(upbeat theme music plays) >> 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, and we are live in Atlanta, Georgia for Citrix Synergy, 2019. We are pleased to welcome Jack Gold to The Cube, President and founder of Jack Gold & Associates. Jack, it's great to have you join Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, we had a great day. We've talked to eight or nine folks or so, lot's of really relevant exciting news from Citrix this morning. Talking about the employee experience as, and how I kind of interpreted it, as a catalyst for digital transformation, cultural transformation. You've been working with Citrix for a long time. I'd love to get your perspective on not just what you heard today from Citrix, and with Google and Microsoft, but in the last year or so since they've really kind of done a re-brand effort. What're your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, it's interesting from a Citrix perspective. Citrix, the old Citrix I guess I would put in quotes right, was always known as the VDI company. I've got, you know, the screen that will talk to the server, that will talk to whatever other apps I need it to talk to, and I can have a nice thin client sitting on my desktop and I don't have to spend a lot of money. And I also don't have to worry about if I'm going to bank people stealing stuff off the hard drive, or whatever. They've made a pretty significant transition that was the old work space, if you will. The modern work spaces which is where Citrix is really moving is one where, look we've all grown up with smart phones for the last ten or fifteen years, our kids don't know anything different. They're not going to deal with anything that's complex, anything where I have to log in and out of applications, anything where I have to switch between screens, this just doesn't make any sense for them. And so, what we're seeing Citrix do is move into an environment where, as I said, it's about the modern workspace, it's about being able to help me do my job not getting in my way of me doing my job, and that's really the transition. It's not just Citrix, the industry is moving in that direction as well, but Citrix is really at the forefront of making a lot of that work now. >> So, Jack, talk to us about the new promise of the new Citrix. The, if you remember me, it had to have be about seven years ago, I did a blog post of running Windows XP on your iPad. It was taking, you know, the then desktop solution and running it on your iPad. >> (Jack) Sure. >> And it was a cool trick. But we talked about, today, we would hope by today, that mobile technology would of forced companies to rewrite applications, for a mobile first experience. But that simply hasn't happened. So, presenting a bad application on to a mobile dot, to a mobile work station, or a mobile device, doesn't work. We end up packing in, trying it, and squeezing, and trying to get our work done, how is Citrix promising to change that experience, even versus their competitors? >> Sure. Well, first of all so two bad's don't make a good. Right. Having a bad app on a bad device doesn't make it good. >> (Keith) Right. >> Doesn't make it easy to use, doesn't help me get my job done. What we really are talking about, now, is the ability to build a workspace. Something where I sit and look at, that helps me get my job done, as opposed to getting in the way. Which means that, instead of having to punch fourteen different holes, or you know, icons and sit at my keyboard and type forty-eight different commands and do thirty-eight different log-ins as each one is different, and by the way I couldn't remember them so I just called the help desk in-between, and that's another half an hour of my time that I didn't want to, that I wasted. >> (laughs) Give me my word perfect templates. >> (Lisa laughs) >> (Jack) There you go, there you go, word perfect I remember that no so well. I remember it well not so nicely. What we're really trying to focus on now is user experience, right. What we're really trying to focus on is if, if you wanted to get your work done, I want to make it easy. Think about it as going to a grocery store. If you can't, if you've got a list of groceries and you can't find what you want in five minutes, you leave, you go somewhere else. You go to another grocery store where things are much easier to find. It's the same at work, or it should be the same at work. Now, that said, a lot of apps and organizations, especially big enterprises where they have, some can have literally thousands of apps, are not going away. The notion that everything is going to go into the modern workspace, where everything looks like a phone, it's a nice idea, it's properly not going to happen. Legacy apps will be legacy apps for a very long time, it's like mainframes are dead, guess what, they're still around. That said, that doesn't mean that you can't take some of those legacy apps and make them easier to use with the proper front-end. And that's really what Citrix is trying to do with the workspaces, and other's again, it's not just Citrix in this, we have to be fair there are lots people working in this space. But, if you can make the front-end workspace more attractive, easier to use, easier to navigate, even if I've got old, clunky stuff in the background. For me as a user, you can give me back fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes a day, an hour a day, that's really productivity. Look, if you're paying me a hundred dollars an hour, and you save me an hour a day you just made a hundred dollars every day that I'm working at that company, that sounds like a lot, but there are people who make that kind of money. Or even a fifty or twenty-five dollars, it all adds up. And so, what we're really doing is trying to move into an environment where if I can make you more productive but making things more easier for you to navigate, and getting in and our of applications more quickly, getting more information to me more quickly, which makes the overall organization more productive because I'm sharing more information with you, then that's a real win-win, and that's where I think Citrix is really trying to position itself, and doing a fairly good job at doing that. Clearly they don't have all of the components yet, but then no one does. This is an ongoing process. >> So, employee experience is table-stakes for any business, as we look at the modern workforce it's highly disrupted. >> (Jack) Yes. >> It's composed of five different generations. >> (Jack) Yes. >> Who have varying expertise with technology. It is also demanding because we're