(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, remote in Washington, DC, not in Palo Alto, but we're all around the world with theCUBE as we are virtual. We're here recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerating IT modernization) announcements with CUBE alumni Kevin Jackson, Kevin L. Jackson, CEO of GC Global Net. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thank you very much, John. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> It's great to have. You always have great insights. But here, we're recapping the event, Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerator IT modernization). And again, we're seeing this theme constantly now, IT modernization, application modernization. People are now seeing clearly what the pandemic has shown us all that there's a lot of projects that need to be up-leveled or kill. There's a lot of things happening and going on. What's your take of what you heard? >> Well, you know, from a general point of view, organizations can no longer put off this digitalization and the modernization of their IT. Many of these projects have been on a shelf waiting for the right time or, you know, the budget to get right. But when the pandemic hit, everyone found themselves in the virtual world. And one of the most difficult things was how do you make decisions in the virtual world when you can't physically be with someone? How do you have a meeting when you can't shake someone's hand? And they all sort of, you know, stared at each other and virtually, of course, to try to figure this out. And they dusted off all of the technologies they had on the shelf that they were, you know, they were told to use years ago, but just didn't feel that it was right. And now it became necessary. It became the way of life. And the thing that really jumped at me yesterday, well, jumped at me with Launchpad, the Launchpad of the cloud is that Citrix honed in on the key issues with this virtual world. I mean, delivering applications, knowing what the internet state is so that you could select the right sources for information and data. And making security holistic. So you didn't have to, it was no longer sort of this bolted on thing. So, I mean, we are in the virtual world to stay. >> You know, good call out there. Honing in was a good way to put it. One quote I heard from Tim (Minahan) was, you know, he said one thing that's become painfully evident is a lot of companies are going through the pandemic and they're experiencing the criticality of the application experience. And he says, "Application experience is the new currency." Okay, so the pandemic, we all kind of know what's going on there. It's highlighting all the needs. But this idea of an application experience is the new currency is a very interesting comment because, I mean, you nailed it. Everyone's working from home. The whole work is shifting. And the applications, they kind of weren't designed to be this way 100%. >> Right, right. You know, the thing about the old IT was that you would build something and you would deploy it and you would use it for a period of time. You know, a year, two years, three years, and then there would be an upgrade. You would upgrade your hardware, you would upgrade your applications, and then you go through the process again, you know? What was it referred to as, it wasn't modernization, but it was refresh. You know, you would refresh everything. Well today, refresh occurs every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And you don't even know it's occurring. Especially in the application world, right? I think I was looking at something about Chrome, and I think we're at like Chrome 95. It's like Chrome is updated constantly as a regular course of business. So you have to deploy this, understand when it's going to be deployed, and the customers and users, you can't stop their work. So this whole application delivery and security aspect is completely different than before. That's why this, you know, this intent driven solution that Citrix has come up with is so revolutionary. I mean, by being able to know the real business needs and requirements, and then translating them to real policies that can be enforced, you can really, I guess, project the needs, requirement of the organization anywhere in the world immediately with the applications and with this security platform. >> I want to get your reactions to something because that's right on point there, because when we look at the security piece and the applications you see, okay, your mind goes okay, old IT, new IT. Now with cloud, with the pandemic showing that cloud scale matters, a couple themes have come from that used to be inside the ropes concepts. Virtualization, virtual, and automation. Those two concepts are going mainstream because now automation with data and virtual, virtual work, virtual CUBE, I mean, we're doing virtual interviews. Virtualization is coming here. So building on those things. New things are happening around those two concepts. Automation is becoming much more programmable, much more real time, not just repetitive tasks. Virtual is not just doing virtual work from home. It's integrating that virtual experience into other applications. This requires a whole new organizational structure mindset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, one of the things is the whole concept of automation. It used to be a nice to have. Something that you could do maybe to improve your particular process, not all of the processes. And then it became the only way of reacting to reality. Humans, it was no longer possible for humans to recognize a need to change and then execute on that change within the allotted time. So that's why automation became a critical element of every business process. And then it expanded that this automated process needed to be connect and interact with that automated process and the age of the API. And then the organization grew from only relying on itself to relying on its ecosystem. Now