort of like a road war you loose five or seven years ago, as long as he, or she can connect through email and, you know, sending a sales data back and forth, they're all set. Now. It's very different. You've got people sitting in a wildly different environments for, you know, six, eight, 10 hours a day and chunk of an hour or two or three here or there. But that, that seamless experience always dependable, always reliable is just, you know, it can't be compromised. And I just thought you have one you know, high level thought about what happened. It was impressive for me to see that Citrix certainly a fine company put it. It's not one of the biggest tech companies in the world but look at the companies we have, the Microsoft, SAP talking about Google Cloud, AWS, you know, up and down the line. So I just thought it was really impressive how they showed their might as sort of a part of a network effect that is undeniable right now. >> Right. Right. And I think it's driven, you know, we hear over and over right? I mean, co-opertition is a very Silicon Valley thing. And ultimately it's about customer choice and the customer's going to choose you know, kind of by workload, even if you will or by budget as to what they're going to do where so you have to be able to operate in that world or you're going to be you're going to get, you're going to get left out unless you're just super dominant and it's a single application and they built it on you and that's it. But that's not realistic. I want to shift gears a little bit Bob, since I'm so happy to be talking to you on another topic, that's, that's a big mega trend and we're slowly seeing more and more applications. That's machine learning and artificial intelligence and you know, and, and the generic conversations about these remind me of the old big data conversations. It's like okay. So what you know, who cares? It doesn't really matter until you apply it. And with all these new applications and even just around the work from home that we discussed earlier, you know, there's so many opportunities to apply machine learning and AI, to very specific functions and tasks to, again, help people prioritize what they're going to do help people not have to deal with the crap that they shouldn't have to do. And really, you know at a whole another level of, of productivity really, based on a smarter way to help them figure out what am I going to do in my next, my next marginal minute? You know, cause ultimately that's the decision that people make when they're sitting down getting work, done it, how do they do the best work? And I think the AI and machine learning opportunities are gargantuan. >> Jeff. The point you made a few minutes ago about, you know, we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate it, what it'll be overtime well, we've been doing that with AI for the last 40 years but this is going to be sort of the golden age of it. And one of the reasons why I have been so bullish on cloud is it presents like the perfect delivery system for it. This is we see in medicine, there's sometimes breakthroughs at the laboratory level where they've got the new breakthrough medication but they don't have the bullet. They don't have the delivery system to get it in there, cloud's going to be an accelerator for that. And it gives the tech companies, which and this is going to be very good for customers, every big tech company. Now as a data company, every company says, it's an analytics. Everybody says I'm into AI. Every company says I'm into ML. And in a way that's real good for customers cause the competitive level is going to soar. It's going to bring more choice. As you said, the more customers more types of solutions, more sorts of innovation. And it's also going to be incumbent on those tech vendors. You've got to make it as easy as possible, as fast as possible for these customers to get the benefit of it. I think it was Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google cloud said, Hey, you know, if, if a shoe company or a retailer or a bank had fantastic expertise in data science, they could go out and hire 200 data scientists do this all themselves. He said, but that's not what they do. And they don't want to do that. >> Right. >> So he said, come to the companies who can do it. And I think that we will see changes in how business works driven by ML and AI, unlike anything that we've ever seen. >> Yeah. >> And that's going to happen over the next 12, 18 months. >> Yeah. Baked into everything. Well, Bob, I really am excited that we finally got to catch up in, in person COVID style. Like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I just gave you the last word before we sign off. You know, you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen lots and lots of waves. You know, this is just another wave with this, with this, you know, gasoline thrown on the fire with, with COVID in terms of the rate of change. And the, you know there's no more talking, the time to move is now, share kind of your perspective as to kind of where we are. And, you know, we're, we're not that far from flipping the calendar to 2021, which is a good thing you know, as you, as you look forward a little bit you know, what's in your mind, what's getting you excited. What's getting you up in the morning. >> Yeah. Jeff, I guess it comes down to this thing of, we, I think here late in 2020, everybody's got a reason to be pretty proud of what we have done, not only in the last six months but over the last several years, if you look at the improvements that have been made in health care and making it available to more people, in education the things that teenagers or young teenagers or even pre-teenagers can do now to learn and explore the world and communicate with people from all over the globe, there's a lot of great things going on, but I think we're going to look back on this point and say, this was, this was a pivot point here in mid and late 2020, when we stopped letting in some ways, as you described it earlier worrying so much about the things we can't do. And instead put more time into what we can do, what breakthroughs can we make. And I think these things we've talked about with AI and ML are going to be a big part of that, the computer industry or the tech industry, maturing and understanding they're not in charge. It's the customers who are in charge here. And the tech companies have to reorient themselves and reimagine themselves to meet the demands of this new fast changing world. And so I think those are some of the mega trends and more and more Jeff, I think these tech companies are going to say that the customers are demanding that the tech companies give them the gift of speed, give them the gift of engaging with customers in new ways, give them the gift of seeing the world as other people see it rather than just through the narrow lens of, you know sometimes the tech bubble that can percolate somewhere out sometimes out in the Palo Alto area. So I, I'm incredibly optimistic about what the future is going to bring. >> Well, Thank you. Thanks for Bob for sharing your insight. You can follow Bob on Twitter. He's got podcasts, he's very prolific writer and again, really, really a great to meet you in person. And thanks for sharing your thoughts >> Jeff, thanks so much. You guys do a fantastic job and it's been a pleasure to be with you. >> Thank you. Allright. He's Bob Evans. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston. This is an episode in the remote works, Citrix virtual series. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio here on this ongoing leadership series that we've been doing, reaching out to people in the community to get their take on what's going on with the COVID situation, what are best practices, what can we learn and specifically today, really the whole new way to work, and working from home. And we're really excited to have two guests on for this segment. The first one is Amy Hayworth. She is the Chief of Staff for HR for Citrix, joining us from Florida. Amy, great to see. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> And also Tamara McCleary, who's been on many, many times coming to us from Denver. She is a well respected speaker, you've probably seen her doing more speaking than anything else, and also the CEO of Thulium. Tamara, great to see you. >> Thank you, I'm so excited for this conversation. >> Well, let's just jump into it. So it's so funny and doing a little homework, Amy, I came across a Professional Change Management executive conference, 2015 and you were talking about building change management as a profession and working from home was part of that and that was like five years ago and things creep along and then we have a light switch moment where there's no time to plan, there's no time to think, there's no time to implement things, it's, everyone must now stay at home. And so, outside the human tragedy, that is the COVID situation, we're not going to really speak to that here. But from a business point of view, suddenly with no warning, everyone had to work from home. From someone who's been in the profession of trying to drive change management through a process over time, what does that do for you? How do you digest that suddenly oh my goodness, we've got this light switch moment which is a forcing function that may have never come, but now we have to go? I wonder what your take is. >> I think the thing that get me most excited about this light switch moment is it is showing all of us that we are capable beyond what we ever thought we were when it comes to change. We've been called to take a leap, and for much of my experience in the organizational change management field, we spend a lot of time talking about managing resistance and the pushback about change and there's even this thing that drives me crazy, which is change is hard. I don't know why we tell ourselves that message. And I think what this is showing us is that number one, change is inevitable, it's going to happen. There is very little control that we actually have, but also we are more resilient, more adaptable. We're capable of change than many of us knew that we were. And it is calling up for me, what do we need to put in place within organizations to cultivate resilience? Because one of the things I think this is making all of us very aware is how volatile the world actually is. And it's also laid bare where we are strong individually and able to cope and where we also may need to do a little bit of practice and some very intentional resilience building. Though I think the conversation around the whole change management field is about to change and my hope is that focus turns more to resilience than it is to managing change. >> It's interesting 'cause a lot of just the chatter that's out there, is about Zoom. Do I use Zoom? Do I not use Zoom? Is it secure? All this other, people like to jump into the technology piece. But really, we had your boss on the other day, Donna Kimmel, the EVP and Chief People Officer, Citrix and she broke it down into three buckets. Culture was number one, physical space is number two and digital space was number three. And I thought it was really interesting that she really leads with empathy and human factors and I think that it's easy to forget those, but bringing up simple things that not only are you working from home, but guess what, your kids are home too and your spouse is home too. And they have meetings and they have Zoom calls, they have to do it or the other dog is still running around and all the other kinds of distractions. So the human factors are so, so important. Tamara, one of your early keynotes about your early development was in your early career working with people who are at the end of their life. And I know it helped you develop an empathy and really a prioritization that I think a lot of people are probably getting today that maybe they haven't thought about, what is truly important, what is truly meaningful. And this again, is this forcing function to say let's pump the brakes a little bit, take a step back and think about what's really important and the human factors. Again, your take on this crazy situation. >> I think you're absolutely right Jeff, and the fact that really what this has done, to Amy's point, yes we are very capable of change, but we're mostly so resistant and unwilling to change. And it's not because we don't want to, it's because we fear what will happen if we do change. And sometimes it's like the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. And right now what has been forced upon us is to really think about critical issues. So when you're faced with a lack of toilet paper and uncertainty about your survival rate, you start to think about things in terms of say Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You're looking at that base level, that safety piece. And when people go to safety, they have really left that area of self actualization in what do I want to be, what do I want to do? And it's more about, oh no, what have I done? Do I like my life? I'm stuck here at home, wherever you're sheltering in place and am I really enjoying my life? Am I experiencing my life? And what we really have experienced through being forced to get on to video conferencing, how many of you out there are doing video conferencing like a billion times a day? We're being forced to really see each other as human beings. And that means whether you're the CEO or you're the EVP of global blah, blah, it doesn't matter. What matters is your dog is still barking, your child is still running around and needs something from you in that moment when you happen to be on a call. Because as we all know, with kids, when you say, I can't be bothered for the next 30 minutes, what do you think is going