>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we always love when we get to talk to practitioners, and not just any practitioner. CIOs, obviously under huge pressures in general, but in today's day and age, lots of pressures on the CIO. So, I'm happy to welcome to the program Rich Gagnon. He is the CIO from the city of Amarillo in Texas. Rich, thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >> All right, so, you know, CIO in a city in Texas, why don't you give us a little bit of what your role entails, a little bit of your background, and looking forward to the conversation. >> So, my background is actually more from the private sector side of the house. Previous to coming to the city of Amarillo, I was the Vice President of Systems Engineering for Palo Alto Networks, for the Americas. Before that, the Global Vice President of Systems Engineering for F5 Networks, and before that, the Director of Global Infrastructure for GameStop. So I stepped into government with a very private-sector, profit-centered mindset, if you will, coming from very high-growth companies. My role with the city is really to be an enabler for local government, to drive not only IT direction, but as a smaller community, I also have to wear the CSO hat, and the Data Privacy Officer hat. Pretty much anything when it comes to leadership of IT and technology, as an enabler to the government, that role falls on me. >> Wow, so a pretty broad mandate that you have there. Rich, give us a little bit, how does that span? How many constituents do you have in your infrastructure, your IT? Maybe you can sketch that out a little bit for us, too. >> Sure, so, I've had peers from the private sector ask me, "What's it like to actually lead in local government?" And the best comparison I can come up with is someone like GE. I have 49 different subsidiaries, different departments that operate as individual business units, only I don't have GE's money or their staff. We have 200,000 people and the departments we support span everything, from the obvious, like public safety, police, fire. We have an airport, a public clinic, water treatment plants, public health. There are streets, all the infrastructure departments. It's very diverse. >> Wow. And with all of those constituents that you have, why don't you give us the pre-COVID-19 discussion first, which is, what are some of those pressures there, from a budgeting standpoint? Are there specific initiatives you've been driving? And how are you responding to all those variables? >> Sure. Well, coming in, it was a little jarring. City leadership was very transparent that the city had sort of stood still for about a decade. I come from a high-growth environment where money was not the precious resource, really. It was always time. It was about speed to market. How do we get competitive advantage and move fast enough to maintain it? That was not the case here. I stepped into an environment where the limitations were Cat 3 cable and switches that still ran CatOS. The year before I came in, the big IT accomplishment was finally completing the migration to Windows 7 and Office 2007. That's where we started. So, for the past three years, I guess I'm starting my fourth year, we have undergone massive transformation. I think my staff thinks I'm a bit of a maniac, because we've run like we were being chased by a rabid dog. We have updated, obviously, the Layer 1 infrastructure, replaced the entire network. We've rolled out a new data center that's all hyper-converged. That enabled us to move our security model from the traditional Layer 3 firewall at the edge to a contextually-based data center with regulation on east-west traffic and segregation. We have rolled out VDI and Office 2016 and Windows 10. It's been a lot. >> Yeah, it really sounds like you went through multiple generations of change there. It's almost like going a decade forward, not just one step forward. Bring us through a little bit, that transformation. Obviously, there should be some clear efficiencies you had, but give us kind of the before and after as you started to deploy some of these technologies. Was there some reskilling? Did you hire some new people? How did that all go? >> Very much so. And like everything, it starts with financials, right? All of the resources at the city within IT were focused on operations, so there was literally no capital budget. As where typically you would update as you go, and update infrastructure, what happened was, as the infrastructure aged, the approach was to hire more staff to try to keep aging infrastructure up and running. That's a failing strategy. So, by moving to HCI, we've actually recovered about 26% of our operating budget, which allowed us to move that money into innovation and infrastructure updating. It took a tremendous amount of reskilling. Fortunately, the one thing that's been, I think, most surprising to me coming to local government, is the creativity of the staff. They were hungry for change. They were excited by the opportunity to move things forward. So, we spent an entire year doing nothing but training. We had a massive amount of budget poured into, "Let's bring the staff up to speed. "Let's get as many vendors in front of them as possible. "Let's get them educated on where the trends are going. "What is hyper-converged architecture "and why does it matter? "What is DevOps and why is the industry heading that way?" So as I said, we started, really, Layer 2-3, established that, built out the new data center, and now our focus is now, we built that platform, and our focus is starting to shift onto business relationship management. We've met with all 49 departments. We do that every six months. We're building 49 different roadmaps for every department, on "What applications are you using? "How do we help you modernize? "How do we help you serve the