an organization had to automate their communications, their integration, the transfer of data and information. So automation is key to business and globalization creates that requirement, or magnifies that requirement. >> One of the things we heard in the event was, obviously Citrix has the experience with virtual apps, virtual desktop, all that stuff, we know that. But as the cloud grows in, they're making a direct statement around Citrix is going to add value on top of the cloud services. Because that's the reality of the hybrid, and now soon to be multi-cloud workflows or architectures. How do you see that evolve? Is that something that's being driven by the cloud or the app experience or both? What's your take on that focus of Citrix taking their concepts and leadership to add value on top of the cloud? >> To be honest, I don't like referring to the cloud. It gives an impression that there's only a single cloud and it's the same no matter what. That couldn't be further from the truth. A typical organization will consume services from three to five cloud service providers. And these providers aren't working with each other. Their services are unique, independent. And it's up to the enterprise to determine which applications and how those applications are presented to their employees. So it's the enterprise that's responsible for the employee experience. Integrating data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider within this automated business process or multiple business processes. So I see Citrix is really helping the enterprise to continually monitor performance from these independent cloud service provider and to optimize that experience. You know, the things like, where is the application being consumed for? What is the latency today on the internet? What type of throughput do I need from cloud service provider A versus cloud service provider B? All of this is continually changing. So the it's the enterprise that needs to constantly monitor the performance degradation and look at outages and all of that. So I think, you know, Citrix is on point by understanding that there's no single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the cloud. It's the real world. >> You know, that's a great call. And I think it's naive for enterprises to think that, you know, Microsoft is sitting there saying hmm, let's figure out a way to really work well with AWS. And vice versa, right? I mean, and you got Google, right? They all have their own specialties. I mean, Amazon web service has got great compliance action going on there. Much back stronger than Microsoft. Microsoft's got much deeper legacy and integration to their base, and Google's doing great with developers. So they're all kind of picking their lanes, but they all exist. So the question in the enterprise is what? Do I, how do I deal with that? And again, this is an opportunity for Citrix, right? So this kind of comes down to the single pane of glass (indistinct) always talks about, or how do I manage this new environment that I need to operate in? Because I will want to take advantage of some of the Google goodness and the Azure and the AWS. But now I got my own on premises. Bare metals grow. You're seeing more bare metal deals going down now because the cloud operations has come on premises. >> Yeah, and in fact, that's hybrid IT, right? I always see that there are an enterprise, when enterprise thinks about modernizing or digitally transforming a business process, you have three options, right? You could put it in your own data center. In fact, building a data center and optimizing a data center for a particular process is the cheapest and most efficient way of executing a business process. But it's only way cheaper and efficient if that process is also stable and consistent. I'll say, but some are like that. But you can also do a managed service provider. But that is a distinctly different approach. And the third option is a cloud service provider. So this is a hybrid IT environment. It's not just cloud. It's sort of, you know, it's not smart to think everything's going to go into the cloud. >> It's distributed computing. We see (indistinct). >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in today's paperless world, don't you still use a pen and paper and pencil? Yes. The right tool for the right job. So it's hybrid IT. Cloud is not always a perfect thing. And that's something that I believe Citrix has looked at. That interface between the enterprise and all of these choices when it comes to delivering applications, delivering the data, integrating that data, and making it secure. >> And I think that's a winning positioning to have this app experience, the currency narrative, because that ultimately is an outcome that you need to win on. And with the cloud and the cloud scale that goes on with all the multiple services now available, the company's business model is app driven, right? That's their application. So I love that, and I love that narrative. Also like this idea of app delivering security. It's kind of in the weeds a little bit, but it highlights this hybrid IT concept you were saying. So I got to ask you as the expert in the industry in this area, you know, as you have intent, what do they call it? Intent driven solution for app delivering security. Self healing, continuous optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The KPIs are changing, right? So I want to get your thoughts on that. Because now, as IT shifts to be much faster, whether it's security teams or IT teams to service that DevOps speed, shifting left everyone talks about, what's the KPIs that are changing? What is the new KPIs that the managers and people can work through as a north star or just tactically? What's your thoughts? >> Well, actually, every KPI has to relate to either the customer experience or the employee experience, and sometimes even more important, your business partner experience. That's the integration of these business processes. And