all consumers. >> (Jack) Yes. >> And so we have this expectation, or this, yeah I'd say expectation that I want to be able to go in and have this personalized experience. I don't want to have to become an expert in sales-force because I might need to understand, can I talk to that costumer and ask them to be a reference? How much time are you going to take? But this personalization is becoming more and more critical as we see this influence from the consumer side. >> Right. >> Were some of the things that you heard today from Citrix, what are your thoughts on how their going to be able to improve that more personalized employee experience? >> So people think of personalization, I think sometimes, too narrowly. For some people personalization is, you know, I've got my phone out, and I have the apps that I want on my phone and that's personalization. I think of it a little bit differently. We need to extend personalization. When I'm at work, what I want is not just the apps I want, clearly I want those, right, but also the ability, to get help with those apps as I need it, right. And so where Citrix is going is trying to put intelligence into the system, so that when I'm interacting with back-end solutions or my neighbors, or with teams collaboration, I get the assistance I need to make it easier for me to do that work. It's not just the apps, it's also help with the apps. And if we can do that, that's really what we want. We go, you know, if I have a problem with my laptop I'm going to come to you and say, hey, you did this yesterday what was the result, can you help me for five minutes? Five minutes is never five minutes, it's usually an hour and a half, but still. I'll come to you. Why can't I have an app on my desk that does the same thing? I'm having trouble. Help me. Fix it. Let me know what I'm doing wrong, or let me know how I can do it better. And that's where Citrix is trying to go with the analytics that they've got in place. Which is huge, I think they're underplaying that, because I think that the whole analytic space in making things easier for people to use, because in understanding where my problems are is huge, and that's going to pick up. The notion of having a nice pretty, pretty may not be the right word, but attractive at least, workspace for me to go in that doesn't get frustrated, frustration is a killer in productivity, as everyone knows. There are examples I've heard multiple people tell me now that they go out and hire, especially with millennials, that go out an hire twenty or thirty new employees, and half of them quit within a week because their systems are so bad that they get so frustrated that they're not going to work there. So, the notion of having a modern workspace where I get the applications that I need, I get the assistance I need, because of the analytics of that backend telling the systems what I need, and making it easier for me to do it. And then allowing me to be productive not just for myself, but for the organization, is where we all need to go and I think that Citrix is making some real progress going that way. >> (Keith) Well Jack, we're talking about products that haven't quite been released yet, so I'm trying to get a sense or, worth's the right built versus buy stage, in complexity Citrix should be? You know, I can make it apple pie by going out and picking the apple. >> (Jack laughs) Right. >> And making my own crust or, I can go buy filling, or I can just go buy any mince pie, stick it in the oven and warm it up. Three very different experiences. Three different layers of investment, and outcomes frankly. In this world, I can go hire application developers to write these many apps, to write these customizations, to write these integrations, but that's, I think that's akin to picking the apple and that just simply doesn't scale. But, also while any mince pie is okay every now and again, I want, you know, something of higher quality. Where do you think Citrix is on the kind of range of built versus buy with this intelligent experience? >> So built versus buy is a very interesting phenomenon. And it's interesting because a lot of it has to do with where you think you are right now in the world, right. You know you mention going out and getting developers and building your own, that's all well and good, it doesn't scale, and by the way in today's market you can't find them to begin with. So you often don't even have a choice. So that's number one. Number two is that there are companies out there that still think for competitive advantage that they have to do everything from scratch, like building your pie. Yes, you probably make the best pie in the world, but guess what, sometimes a good enough pie is good enough. Right, and if you're in business sometimes good enough is the only way you survive. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect, ninety percent's okay too. People can deal with that. So that's the other piece. The third piece of it is, from an end-user perspective, right, if end-users are accustom to having an interaction in a certain way and the you go out and get developers that come in and do it, something completely different, which they're apt to do because each will have their own kind of flavor to it, then you just force them to learn one, two, three, four, five different interface interactions I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get frustrated as heck, and I'm going to go call the help desk or I'm going to go get my app and say go do this for me. Both of which are counterproductive to the company and to me. So, it really depends on where you are in the stage of where your company is, I would say built versus buy it's not a one or a zero. There's lots of shades of gray in between, it's also not all or nothing. So, some applications might be built internally, some you may want to buy externally, some you may have a hybrid, and the nice thing about where workspaces is going now is that you plug all of those into the same environment. That's really the ultimate goal, is to make it as easy and transparent for the organization as possible, and also for the user because the user ultimately is the end consumer. And if it's not good for the end consumer, it's not good for the company either. >> (Lisa) So delivering this great game-changing customer experience for this, as we talked about before this distributed modern work force that wants to be able to access mobile apps, Sass apps. >> (Jack) Right. >> Web apps from tablets, PC, phone, desktop. >> (Jack) Your car, your refrigerator >> Exactly. >> (Jack) Anything with a screen on