to happen? That's exactly the time when they need more grapes. So I think that what it does is it levels the playing field and it shows us all how human we are. It shows us our strengths as Amy pointed out, and it also shows us our communal frailty. >> So let's get into some of the specifics about what people are feeling. Citrix just commissioned this report put on by one pole, pretty timely, comes out in April, 2020, about working from home. And I think there was really some interesting stuff, still connectivity and bandwidth, still the biggest challenge that people have. Can I even get online, was the number one problem. And when they do, their wifi is slow and there's single sign on. All these things that we've been talking about for years and years and years. I mean, why, why Amy, have we still not gotten it done? It's fascinating to me that in 2020, we still have internet connectivity issues and people don't know how to turn on their microphone on their Zoom call, we're so far behind. >> Yeah, Jeff, I think what we're seeing is number one, it takes practice, then the need to be familiar with all these tools. I also have talked to many parents who first day of homeschool, my son tells me I can't call it homeschool 'cause it's different, it's virtual school, he says it's very different. But that first day, especially families with multiple children trying to get onto a Zoom call with their class, Heron is trying to work, possibly two parents in the house are connected. Our home WiFi networks just haven't taken this kind of load before, but very quickly I think we needed to realize as an organization that this is not work from home, this is working at home during the global pandemic and it is very different. So you mentioned that need to lead with empathy and to really understand what's going on, and I think that's so true and just that the humanness of what we've experienced, that one full research really talked about a few epic moments of mishap, whether it's taking a call from the garage, I have a colleague who would take from the car on the street, still sheltering in place, but the only quiet place to go to take a call. We have a legend in our Singapore office. There's a salesperson who made record numbers working from his garage for a month. So there are all sorts of heroics taking place to balance than in the midst of that when technology isn't acting as we would hope it would under normal circumstances, having to adjust quickly, whether that means staggering schedules, working through accommodations, teachers, however it needs to happen but I think the reality and the acceptance, going back to that humanness and empathy is that we all have to shift our mindset about what work means and even are at work. We've built up a lot of these polishished buttoned up personas and when we are able to actually let some of that down, I think what we're starting to see is connection on a much deeper level amongst teams and among colleagues. >> I'm just looking at the survey at how few people think that this is going to roll over into a little bit more of a permanent form. Only 37% think my organization in general will be more relaxed about remote working. I think staff will be allowed to work from home more regularly, 36%. We had Marten Mickos on and he ran MySQL before it got bought by Sun many moons ago. He talked that he had a distributed team from day one and he laughed. He said, "It's so much easier to fake it at the office, "to look busy versus when you're remote." As you just said Amy, you're only judged by your deliverables. And I thought it was so funny in your blog posts from earlier this year that when managers start managing by outcome and deliverable rather than assuming as good work's getting done because someone showed up at the office, I mean this is ridiculous that people are still judging things based on activity, not outcome. And we're even seeing now all these new tools that people are introducing in the marketplace. I can tell you how often your people are on Zoom and how many hours on the VPN. What are we measuring? We should be measuring outcomes and the piece that comes up over and over is trust. And if I can't trust you to deliver outcomes, I probably have a bigger problem than managing your day to day. Tamara, you see this all the time in terms of the trust and how important this is to relationships. >> I do and in fact our workforce at Thulium has always been a remote workforce. And for the way that I've built our organization is treat everybody like an adult and get your work done. And we do base everything upon productivity versus FaceTime. And I think that the reason some of these larger organizations have had this concept of show up having that FaceTime means that whoever gets there the earliest and leaves the latest somehow has been a better employee, it's not true. It is about productivity. And I think those wise organizations that look at how much they can save with the costs of like AC heat, the building cost, having a brick and mortar for everyone to come into it is very costly. And it's an old paradigm that a lot of middle managers have, which is this control piece. And that if the people are there in the office, they've got more control. And actually what we find is you don't need that control, especially when you look at the younger generational cohort coming up, how they have a totally different view of work. And we've talked a lot about the future of work and the gig economy, and what this COVID pandemic has done for us is to show us that actually work does get done at home. And in fact in some respects, more work gets done at home because it's harder to stop working when your work is happening right there at home. And so it does blur the lines and the boundaries between the work life than the home life. And so I think you get a lot more out of your employees when they work from home. >> It's funny, when Donna was on, she brought up a really interesting topic. She said, "Every time somebody pushes back on that, "can't be done from home." This job, this person, this type of task can't be done from home. The question should always be like, why? It almost sounds like when you move the whole cloud conversation that we've been tracking, went from, when should I move stuff to cloud, to why shouldn't you move to cloud? And it's not, does it work on a mobile, it should be mobile first. And now this conversation is moving this to, why can't somebody do it from home, as opposed to it has to be done from the office? So I think even just the relative flip of the context of setting up the question seems to be changing. That's why it surprised me that so few people think that it's going to go back. It clearly, especially as this goes on for a while, new behaviors become habits and they become normalized and hopefully, the senior management pays attention to the outcome and again, not this activity which is really not, that's not what you want people to do, you want them to actually get stuff done. >> Jeff and Amy, the other thing I was going to say is, Amy, when you look at the report that Citrix has put out, how many people are even going to be able to go back to work when kids aren't going back to school? And then we have summer, piggybacking onto that, so now you've got parents who have kids at home, what is that outlook? To me, it's not just this simple, okay, it's over, let's get back to work guys, because the rest of our life has completely shifted as well. >> That was actually my conversation today, is starting to really think about holistically when it comes to policies, programs, what are we putting in place for the summer? And not only that, but even some of our employees who have been alone through this, I think at the beginning, there was a very large shift on those who had children or elder care to think about. And at some point, at least in this half of the world, about last week, we really started to hear, worried about this person who's been alone by themselves in their apartment sheltering for over a month. So I think if they start to look at the variety of experiences people are having, really being sensitive to different personas in the organization, different needs, different emotions that are happening and we even start to think about, what does that mean to come back to work? And I know countries and organizations are being very cognizant about doing that. safely, in a very gradual  way of thinking about it, but it starts to get very, very complex very quickly and also from just let's do this well because there's a whole new set. Jeff, you bring up all new set of questions of employees asking, I wasn't allowed to work from home prior, I would like to do that more often now, new conversations with managers about, well, how are we going to measure results? There's a lot of work to be done between now and then, whatever what then is, to really ensure that we help everyone be successful. And I think the conversation we're having, it's likely not going to be one or the other. The new normal is not the old normal and we're not sure what it is but most likely, there's going to be some sort of hybrid working arrangement. Right now, the playing field is leveled and that in and itself is a very different work from home experience. What happens when it's hybrid again and there are some who are remote, some who are in the office, how do we make sure that it's equitable and all the voices have equal opportunity to chime in? Because when people are in the office and their colleague or two is remote, it's not a level of conversation in an organization. So whether that's establishing norms or really just starting to create behaviors where if one person's remote, then everybody's remote no matter if you're in the office or not, you dial in via go to meeting or whatever collaboration tool you're , so all sorts of things to think about, but I guess that is our ecosystem of work is going to change for sure. >> It was so funny in your blog posts, you talked a little bit about that as well. And one of the little paragraphs was, who gets to do it? It's like this binary decision, you can either work from home or you can't. And there's this whole second order impacts that we see on infrastructure, there's nobody in the trains or there's nobody on the freeways. You think, wow, we actually have a lot of freeways if everyone is not on them at the same time. So, begs a lot of questions are why is everybody driving to work at 8:30 in the morning to work on their laptop? Now clearly if you're in construction or service trades and you've got a truck and you got to go do something on site, they have to be there. But I think hopefully what this will do is help people as you're discussing, look at those who can. And even if it's one day a week, two days a week, one day a week, every couple of weeks. The impact on infrastructure, the impact on traffic, the environment, mental health, Amy, you talked about mental health, sitting in a car for an hour each way, every day certainly is not helping anybody feel better about themselves or get more work done. So I think there are so many benefits if you just look at it in the right context, focused on who can, not who can't and the how and the why and the enabler. But it's really interesting, we've talked a lot about the physical space and the cultural space. Imagine if this happened in 2006, before the iPhone came out, the smartphone. Think of the crazy amount of tools that we do have. I mean right now, we're talking and we spread out all over the country. So we're actually in a really fortunate space in terms of the digital infrastructure that we have in place to enable these things. And I know Citrix, you guys have been in the lead of supporting this forever, now even have a whole set up of resources, what's it called, the Citrix Remote Work Hub for people to get resource to figure out everything from the mental health to the WiFi connectivity, to all these other little things as Tamara said, how do you manage the kids and the dog and your significant other that also has Zoom meetings that they have to attend? So it's so many resources that people need to use and not feel uncomfortable that they're alone and could use a little bit of an assist. >> Absolutely well said. When this quickly became a forced experiment to work remote, Citrix has 30 years of history helping enable successful remote work in a secure way and the first thing that we wanted to do was be of service. So pulling together these resources has been a big project and we're so glad to be able to provide this tool set and we truly do hope that it makes this transition stronger, better, it will continue to grow and to evolve even as our own experiences evolve, new challenges arise, but we definitely want to keep it fresh and keep meeting the need that's out there, both internal for Citrix as much as in as long as we've been doing, we don't have it all figured out, we are learning too, this is unchartered territory for everyone, but also to take what we are learning and put it out there in a very transparent way. >> Right, I want to-- >> You know, I was-- >> Go ahead, Tamara. >> Sorry, but there was just something so crazy, Jeff, about the study that Citrix put out. And Amy, I wanted to bring this up to you because you said they're coworkers like, well, so-and-so lives alone, I wonder if they're okay or if they're lonely. But in the study, barely a quarter of the individuals reported any loneliness. I find that to be pretty shocking. >> It is shocking and I think it really speaks to how quickly those happy hours, the Zoom Happy Hours or the gatherings and some of the creativity that started to pop up, but yeah, you made a great point, Tamara, that was surprising and I'm curious if that will continue to be the case. (murmurs) >> But