one of the most important aspects that people really don't think about is the API, the application programming interface. You know, you think about software applications and you think about hardware, but how is this hardware deployed? How do you deploy and expand the number of servers based upon more usage from your customer? It's via the API. You manage the customer experience via APIs. You manage your ability to interact with your business partners through the API, their experience. You manage how efficient and effective your employees are through their experience with the IT and the applications through the API. So it's all about that, you know, that experience. Everybody yells customer experience, but it's also your employee experience and your partner experience. So that depends upon this integrated holistic approach to applications and the API security. The web app, the management of bots, and the protection of your APIs. >> Yeah, that really nailed it. I think the position is good. You know, if you can get faster app delivery, keep the security in line, and not bolt it on after the fact and reduce costs, that's a winning formula. And obviously, stitching together the service layer of app and software for all the cloud services is really key. I got to ask you though, Kevin, since you and I have riffed on theCUBE about this before, more importantly now than ever with the pandemic, look at the work edge. People working at home and what's causing the office spaces changing. The entire network architecture. I mean, I was talking to a big enterprise that said, oh yeah, we had, you know, the network for the commercial and the network for dial up now 100% provisioned for everyone at home. The radical change to the structural interface has completely changed the game. What is your view on this? I mean, give us your, where does it go? What happens next? >> So it's not what's next, it's where we are right now. And you need to be able to be, work from anywhere at any time across multiple devices. And on top of that, you have to be able to adapt to constant change in both the devices, the applications, the environment, and a business model. I did a interview with Citrix, actually, from an RV in the middle of a park, right? And it's like, we did video, we did it live. I think it was through LinkedIn live. But I mean, you need to be able to do anything from anywhere. And the enterprise needs to support that business imperative. So I think that's key. It's it's not the future, it's the today. >> I mean, the final question I have for you is, okay, is the frog in the boiling water? At what point does the CIO and the IT leaders, I mean, their minds are probably blown. I can only imagine. The conversations I've been having, it's been, you know, be agile, do it in the cloud, do it at speed, fix the security, programmable infrastructure. What? How fast can I run? This is the management challenge. How are people dealing with this when you talk to them? >> First of all, the IT professional needs to focus on the business needs, the business requirements, the business key performance indicators, not technology, and a business ROI. The CIO has to be right there in the C sweep of understanding what's needed by the business. And there also has to be an expert in being able to translate these business KPIs into IT requirements, all right? And understanding that all of this is going to be within a realm of constant change. So the CIO, the CTO, and the IT professional needs to realize their key deliverable is business performance. >> Kevin, great insight. Loved having you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your time highlighting and recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud announcements. Accelerating IT modernization can't go fast enough. People, they want to go faster. >> Faster, faster, yes. >> So great stuff. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. I really enjoyed it. >> Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back everybody jeff frick here with the cube coming to you from our palo alto studios with a cube conversation with a great influencer we haven't had him on for a while last had him on uh in may i think of 2019 mid 2019. we're excited to welcome back to the program he's kevin l jackson he is the ceo of gc globalnet kevin great to see you today hey how you doing jeff thanks for having me it's uh it's been a while but i really enjoyed it yeah i really enjoy being on thecube well thank you for uh for coming back so we've got you on to talk about citrix we had you last on we had you on a citrix synergy this year obviously covet hit all the all the events have gone virtual and digital and citrix made an interesting move they decided to kind of break their thing into three buckets kind of around the main topics that people are interested in in their world and that's cloud so they had a citrix cloud summit they had a citrix workplace summit and now they just had their last one of the three which is the citrix security summit uh just wrapped up so before we jump into that i just want to get your take how are you doing how you getting through the kind of covid madness from you know the light switch moment that we experienced in march april 2. you know now we're like seven eight months into this and it's not going to end anytime soon well you know it's it was kind of different for me because um i've been working from home and remotely since i guess 2014 being a consultant and with all my different clients i was doing a lot more traveling um but with respect to doing meetings and being on collaborative systems all day long it's sort of like uh old hat and i say welcome to my world but i find that you know society is really changing the things that you thought were necessary in business you know being physically at meetings and shaking hands that's all like you know although we don't do that anymore yeah i used to joke right when we started this year that we finally got to 2020 the year