citizens better?" Because that's how IT serves the community. We serve the community by serving the departments that serve them directly, and being an innovation engine, if you will, for local government, to drive through new applications and ways to serve. So the transition has really started to happen is we've gotten that base platform out of the way and the things that were blocking us from saying, "Yes, and we can do more." >> Wow, so Rich, it's been an interesting discussion as the global pandemic has hit, so many people have talked about, "Boy, when I think about working from home "or managing in this environment, if I was using "10- or 15-year-old technology, "I don't know how, "or if I'd be able to do any of what I had." So, I know Dell brought you over, you're talking HCIs, so I believe you're talking about VxRail as your HCI platform. Talk to us about what HCI enabled as you needed to shift to remote workforce and support, that overall urgent need. >> It's been massive. And it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we matured, I think they embraced the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments, but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so fervently, why it was so urgent to me. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt. With VxRail in place, in a week, we spun up hundreds of instant clones. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business, and now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> All right, so, Rich, you talked a bunch about the efficiencies that HCI put in place. How about that overall management? You talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. You need to be able to do things much simpler. How does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. In the old environment, one, it took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive when we did make change. It overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. It wasn't cost-efficient. And then, simple things, like, I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production. You simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment, and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management, because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and reskill them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> Well, it's definitely a great proof point. So often, you deploy a solution, and when push comes to shove, will it deliver on that value that we're hoping for? HCI has been around for quite a while, but a crisis like this, how can you move past, how can your team respond? Congratulations to your team on that. The Dell team has recently done a number of updates on the VxRail platform. I'm curious, as someone who's been using the platform, what particularly is interesting to you, and what pieces of that have the most relevance to your organization? >> There are a few. So we're starting to look at our SCADA environments, industrial controls. And we're looking at some processing at the edge in those environments. So the new organized D series are interesting. There's some plant environments where that might really make sense to us. We've also partnered with our local counties and we have a DR site where being able to extend the network out to that DR site is going to be very powerful for us. And then there's just some improvements in vSphere that will allow us to do a little QA-ing, if you will, on new code before we roll it out, that I think will have a pretty huge impact for us as well. >> Excellent. So, Rich, when you think about the services that you need to deliver to all of your constituencies, walk us through how the pandemic has affected the team, how you're making sure that your employees are taken care of, but that you can still deliver all of those services. >> So from an internal perspective, not running a legacy architecture has made that a whole lot easier. We've remoted most of the IT team. Our entire development team is at home. Most of our support team is at home. Most of the city is still at home. So being able to do that, one, just having the capability has been huge for us. But also, from a business perspective, it's allowed most of our city functions just to keep running. So, modified services, for sure, but we're still functioning, and I just don't think that would have been capable, we wouldn't have been capable of supporting that, even two and a half years ago. >> So, Rich, we've talked a bit about your infrastructure. I'm curious, is the city, are you leveraging any public cloud environments, or any specific SaaS solutions that are enabling some of what you're doing today also? >> Yes, and we could probably have a 30-minute discussion on what is hybrid cloud and what is multicloud. In our instance, we are leveraging quite a bit of SaaS. We've migrated a lot of our services to SaaS offerings. We have spun up several applications in the cloud. I wouldn't call them truly hybrid. In my mind, hybrid is, I am able to take the workload and very seamlessly move it between my private infrastructure and one or more clouds. This is more, workloads specifically assigned to a public cloud. But yes, we've leveraged that. Simple things like Office365 and Outlook, but just as powerful for us has been VDI and being able to offer Horizon to our employees at home. And, with my other hat on, still maintain the contextual-based security, right? So I didn't have to open up the kingdom. I can still maintain the control that I need to to be able to sleep at night. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions I love to ask someone in your position is the role of data, how you think of security, how you think of the technology and put those together. Does it help that you wear both the CSO hat and the CIO hat? How do you think about leveraging data? Is there anything that you're sharing with other municipalities, without giving up, of course, personal information? >> Sure. It causes a lot of internal arguments, right? Because there's the two halves of my brain: the CIO half that wants to roll out as much service as I can and be innovative, and the CSO half of my brain that thinks about the exposure of the service that I'm about to roll out. That's part of where we're migrating now as we start to look into our whole approach to data. We've got the platform in place. We're now really migrating our thinking into revamping the way we look at data. I have seven sources for the same data. How do I consolidate and have one source of truth, and where does that reside? My development team is really starting to migrate out of classic development and more into the automation side of the house. How are we interfacing with all of our vendors? That's in review now. And how are we tying to third-party apps? Yeah, that's really the point we're at in our maturity that, now that the infrastructure is in place, we're now migrating to, "what is our data plan?" >> Excellent. Final question I have for you, Rich. I'd love your thoughts on the changing role of CIO. I loved the discussion you had at the beginning going from, really, the private sector to the public sector. Obviously, unique pressures on all businesses right now dealing with the global pandemic, but how do you see the role of the CIO today and how has it been changing? >> I think there's an expectation that you bring value to the business, whether that's local government, or retail, or banking. I think the expectation is that you're not just managing an infrastructure or managing a team, and providing service, but how do you bring actual value to the organization that you serve? And that means that you have to understand the business and all aspects of the business. I think you have to, at least I do as a CIO, I have to spend a tremendous amount of time understanding my internal customer and what are they trying to accomplish, and often, to show them a new way that they just may not be aware of. So I think there's a little more expectation as a CIO that you're going to drive value to whatever business that you're serving. >> Well, Rich, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on being able to react fast. So glad that you were able to get the transformation project done ahead of this hitting, because otherwise, it would have been a very different conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay safe and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> 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 day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta. We're excited to welcome Principle Analyst of Creative Strategies Carolina Milanesi to theCUBE. Welcome Carolina. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we were chatting before we went live about some of the great announcements that came out from Citrix yesterday during the general session. And one of the things that we, Keith and I, had been hearing over yesterday and half of today is Citrix has really been this pivot towards the general purposed user. One of the stats that they shared yesterday during the general session was historically enterprise software has been designed for power users, which makes up 1% of the population. So, putting users first now, something that we really heard yesterday, wanted to get your thoughts on that. >> That's my passion. When I talk about enterprise, the people that I really want to talk about are the final user of the technologies. And a lot of times not only corporation's design for the power users but they design for the IT Manager, which is even worse, right? 'Cause that is less than the 1% of a workforce. And for things like security and if you like the way that you can be productive first which is not necessarily a bad thing but that shouldn't come at the price of designing an app and a tool that really speaks to the end user and want the end user to be engaged. And so it was fascinating yesterday during the keynote here, Citrix talked about a service that Gallup run and saying that 85% of a workforce is disengaged today. And they are because they often not have the right tool for the job. They don't have the right data available to them to understand what the task is that they're trying to achieve. So, there is so much there that I think something like workspace is helping disenfranchise in a way. And try and break into pieces and make it more user-friendly. That's the best way that you can think about consumerization is making user-friendly tools. >> So user-friendly and enterprise IT really go together. >> Exactly. >> I remember moving from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and thinking, oh wow why did I do this? This is not user-friendly. We have five generations of the workforce in the workforce. >> Yeah. >> So there is variant degrees of adoption. What do you think, how do you think Citrix is enabling not just the consumerization or bringing consumer products into the workforce but adaption across generations. >> I think if you are starting with the user, you are in a good space, right? So, it doesn't matter if you're a baby boomer, a gen z or gen x or a millennial we all want a easy life. We want something to be straightforward and not to get into, in the way of as being productive and getting the job done. And so, I think if you're starting with that in mind making sure that you understand the goals that the company is trying to achieve and then with the design you're attentive at that simplicity baking in security so that security is at the core of your designing your tool but doesn't get in the way. I don't want to use the tool at work that is not secure unless it's more convenient for me, right? And that's how we always gone around