I guess maybe some of us when we got home, we were like, wow, this isn't so bad after all. And then can you imagine? So Jeff, if only 28% of people experienced any loneliness, imagine when you can have peace and quiet in your home again and still work. I think that this really is a lot more delicious than a lot of us anticipated it would be. And, what a grand social science experiment this has been! It's phenomenal. >> The fact that everyone is experiencing it at the same time globally just blows my mind. I was here for the earthquake, I was in Portland for Mount Saint Helens, I've been through a few little things here and there, but those are still regional, there's still a safe space, there's still people that don't have that story. Everyone, six or 7 billion people will have a where were you in March, 2020 story, which is fascinating. And then as you said, it's not only the work from home, there's no time to plan and no time to put infrastructure and, oh by the way, the kids are home too, and school is also from home. So in terms of an accelerant, it's just gasoline on the fire. But I want to jump in a little bit about one of the things you talked about Amy and you'll take camera 'cause you're doing it in your own company, and is in terms of establishing norms. I think people are maybe not thinking about the fact that they either need to establish new norms or they need to be very clear on the communication of what the norms are so that everybody is as you said Amy, feels comfortable in this new space because we have norms at work and now we have to have these new norms and there's all kinds of funny stuff going on in terms of we talked about dogs and kids, that this and that dressed, you're not dressed, you put makeup on, it's funny in the survey, do you take a shower? Only 30 some odd people take a shower every day, which I thought was kind of-- unexpected >> What about the shoe comment? Did you believe that, Jeff, where people actually would wear their shoes to their death? Well, I'll tell you, they didn't ask the women because the women would not be wearing high heels at home if they didn't have. >> They didn't specify which shoes, Tamara, they just said shoes. So maybe the more comfortable flats were the ones that were coming out. But I'm just curious on establishing social norms. Tamara, I'll let you go first, how did you establish them? Was it hard to do? Did they self self-generate and as a leader, do you have to police it or is it self policing? How's that working? And then Amy, from your point in terms of formal communication in a much bigger organization and being part of the HR office, one might say, isn't that already part of HR's charter? But how's that different now? Tamara, I'll let you go first. >> Sure, it's a great question because since we do have a remote workforce, one of the most salient things that I found to be critically important for productivity and collaboration and even cohesion and decreasing those silos between business unit is making sure that we form a community. And so what I mean by that is we have and always have had, we've been using video conferencing since before the pandemic and we have video conferencing meetings where video is on, so that's one of the parameters, is everybody needs to see everyone else's faces, and we have a morning kickoff meeting, an all hands meeting and then we have an end of week one as well and part of that piece, we call a standup where people either share something that's either a challenge within their workplace or with a customer or even in their own personal life, and then they end on something to celebrate because I think it's really important for us to cultivate that. But it really helps the teams to get to know one another. So just because someone in this business unit doesn't work with someone in this business unit, they know one another because of these team meetings that we have. And so I think creating a culture of positivity and collaboration versus competition and creating a culture where people feel a part of a team and a part of something bigger and where they see that their contribution makes a difference to the whole, creates a really delicious community that helps people feel valued at work. And I think with a remote workforce, you have got to pay attention to how you are creating that community and that feeling and sense of value to each and every individual within the organization. >> It's a very different kind of a challenge. Amy, your thoughts on more of a formal approach to establishing social norms to some of these big organizations, or do you treat it differently as a big organization or is it just a bunch of small little clusters of people that work together? >> I have so many thoughts on this, so I would love to have a two hour dialogue with both of you on this topic. Couple thoughts, there's implicit norms that develop organically, and then there's the explicit ones which for whatever reason we seem more hesitant to have very explicit conversations about norms. I don't know if people think it's tedious or something like that, I'm not sure, I haven't done that research yet. But in times of transition, it's so incredibly important just even for efficiency to add certainty, to make sure that everyone has the same message, same expectation to lean a little more heavily on the exquisite norms. Talking about how do we want to begin our meeting, let's reserve the first 10 minutes and just catch up like we would in the hallway. Some of that is a shift to how those meetings probably were happening two months ago. So making sure that everyone understands is that expectation and even little bit more of a warmup question. How's everybody feeling today? And even getting more specific, there is a couple of organizational gurus who I have been following quite a bit lately, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans, Aaron wrote a book called "Brave New Work" and they also have a podcast, but they really talk about the organization as an operating system. And when we look at norms, the norms are so much a part of that operating system and getting really clear about who does what here. There're things like how are not taken, how are we following up, in our current climate, who's checking on who? And so having some of those explicit conversations I think are incredibly important. And also for me with some of the work that I've been doing over the last six weeks is trying to harness goodness across the globe. So we have a group of site leaders who meet twice a week, their charge is to look after their location. So every location in the Citrix ecosystem that has more than 20 employees has a designated site leader during this time. And in bigger sites, they have pulled together committees, they're doing things that are local level to keep that site engaged, but what we're also looking to do is harness the best of the best. Some really amazing things, I did a radio calisthenic last night with our team in Tokyo. So something very true and personal to the Japanese culture but other sites, they're doing coffee chats and having drop-ins, celebrity guests, organizational leaders that are pretty high profile just popping in and out actively to have a very authentic Q&A conversations. There's some really inventive ideas to keep people engaged and also possibly establish new norm and I think that the question for me is, what do people like so much that they decide that it stays in place? When we do have of that thing and people are in the office more often, what level of connectivity will we keep? Even, will people start showering every day again? Some of these things, who knows what's going to happen? >> You make me want to go down to a to RNB and look in the meeting rooms at Intel, they used to have a very defined meeting, culture meeting, process meeting establishment, super efficient just like they're making chips. I wonder if they've changed a little bit in light of what's going on, but final note in terms of frequency and variety of communications. Both of you now have mentioned in the communications with your people and what you're hearing about is one is, you got to increase the frequency just period. And in fact, you might actually be communicating more frequently 'cause you don't necessarily chat all the time in the hallways when you're physically together. And the other thing that strikes me is the variety. It's not just the meeting, it's not just information exchange, it's touching base with community, it's establishing deeper relationships, it's doing some social things that, kind of the variety and the frequency of direct communication person to person, just not necessarily closer than six feet within one another has to go up dramatically, and is, as you're seeing in best practices in this new world. Amy, why don't you go first? >> I'm seeing a lot more Slack usage, we are an organization that has a multitude of tools to choose from, Slack being one of them, but highly engaged Slack community. The other thing that's become very clear as an insight is the more authentic the communication, the better. So our CEO, David Henshall has been doing video pieces and they had become increasingly more personal about whether it's his space where he exercises what he's doing for exercise, and the employee response has been deep appreciation for feeling several degrees more connected to our senior leadership. Other senior leaders on the team have profiled their own work from home antic in a very humorous way and so just finding inventive ways to leverage the communication vehicles we have, but at a level that is very true to the situation we're in and very human at their core. >> So Tamara, let me ask you a followup on that. You're big on social, it's a big part of your business helping other companies do better at social and engage in social, and it strikes me, especially in the real senior leadership ranks, there are those who tweet just to pick a platform, like Michael Dell, Sanjay Poonen, some CUBE alumni that you know, and then there's some that don't. And again, we talked about the contrast of IBM now, Ginny didn't tweet now, the new CEO announces it on LinkedIn. When you talk to CEOs and leaders about getting involved in social, I'm sure a lot of them that don't do it, just say the risk reward is not there, why am I going to expose some little personal tidbit of myself when the potential harm is great? But as we just heard from Amy, people like to know who the person is, people want to relate to who the person is. That's kind of part of the whole CUBE thing that we figured out a long time ago, is people are interested in the people that are behind the technology in the companies in the implementation. So how do you advise people, what do you see to convince them that, hey, it's actually in your best interest to show a little vulnerability, to show a little humanity, to maybe be scared sometimes and not necessarily have the right answer? How do you help coach them that these are good things, not bad things? >> It's so brilliant you brought this up, Jeff, because with the pandemic, a lot of the executives that were not on social media all of a sudden wanted to be on social media, and how do I do this, and how do I set up my thought leadership? Because this was a very primary mode of communication. And I think what we're seeing is that you do see a lot of the progressive CEOs and executive members on social media and then what you've outlined is there was a hesitancy by a lot of the CEOs who come from a different paradigm in which the hierarchal structure was such that they got to this level and why do I need to be on social media? And what we're seeing is that this push from the younger generational cohorts, which is they don't really see that hierarchal structure at all, and they want to be able to communicate with their CEO as much as they want to communicate with their manager. And when they can't, there is this distrust and you brought up the trust piece, which is huge. And I do know that a lot of global business leaders in highly regulated industries have been afraid, like in the financial services industry because there are a lot of rules and regulations. So I can understand and appreciate their hesitancy to be on social media, which is like a bit of the wild West. And you see those that are really pretty insulated from anything that they do, you can see like Elon Musk can tweet whatever he wants to tweet, and a lot of executives don't feel that they have that same sort of freedom. And so how we work with them, we work in the B2B and enterprise space is about what is it that you want to be known for? What is it that you're passionate about that would, Amy's point, be uplifting to those who not only work internally, your internal stakeholders, but to even your customers or those on the external, and stick to that? So no, you don't need to tweet about your political feelings, you don't need to tweet about sensitive subjects. We always say stay away from politics and religion, but you can absolutely establish a very authentic transparent, vulnerable thought leadership about the things that you care about. And we say pick three things. What three things do you want people to think of when you're not in the room? Pick three adjectives and then construct your editorial calendar, what you're doing on social media around how those three things are going to come to life. Through all of your email? Through your videos that you share with your community? And also what you're talking about on LinkedIn, Twitter and no, I'm not advising any of the executives to get on TikTok, but I do advise them to be on LinkedIn and Twitter. >> Matt Eastwood is starting to play with TikTok, so I don't know if you follow him on that, but he's a budding Casey Neistat. So