that we know everything right with the benefit of hindsight but it turned out to be the year that we actually find out that we don't know anything and everything that we thought we knew in fact is not necessarily what we thought and um we got thrown into this we got thrown into this thing and you know thankfully for you and for me we're in you know we're in the tech space we can we can go to digital we're not in the hotel business or the hospitality business or you know so many businesses that are still suffering uh greatly but we were able to make the move in i.t and and citrix is a big piece of that in terms of enabling people to support remote work they've always been in remote work but this really changed the game a lot and i think as you said before we turned on the cameras accelerated you know this digital transformation way faster than anybody planned on oh oh yeah absolutely and another one of the areas that was particularly um accelerated they sort of put the rockets on is security which i'm really happy about because of the rapid increase in the number of remote workers i mean historically companies had most of their workforce in their own buildings on on their own property and there was a small percentage that would remote work remotely right but it's completely flipped now and it flipped within a period of a week or a week and a half and many of these companies were really scrambling to make you know their entire workforce be able to communicate collaborate and just get access to information uh remotely right right well david talked about it in the security keynote you know that you know as you said when this light switch moment hit in mid-march you had to get everybody uh secure and take care of your people and get them set up but you know he talked a little bit about you know maybe there were some shortcuts taken um and now that we've been into this thing in a prolonged duration and again it's going to be going on for a while longer uh that there's really an opportunity to to make sure that you put all the proper uh systems in place and make sure that you're protecting people you're protecting the assets and you're protecting you know the jewels of the company which today are data right and data in all the systems that people are working with every single day yeah yeah absolutely they had to rapidly rethink all of the work models and this uh accelerated digital transformation and the adoption of cloud and it was just this this huge demand for remote work but it was also important to uh keep to think about the user experience the employee experience i mean they were learning new things learning new technologies trying to figure out how to how to do new things and that at the beginning of this uh trend this transition people were thinking that hey you know after a few months we'll be okay but now and it's starting to sink in that this stuff is here to stay so you have to understand that work is not a place and i think actually david said that right it's really you have to look at how the worker is delivering and contributing to the mission of the organization to the business model and you have to be able to measure the workers level of output and their accomplishment and be able to do this remotely so back to office is is not going to happen in reality so the employee experience through this digital environment this digital work space it's critical yeah i think one of the quotes he had whether i think was either this one or one of the prior ones is like back to work is not back to normal right we're not going to go back to the way that it was before but it's interesting you touched on employee experience and that's a big piece of the conversation right how do we measure output versus you know just time punching the clock how do we give people that that experience that they've come to expect with the way they interact in technology in their personal lives but there's an interesting you know kind of conflict and i think you've talked about it before between employee experience and security because those two kind of inherently are going to be always in conflict because the employee's going to want more access to more things easier to use and yet you've got to keep security baked in throughout the stack whether it's access to the systems whether it's the individual and and so there's always this built-in kind of tension between those two objectives well the tension is because of history security has always been sort of a a second thought an afterthought uh you know you said due to work oh security we'll catch up to it when we need to but now because of the importance of data and the inherently global connectivity that we have the the need for security has is paramount so in order to attract that in order to address that the existing infrastructures had this where we just bolted security on to the existing infrastructures uh this is when they when the data centers and we said well as long as it's in our data center we can control it but then we with this covet thing we'll just burst out of any data center we have to rely on cloud so this this concept of just bolting on security just doesn't work because you no longer own or control the security right so you have to look at the entire platform and have a holistic security approach and it has to go from being infrastructure-centric to data centric because that's the only way you're going to provide security to your data to those remote employees right right and there's a very significant shift we hear all the time we've got rsa uh all the time to talk about security and that's this concept of zero trust and and the idea that rather than as you said kind of the old school you put a a wall and a moat around the things that you're trying to protect right you kind of start from the perspective of i don't trust anybody i don't trust where they're coming from i don't trust their device i don't trust that they have access to those applications and i don't trust that they have