>> Presenter: Live from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. Mark Templeton is here, industry legend, former CEO of Citrix. Mark, really a pleasure having you on. >> Thanks, thanks, really great to be here. >> So what are you doing these days? (laughter) >> Enjoying retirement, right, way more than I thought. But earlier today at the Nutanix NEXT Conference, Mark Leslie, the legend, icon, talked about the Ark of Life. And he had this one slide that said, "There is no finish line." And I think anyone who is blessed to have worked their career around their passion, he just captured it all in that one slide. And so there's no finish line, it's just sort of continuing the journey with maybe some new friends and colleagues. >> Right, no hammock, no umbrella drinks. >> Oh plenty of drinks-- >> But it doesn't end there. >> No, plenty of drinks as always but no hammock. >> So we heard your keynote yesterday, which is outstanding. You're spending a lot of time thinking about the future. >> Yes. >> So you've got time to do that now, what are you seeing? What's in the binoculars of Mark Templeton. >> Well, a big thing for me is people and how generations of people actually influence changes in our environment and how they drive different ages in the sense of descriptions of time. So I think for me, I was born analog, I'm a boomer, and boomers generally, born analog, but I fell in love with digital and made it my career. My children are XY geners. They were born digital mainly because of my career, but many in their generation we're actually born analog but learned digital pretty quickly. Now Millennials, they're born digital and they're not interested in how things work from a computing perspective. They want to know what can it do. And so the question is now what's next? And as I sort of talked to a lot of Millennials, talked to a lot of companies that are out there with ideas, I've concluded that we're actually at the end of the digital age because we're on digital overload. There are too many devices, there are too many apps, too much data, too many social connections. I mean, no one can handle and manage it all and the only way we can keep going in terms of leveraging technology to the benefit of humankind is for it to become invisible. And the way it becomes invisible is to take what we've accepted as analog for a long, long time, human emotion, relationships, location of people, intersections amongst people, et cetera, and start creating context out of that through digital mechanisms. So I think this next, where things are going, is away from digital, toward contextual. And it's through contextual that we can actually have a greater experience with technology underneath. And yeah, tremendous opportunities for invention, innovation, et cetera. You asked the question yesterday to the audience, who can program an assembler. I put my hand up. I don't know if I still could, but I certainly have. But your point was that everybody who's programming today is programming an assembler, it's just invisible. >> It's invisible, that's right. Every layer of extraction makes the layers below invisible. And that's one of the things I love about Nutanix because they're making cloud infrastructure, hypervisors, kind of all this componentry, invisible, allowing the focus on a common set of services that are exposed. And for a whole set of people, that's great, right? And that means you can move on to the higher layers of the stack. Same thing goes for contextuality. Contextuality will create layers of abstraction that when you enter the room, the right things happen. You don't have to think about oh, I'm using Lutron switches or I've got a nest going on here, did it move from away to home? All of that, it becomes invisible and goes away. It's just early in the cycle of getting there. >> Yeah, so what do you see that having an impact on the jobs that people are having? You talked about moving up the stack. Even in IT here and for Nutanix, it's oh wow, this is what my job's been for years and now I don't need to do that, I'm retraining, moving up the stack, those challenges. >> Well, I think history shows that every generation where there's a layer of abstraction that has lots of staying power, what it does is it takes a bunch of people and it says okay, you stay below that stack if you're a specialist and you stay deep on it. I mean, let's face it, you put Nutanix technology in place, you have to have deep specialists under that. It's just that the DevOps people don't have to know anything about how it works underneath. The business units don't have to know anything about that, and so they can take all of that stuff that's cluttering their time and mind and focus on the missions that are important to them. So it creates layers of specialization along the way, and then it pushes generalists up, up, up. And look, I mean I think the Nutanix team I think adequately talked about the notion of what do we do when we get time back, whether we're admins or whether we're CIOs or whether we're CEOs or whether we're just individuals? And I think that's where humankind seems to not have a problem in consuming that extra time, whether it's recreational or maybe more return to some of the basic values of families and relationships, or new levels of innovation and invention. I think there are a lot of things that get done with that extra time. >> If I infer from your talk yesterday, you don't like the term consumerization of IT. You used a different term. >> Yeah, I actually... Jeff with Slack made that point around consumerization of IT, and he said really, it's about humanization of IT. I think these terms serve purposes along the way, and I think that we're still in the process of consumerizing IT. It's just that the purpose of the consumerization is to humanize it. And the consumerization basically is making things, making the IT experience much more retail, right? Where people get choice, where they get self service, and IT organizations actually describe themselves in a way where they're merchandising services that benefit the business. So I don't dislike consumerization as much as I really like the idea of moving the idea forward to humanization, because that's the outcome you're looking for. >> So square or circle for me because