I think he's getting into the TikTok thing, or even just TikTok edits, it's great. We could go on and on and on, and I really appreciate the time and it's just interesting again, pulling from Amy's blog post about leadership and you lead with trust, accountability, vulnerability, inclusion and communication. I think those are all human things and I think are so important. So final word, assuming things are going to get better in let's just say a year from now, we get back together and talk about how the new way to work has changed in a post COVID world, what do you hope that we'll be talking about that's different a year from now than we are today? Beyond obviously the COVID itself? Amy, you first. >> Wow. To narrow that down, I hope we are talking about how organizations have invested in helping our people find their strengths and feed with resilience and to understand what it is that helps them operate at their best, no matter what situation that you're in. >> That's great. Tamara? >> Me, Jeff, I'm going to hope that we are talking about the technology that's available a year from now that's going to help us have a much more immersive experience remotely working. So we'll be talking about hopefully things like the haptic internet, well that haptic interface with tactile internet and how AR, VR and mixed reality settings will help us as remote authors to feel like we're actually in meetings and having the same sort of experience that oftentimes we think we get only when we're at the building with everybody else. So I hope we're talking about how technology is really moving the needle forward to helping our remote workforce have that same experience and camaraderie and team building that they do in the physical space. >> Great. Well and again, there's this digital is different than physical, we're not together physically and we can't be right now, but we're together digitally. And so it's not the same, it's different, but there's a lot of good things about it too. So thank you both for taking the time, this has been a really great conversation. Amy, I agree with you, we could go for another couple of hours, but I think the crew would start throwing things at me. So I think we'll have to cut it off here. Thanks again and stay safe and really appreciate the time. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Thank you. >> All right, thank you for tuning in, thanks for watching theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend coming to you from our second day of coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta. We are very pleased to welcome to theCUBE, the SVP of EMEA for Citrix, Sherif Seddik. Nice to have you on theCUBE. >> Fantastic, thank you very much for having me here. It's great. >> Our pleasure, so we have spoken the last, almost two full days here, on set, with a whole bunch of your executives, customers, analysts. The excitement over, not just the Citrix Workspace intelligent experience, but the announcements of deepening partnerships with Microsoft and Google are so exciting. >> Absolutely, I mean, we are very thrilled with kind of the, I was actually talking to David Henshall, our CEO, earlier today, and I was going, "We just announced so much stuff. I'm not sure everybody grasps everything that we announced." So it's exciting times for us, as you said, from an innovation point of view, from a speed to market point of view, and definitely partnerships. >> Yeah, I would love to hear, I mean. The deepening partnership with Microsoft, the Google announcements, the intelligent experience, and I. Zero-in on this announcement with Microsoft. This is like something that has been pent up demand. The ability to run desktop as a service, Citrix in a cloud, specifically Microsoft's, because there's a lot of overlap in partnership. What have customers been more excited about? Getting this pent up demand and answering for this partnership with Microsoft? Or are they surprised, in that intelligent experience, both very exciting announcements. >> Well I think what we're getting most excitement about is really the intelligent workspace because every customer that I talk to these days has an employee experience project going on. They all call it different things, but it's really focused about that. How can we get our employees to get what they need done as fast as possible? I was talking to customers who are actually starting to measure to the nanosecond, how long does it take an employee to launch app A or app B et cetera? So that's really the thing that customers are more excited about. The fact that they can give their employees such a beautiful, consumer-like experience, that guides them through their work, is really, customers are seeing it as a game changers for what they can do for their employees. >> And that's an enabler, well it's essential, for to have a great employee experience, directly affects your customer experience. >> Absolutely, and actually, what I tell many of our customers is you should look at the employees as your customers because if your employees are happy, they're going to make your customers happy. And the statistics, and the studies recently have been quite staggering about employee experience. You see the Gallup result from a couple of years ago that said, companies with engaged employees have 20% higher sales, 21% higher profitability, but the reverse of that was that only 20% of the employees were really engaged. Nearly 20% were actively disengaged. So the companies that can really flip that dynamic, can achieve growth and business results, and as you said, greater, greater customer experience. >> I'm also really interested in this unique balance, when it comes to customer experience and employee experience. You're in EMEA, so, there's a great, I think, distrust between big companies, especially big American companies, and data. In order to deliver the experience, you need data. What have been the conversations with your customers as you help to ensure them that Citrix definitely respects their data, GDPR and all of that, but the exchange of data for value is definitely there. >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key things is every customer conversation now has a deep analysis of data and the data flows and where do they go. And we've taken great steps. So, we've, one of the first investments that we made in the cloud was creating a control plane in Europe, in that space, in Amsterdam. So that we make sure the data is available in Europe, within the EU, et cetera. But on top of that, we also don't keep a lot of data, in our cloud environments. We just focus on, what do we need to make sure that it's the right employee, the right user, and that they only get access to the things that they get access to. But it's every customer conversation. They want to understand, "Tell us exactly, which pieces of data do they keep? And where do you keep them? And how long do you keep them for?" and all that. So, we've invested a lot of resources into making sure that we comply with all of the different European rules. And as you said, there's GDPR now, that's an umbrella, but in Europe, some countries have some. >> They go deeper? >> Yeah, they go deeper than that. And we make sure that we work with our customers, to make sure that we give them every level of comfort around privacy and data privacy. >> So you talked about the customers being very excited about the intelligent experience. The news that the capabilities that it's really going to bring the actions to the user. So really what we've heard and felt in the last 24 hours is, Citrix really pivoting towards the general user. But I'd love to get your perspective on EMEA customers influence on the development of the intelligent experience. How vocal have they been? How, especially because, if you just even look at compliance and standards alone, there's so many. Talk to us about that feedback loop that your customers in EMEA have had. >> It's been fascinating. A couple of years ago, I was visiting one of the largest French banks, and a big of that conversation, they were actually talking to me about, "How are you thinking about virtual assistance in the workplace?" And kind of, "How are you going to bring that in?" And, "Where does that fit with your whole focus on giving customers choice? Are you giving us choice on that? How will you integrate that?" So, customers, as I said, are very, very focused on how to take advantage of that. And the big difference in EMEA I guess, is always that balance between, okay, how do we make sure that we're continuing to enhance the experience that we provide our users with the capabilities? And at the same time, making sure that we are compliant. However, the other interesting thing is the speed at which some of the customers themselves changed. Again, I met a particular customer two years ago, and they were like, "We are in an unregulated industry. We are never going to do BYOD. We are never going to allow our users to work from home." And I met the same person, you know, 12 months later, and it was "BYOD is our new standard. We've even allowed our traders to do some work from home." So that shift in perceptions and actions that our European customers are taking, has been phenomenal over the last 18 months. >> That's a pretty fast turnaround, from no BYOD, everybody needs to be on site, to we have got to deliver an experience our employees need. What do you think were some of the catalysts for a shift of that magnitude in the course of 12 months? >> I think the biggest thing is probably the war for talent, if you like, among organizations. And everybody's thinking, you know, whatever data you look at again, there are employee shortages, there are skill shortages. So, with Generation Y and Generation Z coming into workplace, they are very demanding. It's interesting how many customers are saying now that, one of the questions that employees or potential employees ask when they are coming in is "What are the tools that you're going to give me? Can I choose whatever device I want?" et cetera. So that's the first thing. The second thing has been, things like, pragmatic things, like costs of real estate, and kind of how do we optimize that, and that drives certain things. And if you can get them comfortable around the security and the privacy aspects, then they start focusing on these other business benefits that they can get. But I would say, talent attraction is number one. >> So let's talk about kind of your role, your sales role. As you have AEs, Account Executives, and SEs, Sales Engineers, out in the field, having these conversations. This is very volatile, like, you know, I visit this account three months ago, six months ago, and they said no the the intelligent, they were at Citrix, they said no to the intelligent workspace. They were no to BYOD. How do you prepare your staff to be, for the volatility in conversations? >> I think one of the first things, other than the staff, is I think we have a very unique position around that, enabling the customer choice. So because we are definitely very very much on that, it's going to be hybrid cloud. Customers need get the choice of deploying the technology in the cloud or on premises. Regardless of the customer position, we always have a solution that we can offer. And as long as we are very clear on, okay, if you go this option, these are some of the capabilities you're going to miss about. So that enables a continuous conversation with the customer. However the other thing that we are driving with our teams, is really focus on the business outcomes that the customer is driving for. And as you focus on that, then you can get customers to change their view. But just make sure, the other thing is, we want all of our employees to really understand deeply, the security and privacy concerns that the customers have and be able to respond to these. Because once we, in here actually, yesterday, we had a meeting with one of the large European telcos. And the meeting started with, "Okay, we're not going to do cloud." And once we explained to them, okay, let's walk you through our data flow. Let's walk you through what we keep. And then "Ah, we didn't realize it was like this. Then maybe." They didn't say, yes, we're going to move forward, straight away, but it opened a conversation, and that's the key of what we need our teams and sellers, is focus on the customer. Focus on the business side of things. >> And within those customer conversations, employee experience, we're hearing more and more, is being elevated to a C-suite imperative. Are you starting to see more meetings with CIOs, Chief People Offices, Chief Marketing Officers? Is that opening up opportunities for your sales guys and gals to really educate the executive management team at a company, rather than traditionally, IT? >> Yeah, I think absolutely. It's interesting because, particularly when we start to talk about the intelligent workspace and saying, you know, general purpose and being able to. Many of our CIOs can say "That's great, but this is not a decision that I can take on my own," if that's what we're talking about. "So let's, we have to bring our HR teams into play, we have to bring our business owners into play." And there is now becoming this "Let's go together." So they are now becoming, opening the doors for us to go and talk to the business leaders because that is what is required to make a decision that impacts every employee, not just a small fraction. >> Wow, so that's a huge cultural shift, internally, to your sales team. You know, I'm used to engaging Citrix's sales team and talking about, well this VDI capability is available in this product. This isn't available in this product. Checklist, checklist, checklist. The conversation of shifting to having a business outcome