access to that data and then you basically enable that on a kind of a need to know basis across all those different factors at kind of the least the least amount that they need to get their job done it's a really different kind of approach to thinking about security right and but it's a standardized approach i mean before present time you would customize security to the individual or 2d organization or component of the organization because you know you knew where they were and you would you would say well they won't accept this so we'll do that so everything was sort of piecemeal now that work is not a location you have to be much more standardized much more focused and being able to track and secure that data requires things like digital rights management and and secure browsers and some of the work that citrix has done with google has really been amazing they they looked at it from a different point of view they said okay where people are always working through the cloud in different locations from from anywhere but they all work through their browser so you know we could and i think this was something that the vice president at google said uh sunil potty i believe uh vice president of google cloud they said well we can capitalize on that interface without affecting the experience and he was talking about chrome so so citrix and and google have worked together to drive sort of an agent-less experience to order to enhance security so instead of making everything location specific or organizational specific they set a standard and they support this intent-driven security model yeah it's interesting sunil's a really sharp guy we've had him on thecube a ton of times uh over the years but there's another really interesting take on security and i want to get your your feedback on it and that's kind of this coopetation right and silicon valley is very famous for you know coopetation you might be competing tooth and nail with the company across the street at the same time you got an opportunity to partner you might share apis you know it's a really interesting thing and one of the the items that came out of the citrix show was this new thing called the workspace security alliance because what's interesting in security that even if we're competitors if you're suddenly getting a new type of threat where you're getting a new type of attack and there's a new you know kind of profile actually the industry likes to share that information to help other people in the security business as kind of you know us versus the bad guys even if we're you know competing for purchase orders we're competing you know kind of face-to-face so they announced this security alliance which is pretty interesting to basically bring in partners to support uh coopetition around the zero trust framework uh yeah absolutely this is happening across just about every industry though you're going away from uh point-to-point relationships to where you're operating and working within an ecosystem and in security just this week it's been highlighted by the uh the trick trick bot um activity this uh persistent uh malware that i guess this week is attacking um health care uh facilities the actual the u.s department of homeland security put out an alert now and this is a threat to the entire ecosystem so everyone has to work together to protect everyone's data and that improves that that is the way forward and that's really the only way to be successful so uh we have to go from this point-to-point mindset to understanding that we're all in the same boat together and in this uh alliance the workspace security alliance is an indication that citrix gets it right everyone has workers everyone's workers are remote okay and everyone has to protect their own data so why don't we work together to do that yeah that's great that's interesting i had not heard of that alert but what we are hearing a lot of um in in a lot of the interviews that we're doing is kind of a resurfacing of kind of old techniques uh that the bad guys are using to to try to get remote workers because they're not necessarily surrounded with as much security or have as much baked in in their home setup as they have in the office and apparently you know ransomware is really on the rise and the sophistication of the ransom where folks is very high and that they try to go after your backup and all in you know your replication stuff before they actually hit you up for the uh for the want for the money so it's it's there's absolutely that's right yeah go ahead i'm sorry i was just saying that's indicative of the shift that most of your workers are no longer in your facilities than now and at home where companies never really put a lot of investment into protecting that channel that data channel they didn't think they needed to right right one of the other interesting things that came up uh at the citrix event was the use of uh artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically have a dynamic environment where you're adjusting you know kind of the access levels based on the behavior of the individual so what apps are they accessing what you know are they moving stuff around are they downloading stuff and to actually kind of keep a monitor if you will to look for anomalies and behavior so even if someone is trusted to do a particular type of thing if suddenly they're you know kind of out of band for a while then you know you can flag alerts to say hey what's going on is that this person did their job change you know why are they doing things that they don't normally do maybe there's a reason maybe there isn't a reason maybe it's not them so you know i think there's so many great applications for applied machine learning and artificial intelligence and these are the types of applications where you're going to see the huge benefits come from this type of technology oh yeah absolutely i mean the citrix analytics for security is really a um security service right um that monitors the activities of of people on the