you said something that surprised me, the end of the digital age, right? And you defended that position, but I want to ask you about something like autonomous vehicles. I was talking to my teenage daughters the other day, and one of them made the point that turning 16 is a symbol of freedom. And one of the pieces of that freedom is you get to drive a car. And so I thought you were going to say this is just the beginning of the digital age. What do you make of that in terms of the impact on society and its humanization aspect? >> Well, so the end of the digital age includes it's the end of the visibility of digital, because it's just peaked out. And so digital and technologies around digital, you're just becoming more and more and more invisible as machines do more work that humans used to do. I mean, here's a question. Why is it so hard for older people to adopt new technologies? If they're so simple and they're so great, why do they have a hard time adopting? >> Dave: Because they're complicated. >> They're complicated, right? When you're doing it over and over, you don't realize how much knowledge you're applying to something that's so simple, all right? So all I'm saying is that the test will be when a generation that's behind us can actually consume it in pretty ubiquitous ways. And so it's the boomerang kind of effect, all right? >> So Stu, you were talking a little bit about the work that we did with the guys at MIT and Brynjolfsson and McAfee of The Second Machine Age. So do you think much about, I'm sure you do, about the impact of machines? Machines have always replaced humans. They seem to be now doing it at a cognitive level. What are your thoughts and the state of education in this country in particular? >> Well, I mean there are two ways to answer that, half-full, half-empty. I'm an optimist, and I think that these kinds of things I'm talking about actually will serve to make education more personalized by individual. When I look at the things like Khan Academy, right, and the impact the Khan Academy has made in public school systems, and you squint at it so that you only see the shapes and forms, here's what it's done. It's allowed the teachers to focus on the students by exception and where they need help as opposed to mass kind of education, an entire classroom. That's been one of the big effects of Sal Kahn's work. So I'm optimistic about machines, contextuality, and the intersection of all of that when it comes to education. Because I think the more context a teacher has around a student, what's going on at home, what's happening in other classes, extracurricular activities or lack thereof gives them a better ability to actually teach them, and gives them a better ability to learn if the systems are set up to make that connection. >> And we're optimists too. I mean, I think the observation is that the industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades, and that's what's driven innovation. And it's not driving innovation anymore, it's the combination of technologies. We think that creativity, teaching, I don't know if you could teach creativity, I guess you can-- >> Yes you can. >> Why can't you, right? That seems to be the new frontier of education, in our view anyways. That make sense to you? >> It makes total sense. By the way, you travel the world and you characterize various educational methodologies and priorities around the world. I mean, a lot of people throw rocks at the educational system in the U.S. It's actually a system that promotes creativity more than any other educational system in the world, okay? You go to certain countries in Asia and they promote knowledge and knowing facts and being able to state facts and correlate fact, all right? And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that, it's just that you're not driving a creative sort of process, you aren't teaching creativity. So yes, I'm optimistic about where we're headed in the sense of how this age of contextuality can actually propel us forward as a nation around education. >> And that's, Stu, why I hear so much criticism about teaching the test. You got little young kids and you hear a lot of that backlash. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely. Mark, I want to go back. You talked a lot about kind of generations and journeys. When we look in the IT space, the pace of change is just faster than ever. What advice do you give to, how do you get, by now, by the time you're relevant, you're almost irrelevant soon after. So how do you plan for that? >> So first of all, I think you always have to start with an opinion about the future that you believe in so strongly that you're willing to make bets, okay? And some of the bets, there are low-risk bets, there are high-risk bets. Mark Leslie talked about transformation, et cetera, today, and that's really about having an opinion about the future and making a bet. And he gave some great case studies. But if you look at those case studies, you ask the CEOs, the leaders there, they didn't think they were high risk because they thought the greater risk was not betting, right? And it's because of their opinion of the future. So I think you have to start there. Too many, my observation, opinion, is too many people read too many books, too much of the net and form their opinions based upon what they read as opposed to forming an opinion on their own through some amount of introspection and experience, okay? And I think that, I'll give you an example. I remember, it was probably 1999. I was newly CEO of Citrix and I had a whole faction of our dev team saying, Mark it's all about WAP. (host chuckles) I was like, what do you mean it's all about WAP? It's like, it's all about WAP. I said, what's WAP? Well, it's the wireless, I can't remember what it stood for, something protocol. Access protocol. (crosstalk) So okay, I said fine, all right. Let's meet on that like next week. Okay, fine. So over the weekend, I go somewhere and I bought a WAP phone, a Nokia WAP phone that supported WAP. So I get on there over the weekend and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, fine. I go to the meeting next week, sit down, and the whole team comes, it's all about WAP, here's why. I said okay, let me start with a question. Can everyone showed me their