conversation is very different. You know, one day, your team may go in and talk to HR, another day they may go in and talk to marketing. It is a skillset beyond any single team. How are you guys adjusting to that business outcome conversation? And preparing your team, and giving them the tools from an employee experience, to go out and have this multitude of conversations. >> We're doing a number of things. We're doing a lot of training and enablement. So one of the things that we do, (cough) is we're doing training around talking to business people. And what we do is we actually bring business owners from the customer to educate our teams. Sorry, my voice is going. >> No problem. >> What is important for them? What's the priorities? What are the languages that they use? But the other thing that we're actually doing, is we're encouraging our teams to talk to their colleagues, because we have HR professionals in our organization. We have finance professionals in our organization. We have marketing professionals. Go talk to them, and bring them to your customers with you because they will really be talking the business language. So these are a couple of the key initiatives that we are doing, to enable our teams to have these conversations. >> That's brilliant. We had a conversation yesterday with your Chief People Officer, Donna Kimmel, kind of just about that, in terms of looking at the employee experience not just as the applications I'm interacting with to do my job, but starting up the chain to even recruiting. And needing to have the right, I can't even think of it, the right, a job description that's attractive. But like you were saying, and I've been doing this with some of my clients, what kind of tools am I going to have? Can I bring my own tools? So the employee experience kind of starts up the chain, if you will, more so than I thought. I kind of really narrowly focused it on once I'm onboard, and the onboarding process. And then getting to making sure that that's seamless, and me knowing beforehand, as a new employee, these are the tools that you're going to have, and knowing that a company, like with what Citrix is doing with intelligent experience, is going to be able to look at my behavior and my interaction with the different applications and help tailor that experience, is game changing. Because the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. They are inextricably linked. We all know, disgruntled employees can be, especially with social media these days, very vocal and very impactful. And wanting them to be impactful in the best way possible. So, really smart, to hear that you're bringing in more of your line of business leaders, to articulate that value. It just makes perfect sense. >> Yeah, and it's actually broadening the horizon of everybody, because we've told our HR people, you need to be able to talk about our technology and how it enables you to do your best work. And at the same time, through these interactions, our sales teams, who as you said, who come more from a "we understand the technology" background, are learning about all of these different parts of the business, and it's even driving more, closer working relationships within our own organization, as well, so it's benefiting every aspect of what we do. >> I can see that, and also I mean, you know, we talked with so many companies, and I, one of the challenges that they have, that they probably don't even address very often is how many of our people, that work for us, can actually articulate what it is we do? And the impact that we have to customers. The voice of the customer is so potent. We've talked with all three of the Innovation Award finalists, all different industries, but all making huge strides to make that experience for end user employees, and customers, so much better. So even just having those three examples alone. >> Two of them are from Europe, by the way, just to say. >> Yes, yes, Schroders and ZF, we spoke with them, yes. But it's really, I would think a differentiator even from Donna Kimmel's perspective of attracting talent, because people understand and are able to articulate the value, as a Citrix employee, of this is what we do. We use our own stuff, and let me tell you how much more efficient and easy it's made my life. >> And we've also done something else as well, which is now whenever we come up with a new offering in the market, or a new capability in our product, we actually now ask our teams to certify themselves, that they can tell the story. And what we do is we say, you get one of your colleagues to certify. So you go, and you pitch the story to your employee and if they said it's good enough, then you'll get certified and that's becoming a requirement. So we are doing so many things to make sure that everybody in the business is capable of telling, of telling the story. And articulating it from a customer perspective, not from a Citrix out perspective. >> I think we've definitely heard that articulated very well over the last few days. Sherif, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Very cool that two of those three finalists are from EMEA. >> We are very excited about that. >> We'll be excited to hear tomorrow, who the winner is. >> Looking forward to that. Thank you very much for your time. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.

(energetic technological music) >> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're in Atlanta, Georgia welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Lee Doyle, Principal Analyst at Doyle Research. Lee, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thanks, for having me. >> So we were chatting away all day yesterday with Citrix execs and analysts. We talked to one of their customers from the Miami Marlins. Excited about day two today. We talked a lot about some of the key tenets that Citrix addressed yesterday: digital workspace, the intelligent experience, analytics, security. We want to talk about networking with you. I was looking at a stat the other day that said over 80% of businesses believe the ability to migrate apps to the cloud is hindered by network infrastructure complexity. Talk to us about that and what Citrix is doing to help reduce that complexity. >> Sure. So we're now in an environment where data is everywhere, employees are everywhere, partners are everywhere, data is flowing. You're going to be using in-house applications. You're using SaaS-based applications. You're using applications on AWS or Azure or Google, and there's no good control of that information, but there also isn't a good way necessarily to deliver the appropriate quality of user experience or quality of service that those applications need. So the network, that's where the network sits. It's handling all the traffic. It sees the traffic. It can help with security. So that's why the network becomes so important here. >> So, Lee, SD-WAN has come so far. I remember back when I managed networks and trying to come up with policy-based routing to send voice traffic one way, send, you know, FTP traffic another way, and now we have a robust market. I thought the market would collapse. It's 20 plus, last time I looked, 20 plus significant SD-WAN solutions out in the market. Where is Citrix and the customer mindsets when it comes to SD-WAN? >> Right. So I'll start with SD-WAN and the broad picture which is, you know, SD-WAN is a great technology at the right place, at the right time. It's the example of SDN, broadly, that's had very good adoption. And it solves a real problem, which is that you need to link the user and the application with each other. And that application can be in a variety of places. So you're not, no longer just simply going from the branch via MPLS to the data center. Great, now you're going to Amazon. Now you're going to Salesforce. Now you're going to Microsoft. And the idea of having a hybrid WAN with internet connections, MPLS, 4G LTE, cable, like, whatever you want. So SD-WAN technology sits at that nexus and providing the intelligence and the management and the ease of use to enable the remote workforce in the remote branches. >> So, can you go on a really interesting combination? Identity, Citrix is really into identity management. SD-WAN. What's possible? Talk to us about the "what's possible" when you can tie identity to your network. >> Right. Yeah, so Citrix is a solid SD-WAN supplier. They're able to identify the traffic. They have partnerships with all the major cloud guys. And, one of the critical aspects of SD-WAN is how you tie in the security aspect. So you have network security and partnerships, maybe with a Palo Alto or Zscaler or some other folks, but then you also have the identity because there is no fixed perimeter anymore, right? >> Right. There is no more four walls. >> So, the bad, the bad guys can get access at any different point. So authentication and understanding, you know, that identity is a critical aspect. And Citrix has some excellent partnerships and programs to help that out. >> Especially, >> So, >> I'm sorry. Go ahead. >> Go ahead. >> Especially when you think of Office 365 and these services where, you know, when I think of Office 365 I think about my consumer version of Office 365. I can share data with anyone in the organization. I can access it from anywhere in the world. Right before we started recording, you know, we talked a little bit about the ability of Citrix, with the partnership with Microsoft and Office 365, to improve access to Office 365. When we think about that from a consumer perspective that kind of, you know, it doesn't, it kind of doesn't register. "Wait, I need to. When I use Office 365 it just works." >> Right. >> What are some of the challenges enterprises are facing as they adopt solutions like O 6, O365 and SaaS in general? >> Right. So, you've got the quality of experience, quality of service issue, right? Making sure that the remote user or remote office is hitting the right path on the internet to the right on-ramp, is sort of one aspect of it, right? >> Right. >> So identify that as 0365, get me to the right on-ramp, but have a nice, you know, seamless, quick experience. The other is, from a security standpoint, understanding that, you know, who the user is. What data are they accessing? What data are they sending around? Is that part of the normal behavior or is that something that looks a little strange and maybe we should flag that. I mean, clearly, people do do a lot of sensitive things on Office 365. >> When you're out in the field, Lee, talking with customers, you have to transform digitally. There's so many steps involved in that. We, you know, we talk about cultural transformation and security transformation. Network transformation. How do you advise, especially like, we'll say, legacy organizations. Maybe like a peer of Citrix's whose been around for decades. How do you advise them to start that network transformation process so that they can deliver, for example, you know, facilitate collaboration via 0365 globally, what is that process like to transform a network? >> Right. It's obviously very complex and highly dependent on where you are and where you're starting, but there's no question that these organization are not going to throw the network that they have today. They've got switches and routers, wifi, and applications over controllers and all sorts of different things. So, one of the reasons why SD-WAN has been successful is it's able to slide into the network relatively seamlessly as an overlay. So you don't have to rip and replace. And then, gradually, as you bring up new sites or small locations or temporary sites, you may find that the actual router isn't as important over time. And then you can start to evolve that to a more simplified branch network operation. Instead of having five different boxes at a given branch you can move to two or three and, you know, ultimately I think we're going to a more unified SD branch type solution, but that might be a few years out still. >> So, and as we talk, you know, kind of the few years out, one of the great benefits, productivity wise, from using the SaaS services, destroying the walls, so to speak, the perimeter, is that we can get frictionless transactions. The, Citrix is, you know, touting the employee experience. If I need to share a document with you that shouldn't there shouldn't be a ton of friction in that. But in that comes the, the scare of employees. We've been talking all week, or both days, about employees are the weak link in security. If I can't trust my employee to not have their post-it note with the password on their, on their monitor then all the security in the world can't, won't help. How is Citrix making security easier and frictionless so that, one, we're ensuring all Dr. Albright talked about, "We need to be able to trust who we're talking to." >> Right. >> So, at the beginning we need to be able to trust who we're talking to is actually who we intend to talk to. How is Citrix going about enabling that? >> Right. So, it goes back to, you know, identity and end-point management. Is that the device that we expect it to be? Is it the person that we expect it to be? Are they doing the things that they normally do, right? And then, you have the network can analyze, "Well, is that a strange traffic? Is there something being inserted? Is there malware? Is there an attack?" So you have, security can not only degrade the performance of the network, but it also can be used to take out data that you don't want to have leaving the premises as it were. So, >> Or even if the data hasn't been opened and peeked at. >> Right. >> So, you know, the SSL security keys that when it left the premises the same as the when it was received on the other end. Are those things still in tact? >> Right. Very