internet and it this machine learning gives you or gives the service this insight no one company can monitor the entire internet and you can go anywhere on the internet so bob working together leveraging this external service you can actually have automated remediation of your users you can put this specific user security risk score so um companies and organizations can be assured that they are within their risk tolerance right right and of course the other thing you've been in the business for a while that we're seeing that we're just kind of on the cusp of right is 5g and iot so a lot more connected devices a lot more data a lot more data moving at machine speed which is really what 5g is all about it's not necessarily for having a better phone call right so we're just going to see you know kind of again this this growth in terms of attack surfaces this growth in terms of the quantity of data and the growth in terms of the the the rate of change that that data is coming in and and the scale and the speed with the old uh you know velocity and and variety and volume uh the old big data memes so again the other thing go ahead the other thing it's not just data when you have 5g the virtual machines themselves are going to be traveling over this network so it's a whole new paradigm yeah yeah so the uh once again to have you know kind of a platform approach to make sure you're applying intelligence to keep an eye on all these things from zero trust uh uh kind of baseline position right pretty damn important yeah absolutely with with edge computing the internet of things this whole infrastructure based data centric approach where you can focus on how the individual is interacting with the network is important and and uh another real important component of that is the um software-defined wide area network because people work from everywhere and you have to monitor what they're doing right right yeah it's really worked from anywhere not necessarily work from home anymore i just want to you know again you've been doing this for a while get your feedback on on the fact that this is so much of a human problem and so much of a human opportunity versus just pure technology i think it's really easy to kind of get wrapped up in the technology but i think you said before digital transformation is a cultural issue it's not a technology issue and getting people to change the way they work and to change the way they work with each other and to change what they're measuring um as you said kobe kind of accelerated that whole thing but this has always been more of a cultural challenge in a technology challenge yeah the technology in a relative sense of you is kind of easy right but it's the expectations of humans is what they're used to is what they have been told in the past is the right thing no longer is right so you have to teach you have to learn you have to accept change and not just change but rapid change and accelerated change and people just don't like change they're uncomfortable in change so another aspect of this culture is learning to be adaptable and to accept change because it's going to come whether you want it or not faster than you think as well for sure you're right well that's great so kevin i'll give i give you the final word as as you think about how things have changed and again i think i think the significant thing is that we went from you know kind of this light switch moment where it was you know emergency and and quick get everything squared away but now we're in this we're in kind of this new normal it's going to be going for a while we'll get back to some some version of a hybrid uh solution at some point and you and i will be seeing each other at trade shows at some point in time in the in the future but it's not going to go back the way that it was and people can't wait and hope that it goes back the way that it was and really need to get behind this kind of hybrid if you will work environment and helping people you know be more productive with the tools they need it always gets back to giving the right people the right information at the right time to do what they need to do so just kind of get your perspective as we you know kind of get to the end of 2020 we're going to turn the page here rapidly on 2021 and we're going to start 2021 in kind of the same place we are today well to be honest we've talked about a lot of these things but the answer to all of them is agility agility agility is the key to success this is like not locking into a single cloud you're going to have multiple clouds not locking into a single application you have multiple applications not assuming that you're always going to be working from home or working through a certain browser you have to be agile to adapt to rapid change and the organizations that recognize that and uh teach their workers teach their entire ecosystem to operate together in a rapidly changing world with agility will be successful that's a great that's a great way to leave it i saw beth comstack the former vice chair at ge give a keynote one time and one of her great lines was get comfortable with being uncomfortable and i think you nailed it right this is about agility it's about change it's we've seen it in devops where you embrace change you don't try to avoid it you know you take that really at the top level and try to architect to be successful in that environment as opposed to sticking your head in the sand and praying it doesn't absolutely all right well kevin so great to catch up i'm i'm sorry it's been as long as it's been but hopefully it'll be uh shorter uh before the next time we get to see each other yes fine thank you very much i really enjoyed it absolutely all right he's kevin l jackson i'm jeff frick you're watching thecube from our palo alto studios keep conversation we'll see you next time you