it. >> Oh yeah, the refrigerators. Wherever you are, I think, okay people >> (Jack) Sure. >> We're people, and we are the biggest single security threat there is. >> (Jack laughs) >> So in your perspective, how is what Citrix is talking about balancing security as an essential component of this employee experience? >> So there are a few things, number one is a lot of companies think that if they limit the end user experience they're more secure. The truth of the matter is, yes, I mean if you don't let me get in to an app I can't steal application or information, or lose it somehow. But I also can't get my work done. So there's a balance between security and privacy which many companies don't talk about which is not exactly the same thing, there are two unique things, more and more privacy is becoming as big or bigger an issue than security, but you know we can get at that in a minute. But, the notion of security really relates to what I was talking about earlier which is analytics. If I know what you're suppose to be doing, you're here at Synergy. If someone just got your credentials and logged in from Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or Denver or wherever, I know it's not you. I can shut that thing down very quickly and not have to worry about them stealing information, also if you're, if I know you're not suppose to be in a certain version of SAP, you're not suppose to be doing some ERP system and you're in it, then again the analytics tells me that there's something going on, there's something anomalous going on that I need to investigate. So, having a system that protects because there's a kind of a front end to everything that's going on in the back end, and a realization of what's going on behind that screen gives me a much higher sense of security from a corporate perspective, it's not perfect there is no such thing as perfect security, but it's a lot better than just letting us kind of do our own thing, and loading, you know, semantic or McAfee or whatever on your PC. And that's where the industry ultimately has to go. That becomes part of the new modern workspace. It's not just about more productive it's about more secure. It's about more private. It's about not letting information escape that shouldn't be there to begin with. >> (Keith) So last question on data grabbing. Because we haven't talked about data and data is, you know, probably the most important thing in this topic. The importance of the (unintelligible) and Google announcement. You know, we, the yottabyte, the first time I've heard that term, yottabye of data that data's going to be spread across the world and this, this ideal of centralized compute and us being able to present, compute into data centers, no longer going to work, that we're going to have to, applications are going to be spread across the world. Where do you Citrix advancing that discipline of providing apps where they need to be with these relationships? >> So, it's an interesting phenomenon what we're going through right now, if you look back a couple of decades ago everything was centralized, people were centralized, they all work in one building, computing was centralized it was all in the data center, IT was centralized, it was all, you know, working around the servers. The Cloud is the opposite direction, although I would argue The Cloud isn't new, The Cloud is just time-share in a different environment, for us old people who remember the old IBM time-share computers. But everything is becoming distributed, data is distributed, people are distributed, applications are distributed, networks are distributed, you name it. The key critical factor for companies in keeping their productivity, keeping up the productivity is to make sure that the distributed environment doesn't get in the way of doing work. So you've got things like latency, if it takes me, if I'm in. (crowd cheers) >> They're having a party behind us. >> No, they agree with you! >> (Jack laughs) Yes, apparently. I, you know, if I'm here at Synergy but I have to work back at my offices near Boston, I can't wait five minutes for information to come back and forth, it's like the old days. Latency now has to be within five microseconds or people get frustrated, so that becomes a network issue, applications, same way, if I have to go to a data center, the data isn't local to my server here, it has to go to London, I'm not going to wait three minutes for it to come back like we use to, or ten minutes or an hour and a half. Or come back the next morning. You know, you want to book a flight on an airline, are you going to wait thirty minutes for them to find you a seat? You're going to go to another airline. So the whole notion of distributed means that it's very different now, even though it's distributed, everything is local. And by local, keeping it local means that you have to have latency below a certain point (crowd cheers) so that I don't realize that it's distributed, or I don't care that it's distributed. Yottabyte's of data means that we're going to have data everywhere, accessible all the time, and we're going to produce data like crazy. You know, a typical car, an autonomous car will produce a gigabyte of data every minute. Hundreds every, you know, hour. So, the amount of data is going to be fantastic that we have to deal with. Then, the big question becomes, okay so, I can't personally deal with all this data, it's impossible, I have to have the assistance, the intelligence within the system to go off and make something of that data so that I can actually interact with it in a meaningful fashion. That's where Citrix would like to go, that's where other's would like to go. They can't do it alone, because the problem is just too darn big. But, it will, we will get there, companies will get there eventually, not all of them perhaps, only the ones that are going to be successful long term are going to get there. >> Well, Jack, I wish we had more time to chat with you. This has, I just feel like going dot, dot, dot, to be continued. And I want to say, coincidence, I don't know, there were two rounds of applause when you talked about latency. (Keith laughs) >> There we go. They're just waiting for the bar to open, it's taking too long. >> (Lisa laughs) You think that's what it is? >> (Jack) Properly. >> All right well we'll get you over there, and thank-you again for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank-you very much. >> (Lisa) Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube live from Citrix Synergy, 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat theme music plays)