WAP phones? No one had one. And I pulled mine out and I said hey, let me give you a demo. So yeah, you form an opinion about something and then you can, and so I said we're not spending one nickel on WAP, right? Right. So I think that's the number one advice I would give. Because then when you have a belief and an opinion about the future, you feel they're low risk for the right reasons. >> I want to ask you as a CEO, a former CEO of a public company, you heard Mark Leslie talk about, today, the short-term focus. A lot of people talk about that. Ever since I've been in the business, people talk about, particularly US companies, short-term focus, Wall Street, now you're seeing activist investors. Maybe it's gone to a new level. I presume you agree, but it's worked. United States is dominant, and they've always had the short-term focus. Have we gone beyond a point though of rationality? >> Well, I think this is a semantical problem. So I think I probably don't agree with Mark, all right? And along the way, when people said public CEO, go with the PE guys, do that. Well, why would I do that? Well, because you don't have the short-term focus like the quarterly thing. I was like, are you kidding me? (host chuckles) You don't know PE guys, first of all. Secondly, I disagree because you're measured as a public company against the expectations that you set. So if you set the wrong expectations and miss them, then you're in trouble. If you set the right expectations, whether those expectations are financial, strategic, operational, and you exceed them, there's no problem with it. And our system is successful because there's a quarterly rhythm to measuring the path of companies that are public. And so there's no law out there that says every time you measure, it has to be something prescribed. It is prescribed, it's prescribed by the CEO and board-- >> Dave: And the expectations that get set. >> And the expectations that get set. So I was CEO of Citrix for many, many years. And when I retired, it was my 70th earnings report, all right? And I figured, I figured 70 years in jail is enough. I applied for parole a few times and it was denied. But seriously, the idea of a quarterly report against the expectations you set is not a bad thing. >> Yeah, Michael Dell talks about the 90-day shot clock, but I bet you he has a 90-day shot clock internally. >> Sure. I mean, absolutely. >> I don't know if this is the case, but it seems to me that some of the companies that I observed today, that are successful, in particular, Nutanix, I would put service now in that category, Tableau, Splunk, they seem to be highly transparent, maybe more transparent than I'm used to. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention before. Have you observed that? Do you think it's just a function of their success and their size, allows them to be more transparent than-- >> I think that... I think that's a big change that's taken place. So more newly public companies like Splunk, for example, have to be more transparent around the core metrics they use to measure success. So if you look at some of the, like Adobe, hugely successful transformation story. They did it through obviously the right strategic mechanisms to move to a different business model, but they had to create a level of transparency to get there in order to successfully make that transformation. Companies like Splunk started there, all right? And so that is the standard for a more of a subscription cloud-based SAS-oriented type business model. And investors reward that, I think. And so therefore, it's confirms, it's like positive strokes to transparency, which I'm all for. >> I wish we had more time to talk about things like culture. There's so many different different topics, but we'll leave it at what's next for you, what are you spending your time on, any fun projects that you're working on? >> Yeah, I'm spending all my time on technologies that increase contextuality. So for example, one of them is a web psychographics company. So when you surf the web now, their web analytics really does more demographical kinds of things, right? But the science of psychographics actually takes a lot of that and actually figures out what's the why, your behavior, what's in your head. So I think that's a context that's important to add, again, to make the technology more invisible. Spending time on autonomic security, security that actually not only dynamically sees attacks and discontinuities, it fixes them and then tells you later, okay? Spending time on something really exciting called human location analytics, which basically is technology that can passively track human motion, and very precisely, so that as people occupy various spaces and have paths and interactions, systems around it can respond. So like in a retail environment, maybe if you're spending a lot of time at an N cap, somebody will come and help you. And if you combine some of these things, the psychographics and the human location, you'll get the right kind of help and so forth. And that all becomes invisible and we just have a great experience. >> Combining innovations, right, taking advantage of this invisible digital matrix. >> Yeah. And the thing that I'm really psyched about, and most people that have known me for some time know that I have a particular weakness for things that have round rubber tires, okay? So deeply involved in a company, an e-bike company that is called Vintage Electric Bikes. It's an e-bike you love and you want to ride because of the joy that it gives you, all right? So yeah, so things that... Greater context, so technology can be invisible, and things that bring out emotional kinds of pleasure and joy. That's where I'm spending my time. By the way, it's fun, which is the first bar I have. Number two, great people, the second bar, all right? And then the third bar is I think they actually, these things are important for a better world and creating opportunity for people, et cetera. And I like doing that. >> Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE and delighting our audiences. It was really a pleasure having you. You look great, you sound great, congratulations. >> Mark: Thanks, thanks. Having a great time, thank you very much-- >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)