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here, at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, with Keith Townsend, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE, Kevin Jackson, the founder of GovCloud. Kevin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for the opportunity. >> So this has been an exciting day. Keith and I have been geeking out all day, starting with the keynote this morning. Talking about employee experience is so relevant, theCUBE covers a ton of technology events, we don't often hear about employee experience as a catalyst to digital transformation, but it is. >> No, absolutely. Citrix, the keynote today was just very impressive. Not because of technology, and not that it wasn't impressive, but it was the focus. Today's world has really been focused around digital transformation. What processes in your organization are the right ones? And Citrix has developed and is delivering tools to help organizations understand those processes which should be digitized, and it's really about the employee experience because companies in the commercial world, in the consumer space, have really focused on consumer experience and customer experience. Those that have been successful in doing that have seen their market share grow. Well, this is all about looking at your employee experience. Instead of looking outside, look inside. If you're able to improve your employee experience, you get more efficiency, you get better employees, and you get better products and services. >> So Kevin, talk to us about the importance of examining your processes prior to automating. I was visiting my parents the other day and they're remodeling their home, and I said, you know, I made a joke about how we automate in ITS, I said you know what, you guys are moving much too slow, I'm going to buy you two more saws, so you can go faster. And a lot of times I feel like that's the way we tackle automation and process improvement. What have you seen out in the field, and where should companies start versus where they do start? >> So one of the biggest problems companies have is their history. They have a process that they've done for years, in their eyes it's been very successful, and I'm not saying it wasn't successful, but it was successful in a different era, successful in a different environment. Today's environment moves much faster. It's much broader. It's not regionalized. It's international. So organizations need to understand what their processes are, and which of their old processes can actually be effective in the new environment. Many of them can be, but they need to be tweaked. They need to be updated. They may need to be entirely changed. When those processes were designed, you didn't have customers with smart phones that can access your products and services. We're going from a physical world to a virtual world. So the first thing is to understand which processes need to be digitized. Maybe the saws were a good thing, but maybe they weren't. Maybe they need a level to go faster and to go better, to improve the quality of the output, not necessarily cutting more wood. >> So these changes are subtle. How does Citrix help kind of break down the processes and help you determine? You know, one of the things that we learnt, early cloud. It's not wise to put everything in the cloud up front, it's what makes a difference and moves the ball. David talked a lot this morning about employees want to move the ball forward. How does Citrix help move the ball forward in determining what processes should be automated? >> Yeah, great question. One of the biggest problems with cloud computing is sort of the adoption of the cloud-first policy. People misunderstood that policy and many companies misunderstand the implementation of that today. Cloud-first doesn't mean put everything in the cloud and get rid of all your legacy, it means evaluate cloud first and make a decision as to what data should go in the cloud and what processes should go in the cloud. Any organization of any significant size is still going to need legacy data centers. They still may need managed services, and cloud computing would be part of that hybrid mix. So what Citrix is doing is providing the tools so that you can get the data about the processes and understand which data should go in the cloud, which data should stay in your legacy data center, and which data could be managed by manage service providers. So customers, Citrix customers that actually leverage this intelligent workspace have the required tool to do digital transformation. >> When you're out talking with customers in different industries, public sector, government, where are they in understanding how critical the employee experience is, from recruiting and onboarding, to actually those employees interfacing with their customers? I mean, it's such a critical function. >> Oh, absolutely, and digital transformation is really not about the technology as much as it's about the culture. Organizations that undergo this journey oftentimes forget about the cultural transformation that needs to occur within the organization. And that means training, that means education, and it also means redefining the roles within the organization. Citrix provides many of the tools for helping employees understand their role, redefining their role, educating employees. So all of this is critical to digital transformation. >> And that's not easy to do, as well. I think this morning, and I've heard this recently from a number of events I've covered, is there are five generations active in the workforce today. So you've got my parents, the baby boomers, you've got the generation younger, too, younger than I am, who were born on smart devices, and there's different expectations, there's different levels of technology expertise, so companies like Citrix have to really balance that employee experience across five generations with very different expectations. >> Yeah, absolutely. I was talking to a colleague of mine and he was relaying a story to me when an employee was working an application, right? And he finished the task, went home, came back the next day and