what was available in the consumer space and we've brought into the enterprise either as a device or an application. And I think that putting simplicity first, is allowing Citrix to avoid the issues so that, the IT departments don't have to worry about renegades that are going to bring in something from the backdoor but really embrace this technology as a new way to think about how I work. >> In along those lines, thinking about how I work, I as an employee, you as an employee, Keith is an employee, we all have habits and tools and ways of interacting with different applications that are really personalized to us. And as consumers on the consumer part of our lives, we have this expectation that we are going to be delivered this customized personal experience. Whether we are going on at Amazon to buy something or Keith was saying the other day on Facebook Microsoft surfs up an ad to him about not a Surface, 'cause they know he's bought one but some additional value ad accessories that might be beneficial to him. So those are things that we kind of more and more, I think across those five workforce generations are expecting. >> Absolutely. >> What are some of the things that you're saying that Citrix is doing to enable that personalization at scale in a way that is secure? >> Yeah, by putting intelligence in the midst of all of this because all the things that you're talking about the example you're giving in my consumer experience, are enabled by intelligence. So artificial intelligence or machine learning that look at what ad I looked at or what page I visited and some of it is a bit stalking but that's all right. From a user perspective, that stalking is still giving me a benefit. Now you take that into an enterprise environment, it is much easier 'cause advertising is not something that comes into play. But when you're looking at what Citrix do from an intelligence workspace and so they are able for instance to look at, say I join Citrix in the marketing department and they're able on day one to show me what my colleagues in the marketing department are using as their apps. Their favorite apps, their workflow so that from an awarding perspective, my experience is already easier. I'm not given a blank PC and I don't know where to go and they tell you go in the internet, find what you need. That's really overwhelming if you're just starting a new position. So being able to look at how applications are used either at the team level or across organizations, you can do this with analytics. You can see organizations that can belong to same versicle say they are in retail, they have similar numbers of employees to yours. This is how they work, that's their best practice and you can learn from that and then customize to your own needs. >> So we've learned a new term yesterday, tomo, total motivation. The measurement of how motivated or how not disengaged employees are. So employee experience is becoming a big deal. If I come to a new company and I have to wait two or three days to get a laptop or get my device, that's a pretty bad indicator whether or not I am going to be able to perform well in my function. I'm starting to think are you saying really great examples of enterprises that will make consumers jealous. Like wow that enterprise experience of computing is so great, I'd like to have that in my life. There was somethings I saw on stage yesterday that went like wow that would make build me so much easier. Are you saying enterprises kind of inject some ideas to the consumer space? >> I think that we are starting to, right? I've been in this industry for along time. And I've been preaching for a long time about how looking at consumers and putting the user first is important. We're just starting now to come around to the idea that consumer satisfaction is important, that consumer engagement, sorry, employee satisfaction, employee engagement is important. It dawned me yesterday that if you're looking at consumer brands, engagement is the first thing they target. Because if you're engaged, you're going to be loyal. If you're loyal, you're going to spend more money within the brand and ecosystem that they represent. But yet in the enterprise we are not that yet. So, what you're talking about will happen, in my opinion, especially with new technologies we're thinking about deployment of 5G or you're thinking about VR and XR. There is a lot that in a way takes us back to how technology used to be which was not as affordable as it is today. And so will be deployed in enterprise environment first and then come to the consumer. And so, along those line I see somethings that consumer can look at and think, you know that would be nice in my own life. If you're looking at workspace why cannot I use this similar solution to just organize my kid's life 'cause I tell you, you know. With all the afterschool activity and whatnot between me and dad, we're pretty busy. >> So you mentioned engagement and some of the things that pop into my mind is the marketer in the last day and a half when they talk about employee experience as how I'm hearing it from Citrix is this is a critical catalyst for digital transformation. Talking about the employee experience from the very beginnings of even recruiting for talent and writing job descriptions to telling accusation to training, education. You guys both talked about some of the onboarding things that should be in place to make that process pretty seamless. But one of the things too that I think govern terms of employee experience is that like a marketing funnel, naturally, becomes a opportunity, converted to a customer but you want to turn that customer to an advocate, turn those employees into advocates so that you are able to retain them, they add more value into the company. That was something that I thought that was really, pretty, I want to say