complex, though. But, it's not a, >> Yeah. >> Now, we haven't solved the security problem yet. But, Citrix is certainly making some good headway. >> I wanted to get your opinion, speaking of Citrix and headway. As I mentioned, 30-year-old company, maybe they consider themselves 30-years-young. I noticed last year at Synergy 2018 rebranding, messaging changes, positioning. One of the first things David Henshall showed the audience yesterday in his keynote was a big, great eye chart that just showed how much they've been focused on delivering. And they've delivered new solutions faster than they ever have before. We're hearing now about, they've really elevated their technologies to not be for power users, but for the general user which is most of us. I'd love to get your, your perspective on, not just the last year of Citrix's evolution, but over the last few years and how you think their, where they are now, is a competitive advantage to their business. >> Right. So, I focus mostly on the networking side of what Citrix is doing. And they've rebranded the networking. They've made some very significant enhancements both in SD-WAN and the ADC and intelligent traffic management. And I think the next evolution for Citrix is really integrating these solutions together and, you know, moving even to, to easier to consume bundles. They, what they've done in the last, in this cycle of announcement is given a lot of different options in terms of ways to consume. You can consume it on the major cloud platforms. You can consume it as a box. You can consume it as a license or as a usage-based. Over time I'm interested to see how Citrix migrates to more network-as-a-service offerings which would make it even easier to consume. And, you know, as a workspace user you, that, those tools might be in the background. You might not even know that they exist. And in some cases that's already here today, but there's a lot more that the industry and Citrix can do there. >> Do they have the foundation to eventually get to network-as-a-service? Maybe the right ecosystem of partners to do that, in your opinion? >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's the, that's where they're headed and I think they have some good technology, and good partners, and obviously always more work to do. But, >> So as you talk to combine Citrix and your own customers, I would like to get some insights. That, we, we've heard several times over the past couple days, me and Lisa, that there's five generations of workforce in the workforce. Which also means there's five generations of leadership. So when I saw the stat in yesterday's show, when all the changes that happened in a year at Citrix, one part of me was like, "Oh, that's great. That's the consumerization of IT, enterprise IT." Then another part of me was like, "Whoa, that's a lot of change." You know, if I set up a, if I spent a year and a half, two years deploying a network, I want that network to be very stable for the next five to seven years. How have customers embraced the consumerization, or the pace of change inside of Citrix and in the industry as well? >> Sure. So, I think the network issue a little bit separate because it's not at really consumerization of the network, right? >> Right. >> And so that's still, you know, you still need network professionals and, that being said, you know, Citrix SD-WAN is very easy to install and, you know, has good operational tools and, you know, improved management. So you're network management is now back in vogue and making it, you know, making life easier for IT administrators. You know, the whole consumerization, I mean, that's just like there's so many tools and so many channels. And, you know, the the issue of being overwhelmed by the seven different ways that we might communicate with each other is a very real, you know, challenge. And I'm glad to see Citrix, you know, addressing that because each generation or types of will have their own favorite, you know, ways to go about it. >> Oh, yes. Even, you can think about it in your family. Somebody might be an email person. Somebody might be a text person. Somebody might be a WhatsApp person. It's hard enough to manage, to try to meet everybody. So somebody might be a phone person? >> I know, like, real-time >> Who talks on the phone? Voicemail? >> Real-time communication. >> Right. Creepy. But in terms of, you're saying you know that we talked about consumerization, and not consumerization of the network. But those network expert that you talked about are influenced as consumers at home. And we all as consumers have these expectations of everything on-demand. I want to be able to use the tools that I'm most familiar with to become the most productive. So, how are the network engineers and their own consent of consumerization potentially going to impact consumerization of the network? >> Right. I mean I really look at the, you know, the two things of, you know, is the network, is my application available and is it responsive, right? Obviously the first one's a deal breaker. The second one is incredibly frustrating. And then of course the third area from an IT or SecOps standpoint is, you know, is it secure? Right? And then, you know, from an IT or network professional I need to enable those things so give me more tools. So, I mean I think that the buzzwords of, you know, machine learning and artificial intelligence as applied to networking are still a little early for that. But there are, you know, Citrix is using, you know, its vast intelligence that it gathers through its traffic management system to to look at, you know, where where to best route the traffic. It's deploying new tools to make things easier to deploy and easier to troubleshoot. So anything that the industry and Citrix can do there makes the life easier for the network guy and the IT guys. >> Making life easier. I think that's what we all want, right? >> Right. >> Well, Lee, thank you so much for coming back to theCUBE and talking with Keith and me at Citrix Synergy. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Atlanta, Georgia, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (energetic technological music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni to the program today, Marybel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Maribel, great to have you back! >> I'm excited to be here, excited to be at Synergy! >> This has been a great day, the keynotes kicked off this morning, with really strong messaging around digital workspace, they gave so many stats that I think all of us can understand and digest. One of the things they talked about was, by 2020, which is a few months away, as frightening as that is, 50% of the work force is going to be mobile, we also know that this modern work force has five different generations of varying technology expertise, but one of the things that Keith and I, really struck us this morning was that, I think it was David Henshall that shared a number of seven trillion dollars is wasted every year on lack of output because the employee experiences are challenging and, if employees aren't satisfied and happy, talent attraction retention, out the window. So the future of work really is dramatically changing. Your thoughts on that. You did a lot of research on that, and the employee experience as a catalyst for digital transformation. >> Well I think if we step back and look at where technology's gone, we spend a lot of time just deploying technology, trying to digitize the business, right? That was the digital transformation, and you have to ask yourself what's next, and I think what we've seen is that, on the consumer side, we've seen this whole consumerization of technology, and when you're at home, you've great services. David Henshall actually talked about what you could do as a consumer versus what you can do as an employee. You know, my personal perspective is employees are people too, there's no reason why you need to go to the office, and you shouldn't have a good quality experience. But I think we've spent so much of our journey looking backward, like, okay, we have to take these things we had before and replicate them in the new world, and now I think we're moving with digital workspaces forward, what does it look like to work in 2020 and beyond? So I'm excited about that, 'cause I think it changes how we view it, to being about what should the process be? >> I'm always surprised, whenever I talk to a security professional, and I walk to them and I say, you know what, this customer wants to transfer data from one research institute to another one, what hoops do we have to jump through? >> Right, yeah. >> I'm surprised when they say, none, just have them do it. That is a very forward-thinking organization that's thought through this process. But not every organization has done it. What did you hear, either today on stage, or during your experience working with Citrix, that is reducing that friction between kind of the need for security and the need for frictionless work? If I need to share a file with a community group that I'm working on I just jump on Google or whatever and do it. What is Citrix doing that you've seen to enable that type of frictionless employee experience? >> Okay, so I'd say the first thing that's happened is that technology used to be in these really discrete silos, and you as an organization had to be a systems integrator to make that happen, to make it so you could seamlessly share the files, you had to figure out their identity service, your identity service, permissioning inducts, you had to have similar technologies. I think what companies like Citrix are trying to do is take all that process out, do all that systems integration for you and to actually wrap a layer of security around it at the outset, as opposed to trying to retrofit the security at the back end of it, which is typically what we've done. And so now, you're not trying to figure out how do I macgyver five tools together to make this happen with duct tape and sticky glue, you're basically doing things like saying, I already have a security framework in it, I have to select how much or how little security I want, but all the rest of it, it's baked in, I can just roll it out and have it happen. >> The people element though, when we talk about security, we know that people are the number one biggest threat >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Where security is concerned. >> They'll go around the process. >> Or just take my password. >> Yeah. >> Exactly! >> Or it's written down on that sticky note that MacGyver is going to use to engineer the software. Where do you think Citrix is, in what they talked about today, what digital workspace, security, analytics, in enabling the employee experience to be done in a secure fashion, especially as there's so much distribution of workloads, people, businesses, applications? >> So security has always been a multilayered problem, but the problem that's been the weakest link has been the end user, because you decided that you needed to have a 13-character alphanumeric special characters only these five kind of password environment that changes every 90 days or for different different things, right? Where I think we're moving now, the whole Citrix story around this federated identity, whatever identity tools you're using, you can use those, we'll make that happen, you can get to a point where it's single sign on, you can get to a point where it's multi-factor authentication, where it's a thumb print or a passcode or, you know, choose your own adventure as an organization around how many of these you want. But it means that I as Maribel don't have to memorize 15 different things, which doesn't happen, I write them down, I put them on sticky notes, it's in my desk drawer, right? So, rather than do that, we get to a much more unified environment of I remember one thing, and it allows me access to say, the 500 apps I might have in the organization, 'cause you've found a way to authenticate me in a way that is seamless but also meaningful and secure. >> So, when I'm onsite with another employee I can simply take these devices I can flip that over, grab a pianist, start collaborating with my coworker, that's how ideas are formed. Talk to us about the importance of the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft with the team solution. We are taking this DM-IM tool, marrying it with Office three 65 products and then putting collaboration around that. Where's the value Citrix is bringing to that collaboration? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple of pieces of value that Citrix brings to the collaboration. One is this concept of contact switching, like how many tools do you want to go to, to figure out what's going on, right? Some people are in this type of messaging, some people are in teams, some people are in emails, some people are in some other social network, right, there's about eight or nine different places any given person could be, or be doing work with somebody because we all have preferences, right, so the question is, if you're someone like Citrix, how do you help somebody unify that, in a way that they can see all of their different touch points, and teams has becoming and increasingly growing part of that touch point community, right, people like that instant on access to other individuals, right, it's become part of our nature in consumers, it's now part Of our nature in business. But that doesn't mean that you might also not want to be looking at your Outlook email. It doesn't mean that there might be something that's in Sales Force that you also need to be cognizant of. So what you look at someone like Citrix is doing, is helping you unify that with the tools you already have, so you can leverage the best of all of them, but they are not so disparate that you can't figure out what's going on. >> When you're having conversations with customers in different industries, where is the employee experience and the intelligence needed to drive a really solid employee experience, where is that in terms of a C Suite imperative? >> So if you asked me that a year ago, I would say it wasn't as high on the list as it is today. I think what's happened in the past year is that, we did a survey actually, and 78% of the C Suite put it in the top three for their list of imperatives. Security actually being obviously one of the key issues of our generation it seems. But in addition to that, people really get now that talent is the competitive differentiation, so employee experience is related to talent, and employee experience is actually many things. You can define it extremely broadly, from the time that you are engaging with a prospect all the way though the time that they become an alumni of the corporation. So employee experience isn't this one-and-done bounded thing, it's not just when you're an employee, it's not just when you're in recruiting, but in general, corporations really get this, and now they're looking for a way to make this happen. And I think there's lots of ways we can make this happen. One of the biggest things that I think is happening is the concept of not just redoing our old experiences, but looking at what work should look like today, and that's what are the devices that they're using, are they owned devices or not, what their physical workspaces look like, how you integrate technology and buildings, what does your digital workspace look like. And not just for employees, but we also have this new gig economy that we're looking at as well, so if you really want talent, part of the employee experience might be that they are only going to be an employee for three month, how do you make sure you get them on board day one? That they can do their job effectively with all the tools that they need? And then when it's time for them to leave, you can turn them off so they can secure your data and content, and be really confident that they didn't take the keys to the kingdom with them, right? So I think that employee experience is a critical board-level topic and I think the biggest challenge now is figuring out how do we define that and what tools do we need in the organization to make that happen. >> So, as I look at this alumni network, married with the gig economy, I'm a former PWC guy, they constantly send me opportunities, like, sure, you don't want to come back and get burnt out again, but there's always opportunities to come back and do... >> Maribel: Project day >> Projects, as talent gets, in my opinion, more and more scarce, especially specialized talent around AI, machine learning, application development, process automation, et cetera, there's going to be a need to go out and extend your search for folks around the globe to do that work. When you think about partnerships and whether it's technology partnerships, partnerships with staffing companies, partnerships with social media, what are some of the trends that are kind of arranging or emerging as companies look to globalize their work force? >> Well I think that you picked up on one of them. Well if I step back for a second, I'd say we have to think of location independence. So a huge trend, particularly in large metros, where talent is very competitive, as people start to think more broadly about are there new locations that we want to create new offices in? If there aren't new locations, are there just easier ways to create a remote work environment where people can work at home? And there's two types of remote work. There's remote work like, I want to work at home maybe two days a week because the commute is terrible, or there's remote work like, I never go to an office, and both of those have to be first-class citizens, and both of them also have to foster a sense of community, because part of the challenge around that is what we call the water cooler problem. How do you give people enough technology that they feel like they're almost in the room with people, that they have the right access to people and information, wherever they are, and that they are part of an environment and a culture, because I think that's really important. So we're seeing location independence being one of the huge trends we're looking at. We're also seeing that trend of they can come and they can go, they might be what I call the part-time employee trend. We're also seeing a trend of use the tool you want. There are many ways you can get a job done. You might be a PC, a Mac, a Surface person. You might want to use big phones, small phones. All these things don't necessarily need be company-owned as well, so how do you get people the tools they want? People are very specific about what collaboration suites they want, what document storage they want, what SAS applications they want, and teams will pick these types of things. So it's really important when people are building the next generation of technology that they allow enough flexibility for choice, so that you can actually say, okay, you want to to use these devices, you want to use these SAS apps, we can find a way to manage and secure that and let you work the way you want to work, because that's attractive to you and that will keep you employed with us. >> When you're having those conversations with businesses about the location independence, which I fully support, I've been doing it for a long time, there's a cultural impact there, whether it's a start-up that has been around for five years, or a legacy corporation like Citrix that's been around for 30. How often does that cultural transformation come up in your customer conversations? And, similar to my question about where employee experience is within the C Suite, are you seeing cultural transformation also elevate to, hey, in order to be really competitive and really successful we've got to modify our culture, maybe to embrace, not just for technologies, but these different ways of working? >> So I've been talking to a lot of organizations about what does the concept of diversity mean, and diversity means a lot of different things. Diversity means diversity of geography, diversity means diversity of opinions, diversity means diversity of technology. It is changing the way you think about culture from being everybody has to be in the building. It's also diversity in terms of how you evaluate an employee's worth. So one of the big cultural changes that people have been talking about is, they felt it was easier when you were sitting in a building from nine to five to know that you were working and now people are working many different hours and many different geographies, and I think the big rethink for organizations is what is the value that you're bringing, and what are the metrics that you're impacting, and how do I focus on that, as opposed to you worked 3.2 hours today because your VPN connection said so. That thinking has to go away. It has to be moved into a meritocracy, but it also has to be very much structured of like we really need to know what we're trying to do and trying to accomplish, so we can create the right goals for our employees, and I think that that concept of going from I saw you therefore you must be working, to you impacted our net promoter score, you impacted sales, something that you can say, this was the business value of employees, so that they feel that they have worth and you understand their worth, is actually a real big change in the future work that's not about the technology, technology can enable you to get there, but it's really about a rethink of how we do business. >> Oh, exciting, I wish we had more time but Maribel thank you for joining Keith and me and sharing your insights and educating us, even on the different ways of looking at diversity, so interesting, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy day one from Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering CITRIX Synergy, Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by: CITRIX. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend coming to you live from Atlanta Georgia, our first day of coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I are very pleased to welcome you to theCUBE. For the first time, Bob O'Donnell, the founder and president of Technalysis. Bob, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Great to be here I really appreciate it. It's my first chance to do theCUBE. It's exciting. >> We're so excited because you are no stranger to TV. Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, Squawk Box, now theCUBE! >> Bob: And the now theCUBE! >> Keith: Most importantly- >> Bob: It completes the circle. >> He's a friend of Leo Laporte, which makes him a super star. >> All: (laughing) >> Well there you go. >> We're sitting in the presence of greatness. >> Oh, I don't know about that. But anyway, no, it's a pleasure to be here and it's nice to chat with you guys. It's a very interesting time that we're in. I mean, when we think about what's happening in the world. For years we've seen this move to cloud-based computing, and SaaS, and everything else. And everybody's excited about all of this stuff, and there's all these tools. And then on top of that, we thought, we have all these devices, right? We've got this amazing range of different devices we can use. But ironically, what it is, is we're in a state of too much of a good thing. It's too much. Even though if you think about it, you'd say, "Well, objectively, there's so much that "we could potentially do here. "I mean, we've got these tools that can do "this and this and this." But all of a sudden, "Well, except I got this one and this one, and this one. "And oh, by the way, if I want to send a message, "I can send it five different ways to Sunday, "and therefore if I want to read a message, "I have to be able to read it "five different ways from Sunday." And so, the challenge that you face is, and Citrix talked about it, I thought, quite nicely in their keynote this morning, is people get overwhelmed. And they just can't get productive with what they're trying to do. And so, what you need to do it figure out ways to turn that chaos into structure and order. And that's what they're trying to do with the workspace. And it looks pretty cool. >> Yeah, one of the offline conversations I had was you get all these tools. It's like somebody took a box of 10,000 Legos and just jumped it on your desk and said, "Build a masterpiece." And what I head this morning was the equivalent of what was like a Star Wars kid of like, "This is what you can build. Here's the directions, "and now you can start to deviate and customize it "for your environment." So one of the things that I'd love to get your input on is this concept of AI ML. This ideal of taking tasks and automating them. It's nothing new. We've tried this with macros and other areas. But the thing that was missing was, these tools were pretty dumb. >> Bob: Right. So the promise of ML AI should make these tools become real. What's your impression of the state of the technology versus what was presented today. >> Well, look, we're in very early days of AI and ML. There are some fascinating things out there. There's a lot of the high profile things that we hear about. The ImageNet and the ability to recognize every kind of dog known to mankind, and all the demos we've all seen at every other trade show. It really is, the fascinating part, exactly, to your point, is that the goal with AI and machine learning is to actually makes things understand. And it's fascinating because... I'll take a bit of a sidetrack but bring it back. When devices started to be able to recognize our words, we assumed, because we're human beings, that they recognized what we meant. But, no. There's a big jump between the words that you can transcribe, and what you actually mean. >> Yeah. That context. >> Context is everything. And context is something that, again as human beings, we take it for granted. But you can't take that for granted when it comes to technology and products. So, the beauty of AI as it starts to get deployed is how do we get the context around what it is that we're trying to do, what we meant to say. Of course, we all want that in real life: "What I meant to say was..." But, "what I meant to do was this." Or, "the task I want to do is that." So, taking that back to what Citrix is talking about is there are a lot of rote procedural things that people do in most organizations. And they gave the classic examples of proving the expense reports and this and that. So, clearly, some of those things they can pre-build. The micro apps, in a lot of ways, they really are macros. It's kind of a fancy macro. And that's fine, but the question is are they smart enough to kind of deviate, "Oh, well, there's a conditional branch "that it automatically builds in a macro "that I didn't have to think about "because it realizes in the context of what I'm doing "that it means something else." Or something like that. >> At the end of the day, I want to get the account balance, however that translates. As opposed to: take this column from row A and put it in row B. No, sometimes row A won't be the correct destination. I want the account balance. >> Right, right. >> And the other truth of the matter is we're still getting used to actually talking to our devices. We do that at home to some degree for people who have Alexas, unless they've decided to stop recording everything, and then that's a whole different subject. But, at work we don't. Interestingly, I remember when I first saw Cortana, for example, on a Windows machine. I thought, in a weird way, Cortana makes more sense because I should