all the work was gone, and the employee was saying, "What happened? "I worked hard on it, it took me hours." And the manager said, "Well did you save it?" And he said, "Well what's that?" (laughs) Because if you're born in the cloud you don't press a button to save, it's automatic. This was a millennial that was born with technology and actually didn't understand the concept of having to save something, because it was always in the cloud. This is cultural, and you need to address this culture when you are improving and modifying your business processes. >> So when you're an organization of any size you can look at this employee experience journey and be overwhelmed, and think, wow. You know what, you could hear a story like that and say, "Where do I start to change?" Like my SAP app, you're still going to have to hit save, that's not going to change tomorrow. So where's the starting point? >> Really, the starting point is data. Collecting data, understanding the data, interpreting the data, because then you can make the appropriate decisions within the context of what your organization or industry is doing. Although I do a lot of public sector, most of my work today is in commercial industry, and employees are in an environment that's forever changing, where their context changes from second to second. They're doing one application then doing another application. They're responding to a client or customer, then responding to a colleague, and then immediately responding to the manager. This context switching is normal for computers but it's not normal for people, so this is important as you move forward in the world. >> So what I'm hearing is a term, an SAP coin, X-data, experience data. The idea that you need to collect, as much pressure as we're under to transform digitally, the first step is to collect and analyze the data. One of the questions I put towards another analyst was where is this data coming from? I know the data is because people are doing stuff, and there's a trail somewhere, but where do I go first to start as the indicator to collect this data to analyze? >> Well the old school method of doing that would be a survey, or you would observe a worker. Now the actual act of conducting a survey or observing work changes the work process. All right, so the data that you get from that can also be colored or flawed based upon the observer. Citrix experience, their desktop has artificial intelligence built into it. The worker can actually do their task, unbeknownst to them that they are being observed, that the data is being collected with respect to that process. Don't get scared, this is not George Orwell in 1984, though that's been a while, I guess. It's not Big Brother looking at you. The data is anonymized, right? It's not about you, it's about the task that you're completing. So you now have a tool to collect real data and you can continue to collect that data because processes have a life, they change. So you can monitor that, and update and tweak it. >> And an important outcome of that data collection and analysis is delivery, using it to deliver a personalized experience to the user, regardless of generation, how born in the cloud they were or not. >> Absolutely. And now, you're heading back to that cultural aspect. The digital transformation is really cultural transformation. >> Then another aspect, no, output of that, is that you could correlate this X-data with operational data and see where there's human error. So your processes analysis, you champion process analysis, you can say, okay, where are we making the most mistakes, because we're having a human translate something from one screen to another, while we see where this error rate is coming up and now we can automate or modernize this process to improve the overall not only employee experience but customer experience as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's important to understand not just the investment that you're making in any process, but the return you're getting from that process. By collecting data, you can determine if value is being delivered not just to the organization, but to your customers. So this ROI, return on investment, is often not just about money. It's about the value of the employee, and you can actually measure that value. Measure what they're doing, measure the return, and drive better environments, better employees, better outcomes based on the data. >> And that's got to elevate up to the C-suite as a business imperative, to understand that ROI, because those are employees that in many facets are involved and connected with those customers who are paying for products and services. So those employees, whether they're in sales or marketing, or finance, or legal, or a contact center, they're critical touchpoints to your customers. If their experience isn't great and they decide to leave, that customer experience, that's a possible brand reputation challenge. >> No, absolutely. And you touched upon touchpoints, right? In the past, you basically knew how your client was going to interact with you. Dissimilarly, you need to understand how your employee interacts with the organization. They're not going to just be in a cube interacting with the IT every day. They may be at home. They may, in the very near future, not today, they may be interacting with Alexa to get your information, or through Alexa with one of your clients and one of your customers. How do you manage that touchpoint? Well, with tools like Citrix, they are actually giving you the ability to normalize data across multiple channels, across multiple touchpoints, so you can make sure you have the same experience, the preferred experience with your clients and customers as well as with your employees. >> Serious impact. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> It was very enjoyable, thank you. >> Good, our pleasure. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (percussive music)

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