revolutionary but it was nice to hear Citrix talking about employee experience as it really relates to the essential telling, attraction and accusation issues that a lot of businesses face. And one of the things you said, looking at how they're using AI to look at tool efficiency rather than productivity of each individual is really a great way to foster that I would imagine loyalty on the employee side. >> It definitely is. I think that, we talk a lot about being millennials and in the fact that they are going to come into the workspace and they are expecting a different way of working because their relationship with technology is different from the relationship that my generation has had. They are comfortable with technology. They use technology everyday and they don't understand why it cannot be the same way. But I think beyond that is not just about millennials, I think companies really need to look more at, if you like, digital transformation and consumerization of IT actually brings to the whole company. And even being yes an employee for factor but also a customer factor, supporting your customer, increasing customer satisfaction. And I think a lot of times we need to get away from how we measure something new using old tools. So you're trying to justify why you should be deploying workspace and you're trying to cut down on okay, I'm going to save four hours a week, how much is that going to cost me? That's not it. That is the wrong way of looking at what a new tool and rethinking about your processes is bringing as a value to your company. And a lot of times this is soft, it's not a hard number that you can put. They're soft advantages that you're going to have and like you were saying, satisfaction brings loyalty, brings further every employee in your organization is going to be an evangelist for you. That, you can't put a price on that. >> So in terms of customer I want to kind of rift off that, if you're saying, cause one of the things that they said yesterday is with workspace intelligent experience, we aim to give back every worker one full day a week, which is two months a year. And my first thought was, wow, how much is that going to save the company because one of the things that Keith and I have been talking about the last day and a half that also was announced yesterday was the 7 trillion dollars that companies waste because of disengagement. So that certainly is something that was attractive and was a very strongly resonating message but you're saying how should companies be kind of looking at that? Okay so, yes I'm going to be able to save each person a full day a week, two months a year; how is that going to one, turn them into advocates for the company? But what's the benefit that going to be on the end user customer? >> Well, I think that if you spend less time fighting to get your job done and actually focusing on doing a good job, that's already going to benefit your customer. Whatever customer it is, right? It could be that you're able to research whatever it is that you're doing. Like if I look at my job, if I can cut down an hour a day, I can spend that time reading in a benign form, reading books or reading articles that will add to my thinking, engaging with my peers and discussing what is going on. The same thing can be in an enterprise where I have actually time to spend with my manager and making sure that he knows if I'm happy or not happy. Engaging with my peers to problem solving or spend more time with my customers. I think a lot of times there is a little bit of a mentality of, oh you're saving money so you're going to work less and so why would I need to do that? There is plenty of jobs to be done. I think that saving that time and saving the aggravation that pushing paper work or doing one thing that could take three step in 15 steps it's just not helping you. It's not helping your morale, is not helping how you've been interact with your customers because you aren't happy. And that transpire and transpire with your teams as well. >> Let's talk about 5G and impact of 5G on employee experience. One, we're a little bit away from 5G becoming a thing but when it's talked us about where it said today and where potential of impacting employee experience when it finally arrives. >> Yes we are a little bit away. We're starting to see deployment in markets actually today was the launch in the UK with EE and we have Verizon here in the US. So we are getting started. But for me the power of 5G is two falls, yes on every employee will have the power of connectivity anywhere and at any time, which is good and bad 'cause potentially you're never disconnected ever but the other side is we're talking about the intelligence in that data. There is going to be way more of that. There is going to be more data available. So if you're thinking from an employee perspective of the availability of data and what that can do to you as far as understanding your customer base and how to serve and that is going to be exponentially bigger just because so many more devices are going to become connected. And I think that for me is really what excites me about 5G. Yes I can download a movie in one minute and five seconds but that's not it, right? It is really about first of all, new experiences like augmented reality and what that bring to an experience say in a retail environment, experience environment, entertainment but then the amounts of sheered data that you can get from devices being connected. >> So, it's that we're at the tip of the iceberg? >> It is. >> Carolina thank you so much for joining Keith and me. >> It was a pleasure. >> On the CUBE I know that we can keep chatting but we have to have you back 'cause this is a dot dot dot to be continued conversation. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE Live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)