want... But it hasn't really happened. It hasn't played out. So there's some level of discomfort of talking to our devices and recognizing these things. So, I think there are cultural issues you still have to overcome. There are physical issues in the workplace, now. Now, when you have these open office environments, which doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that that was going to be a disaster. Whoever thought that was smart, man, let's take a look at where their degree came from. But that's the reality that people are in. So, you've got the physical environment challenges. You've got the cultural "how do I work with this?" environment. And then just starting to realize what it can actually do. And then, of course, you have the problem that it didn't recognize what it actually said. That's something stupid, and the original Siri problems that we all had. But, all of these things tie together because they're all different takes on what machine learning has the potential to do and what we think it should do, and what it can actually do. The one thing I will say is as we head towards 2020, I think we're going to start to finally see some of these things do what we thought they were going to do. They're going to start to have the context. They're going to start to have the intelligence. So, in the work space, it's going to have the ability to know what I mean when I say, "I need the account balance." Or, "I need to know where in the sales pipeline "this particular project is," or whatever task it is that I've got to deal with. And so, understanding that and then building the plumbing to do that is critical. One of the interesting things, if you look at what Citrix does, they're really all about plumbing. They have this ability to pull together all these different elements. From the beginning, what we started talking about. All these different applications over different types of network speeds and connections and make them all work. And yet, they present this very simplified, beautiful, nice little, you're like, "oh, this is great!" But, man, buried beneath there is a lot of stuff. And that's, to give them credit, that's what they're really good at doing. And companies now, the challenge is, a lot of companies have really old applications that they've got to kind of modernize in some way shape or form. And some of them are doing it on their own. They're doing the containerization and all the things we hear about as well. Some of them are wrapping them. Citrix, some of their original business, XenApp, was about app virtualization. Taking an old app and giving access in a modern way. So, again, it's doing that, but the other problem you have to bear in mind, excuse me, is that every company has a different combination of apps. They said 500 apps is normal. A lot of companies have more than that. >> Keith: Mhm. (affirmative) >> The problem is, it's not the same five hundred apps. This company has this set of 500 apps. This company has this set of 500 apps. This company has this set of 500 apps, and maybe 150 of them overlap, which means the long tail of 350 per company has to be dealt with and figured out. And that's, again, those are the problems that they're trying to solve and bring in to a unified environment. >> And also manage these growing expectations that all of us that are workers have from the consumer side of our lives. You mentioned Alexa and Siri, and we have these growing experiences that whether I'm talking to a device or I'm going on Amazon, I want it to know what I want. Don't show me something I've already purchased. And we have these expectations as humans and consumers that we want the apps when we get to work to understand the context and of course, we're asking a lot. In your opinion, where is Citrix in starting to help manage, helping their customers, rather, manage those growing expectations? >> I think Citrix has done a lot in that area. Even many, many years ago they were the first to come up with the notion of an enterprise app store. In the early days of the app store, they came out with this concept of, "We want to do an enterprise equivalent of that." When I download an app that I need to install on a work PC, make it easy to get at. So, from way back when they've been building on that. And then, the examples they gave today, the notification from the airline that your flight has changed, or whatever. Those are all the experiences that we're now used to thanks to cloud-based services. And their point is like, "Hey, why shouldn't we "have that at work, as well?" And so that's exactly what they're trying to work towards, is that notion of cloud-based notifications and services, and things, but related to the specific tasks I have to do. Because at the end of the day, they want to drive productivity. Because we all waste stupid amounts of time, and truth be told, the bigger the company you're at, the more time you waste because of just keeping up. I used to work at a big research firm of 1200 people, and literally half my day, every day, was just procedural stuff. I didn't actually work on the stuff that I thought I was hired to do, except for maybe half the day. And with a lot of people, that's very common. So, anything that can be done to reduce that and allow people to get through the procedural stuff a little bit more efficiently, and then actually let them do the work that they were hired to do and that they'd like to do, and oh, by the way, gives them more satisfaction. All of these things tie together. People tend to say, "Oh well, you know, "that's nice to do, this consumerization of IT, "that's nice." It's not just nice. It's actually practical. It's actually a real productivity enhancing capability. And I think Citrix has done an excellent job of driving that message. It's hard to to do because, again, the complexity of the plumbing necessary is super difficult. But their head and their heart are in the right place in terms of trying to achieve that. >> Well, it sounds absolutely like not a "nice to have," but business-critical. One of the stats that David Henshall, their CEO, said this morning, and Keith's been mentioning a number of times, is that he said there's 7 trillion dollars wasted on output because employees are not able to get to their functions that they were hired for in a timely manner. >> Right. >> So, there's a huge addressable market there of opportunity but also the consumerization that's personalization expectation is huge to not just making me, Lisa Martin, as an employee happy, but my business's customers that I'm dealing with. I think of a sales person, or even a call center support person. If they don't have access to that information, "She already called in about this problem 'with her cable ISP," that person is going to go turn, and go find another option that's going to fulfill their needs much better. >> That's absolutely right. And that was the interesting point that they made. And that's what they're trying to do with the intelligent work space is to move beyond just providing these apps, but actually personalizing it to each individual and being able to say, "All right, each of us are going to have a workspace." Sort of, it looks kind of like a news feed kind of a thing. Each one is going to be different though, based upon, obviously, the different tasks that we do, the order with which we do them, the manner with which we do them." So it does get personalized. The notifications, you know, I may want certain notifications that you don't really care about as much. But that's fine. We can each create that level of personalization and customization. And again, what Citrix is trying to do, and it was a key point that P.J. made, is, "Look, we're not just building an application. "We're building a platform." And that's... The significance of that is big. And remember, he came from Microsoft. He worked on Windows. He worked on Office. So, he's got a long history of working on building platform based tools that have tools that you can build on. That have APIs and ways for other people to add to. So, all of those are critical parts of how they tell that story, and how they get people enthralled enough to say, "Hey, I'm going to make the commitment to do it." Because look, it's a lot of work. Let's not kid ourselves. If I'm not a Citrix shop, but I go, "Damn, that's cool!" There's a fair amount of effort to make all this stuff actually happen. So, it's a commitment. But, once they get them hooked it's a pretty sticky type of environment. Especially as they continue to deliver value and personalization and customization. That, at the end of the day, drives productivity. And that's a pretty straight forward message: "Hey, we can save your workers time "and make them happier." Well, who doesn't want that, right? >> So, let's talk about engaging your customers. Like, I can look at this, and I can easily, say I can come to a conference like this and say, "Wow, I really want the output. I don't want "any of that employee experience stuff. "That stuff just sounds hard, "but the output I definitely want." Talk to me about the evolution of your customers as you walk them through if you want the output, here's what you have to do. And talk to me about, specifically, the success stories of where they didn't get it, and then after you've engaged them, they got it. >> Well, there's so many different variations out there. But, at the end of the day, every company out there is dealing with the fact that they have workers that work in a lot of places on a lot of devices and they have to allow them to get stuff done. And so, it's about how much are they willing to do to make that happen? But there's the psychology of it. There is the whole, "how much of this am I willing to outsource?" Versus, "I really want to keep it inside." So, it depends on the industry and the level of if they are a regulated industry, and all those things have an enormous impact on how they do this. But, if you think back, Citrix's original business was, a lot of it, was again, around desktop virtualization, and actually trying to get really old school stuff, I'm taking mainframe green screen stuff, to actually run on an old Windows PC. And that was kind of a lot of what they did, initially. And then, of course, they've built on from there. So, all along the way, you see different organizations. Citrix has been thought of more as more of the old school kind of enterprise software. Along with an SAP or an Oracle so something like that. I think they've done a particularly good job of being cloud native, cloud aware, and working with these cloud-based tools. Because early on, when we think about what happened with SaaS applications, people thought that was going to dramatically change how anybody did software. And it did, but not in the way people expected. So, I'm trying to get an answer, specifically, to your question, but I think what it is is what they're doing, and what companies who deploy it find is that they can take even these completely different types of software and services, and ServiceNow, and Salesforce, and Workday, and all these kinds of things that are dramatically different, but still, again, have overlapping functionality if I use all of them, and conflict or counteract or interact, or need to interact with other tools I already have that I'm working to change. So, again, what I think that what Citrix has done a good job is they're able to look at the wide range of stuff that people have in that 500 group of apps, or whatever it is, and be able to say, "All right, ten of those are cloud-based services. "But we've got 490 other ones we've got to deal with." And they have different levels of technologies to deal with those. So, what companies can do is they can also pick and choose. They can say, "Look, we're not going to get all 500 apps in our workspace." Maybe they just decide, "But we're going to do these twelve, "five of which are SaaS-based, "and then we've got a couple other critical ones "that we have to do, and that hits 80% of our workers." And they can tackle it that way. So, the bottom line is companies who... Look, it's a big investment up front. So the process is you have to psychologically say, "I'm willing to make an investment in," not obviously, just now, but their roadmap. What they're doing. What they're talking about. That's why they talk a lot about the future because if I buy into this ecosystem, I'm committed. Right? Again, I talking about that earlier: The stickiness question. So, companies who are doing this kind of thing, companies who are trying to make sense of all these applications have to be willing to make those big investments. It used to be, it used to have a huge Citrix server farms, as well. Obviously, with the development of the Cloud and Citrix Cloud, that's all changed. But, it's still a big investment, and they have to work to figure out ways to do this. And if they do, to finally get to, you know, they do see productivity savings. I mean, Citrix is, I don't remember the numbers, but they can qualify actual time saved when their solutions are installed, and that's the benefits that these companies get. So, they have to measure how much is my employee time worth versus the cost of getting these things deployed? >> Well, and I think that's going to be a differentiator for them. I wish we had more time because we could keep talking to you for a long time, but you got to add theCUBE to your list of TV: Bloomberg, CNBC, >> Bob: It's all there. Hey, I'm excited. >> Squawk Box, Now, theCUBE. Bob, it has been such a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much. Appreciate being here, thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from CITRIX Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

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