>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this episode of "CXO Insights." As you know, we've been grabbing the perspectives of leaders throughout this pandemic and assessing their tips for managing in a crisis and of course, managing in good times as well. But now, as we enter the post-isolation economy, we really want to look at not just how you manage through the crisis but how you manage beyond the crisis. And I'm really excited to have Chris Riley here. He's the newly minted Chief Revenue Officer at Automation Anywhere. Chris, my friend, how you doing? I hope you and the family are well. >> Thank you, David. I wish the same for you. I think getting by as most folks are, it's the new normal, we're all getting used to it but I'm happy to be here and happy to be at Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, I want to talk about that in detail. Eddie Walsh calls it the new abnormal but so congratulations on the new role. I want to start with your career. I met you in 1987, which ironically was the same year I met Dave Donatelli, the same year I met Michigan I. and Saul Koi, talk about great timing. And then, you came into the industry at a time, really different time. It was, the IBM people don't remember this but IBM was the dominant player and you guys unseated them amazing 12-year career at EMC and then you kind of went to the .com boom. That was amazing. You relive that ride, did a stint at HP and really turned that business around and then came back to Dell, top go to market executive. One of the top in the industry that I know and now, of course at Automation Anywhere we're going to talk about. My first question to you is, a lot of changes have occurred since 1987. What has changed the most? Now we're talking diversity, we're talking all kinds of your different sales models. From your career looking back, what's changed the most? >> I think everything has changed and candidly for the better, Dave. You just led with one of the key areas in an area I'm deeply passionate about and that is diversity and inclusion and I think there's no stronger time, at least in our country's history where the inequalities that exist have been so exposed. So I view this as an opportunity, as I did at Dell to make a difference, lead from the front and make this a destination and a company whose culture really supports and drives diversity and inclusion. So I'd say that's one area, and I know it's very passionate for you as well. The others, it was a time before laptops, desktops. I think Ken Olsen once said, who would ever need a laptop in their home and boy, the world has changed. So I think some of the things though that haven't changed and this is why I'm so excited about Automation Anywhere. At the manual processes we have our workers doing and I think there is a real opportunity. I've lived through explosive growth at EMC, top company performing stock during the 90s, I get to see VMware firsthand. I've seen what's happened with ServiceNow and I believe this RPA space, as to you is in its infancy. It's seeing 30% compounded annual growth and we're just at the beginning and I think it's going to change the way people work and really lead to that digital transformation that so many of us have been talking about for the last decade. >> Yeah and you know kind of my position. Quick aside, I don't know if you saw the Netflix announcement this morning and I've been wondering as a small business, what can we do? What more can we do for inclusion and diversity? Netflix announced they're going to take 2% of their cash and put it into banks, financial institutions that support black causes and I just talked to our CFO. I said, look, why don't we take some of our cash, let's take 2% and stick it into banks, community banks. There's 30 million small businesses in the United States. If just 1% puts 10 grand in each, that's $3 billion that go into black community. So I'm going to start a mission and I just thought I'd share that 'cause I know it's a passion of yours. >> Yeah, and we all need to be in a position to provide equal opportunity for employment and that is reaching out into those communities and starting early on in creating the opportunities for advancement professionally, mentorship and just the path forward. And I'm excited to see what Netflix is doing. I'm sure you'll come up with the right answer for your company and I think all of us are searching, what's the right answer for our respective companies? >> Yeah, so now let's get into it. You're a month in and I want to talk about this project. I've learned a lot about not only RPA but about automation. I've just had a deep dive with your team and it really brought some things into focus. Guys, if you bring up the first slide, I want to get some thoughts on the table here. So this is a chart that sort of came into my focus with a friend of mine, Dave Moschello, who really big thinker on this stuff and he pointed out, this is data from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics and the EU and it shows the lackluster productivity that's going on in the past decade. So you can see, we had the boost in the 80s and the 90s, we had this sort of productivity uptick from laptops but now, look what's happened since 2007. And the point that Moschello made on the right hand side is we have all these huge issues that we face, whether it's climate change, we have this massive debt, healthcare, an aging population, feeding everyone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and his point was, there's no way we're going to be able to solve all these problems by throwing humans at the problem. So I've really begun to sort of think about this just in terms of machines and the roles that machines will play. I think overnight, Chris, we've gone from, wow, I'm afraid that machines are going to take my job to you can't operate if you're not digital. >> Yeah, well digital transformation is not a new term. I think it's meant something different each year for the last 10 years and I look at this as an opportunity. The World Economic Forum projected that IA and RPA will create 58 million new jobs. It's an astounding number. What COVID-19 has exposed is this work from home phenomenon that really exposes the risk of manual processes within the enterprise. So I think those two things combined is almost a perfect storm and I think what it'll do is accelerate the adoption of RPA and IPA. So something that might've taken years or decades to really be adopted in force, in this new normal, I think is going to be accelerated quite dramatically. >> So, the combination of your go to market execution, you managed complex sales motions before. Automation Anywhere obviously has some great product capabilities. Guys, I want to bring up the next slide and Chris, you might have seen this in some of the stuff that I wrote but this is data from ETR Enterprise technology research. They're a data partner of ours. Now it's clear that Automation Anywhere has the right product market fit and you can see on this chart, this is a methodology that we use. ETR goes out and they ask people, are you adopting a platform new? Are you increasing spending relative to last year? Are you flat, decreasing or replacing? And you can see here, there is zero churn in the Automation Anywhere base. And so obviously you got product market fit. Churn is the silent killer, obviously of SAS companies and so, you've picked a winner and I'm learning more about this. At first I thought the team office is quite large, I sized it. I actually think it's bigger than I originally thought. Chris, I thought this was going to be a winner-take-all type of market. I'm really rethinking that after, especially the deep dive I've had with your team in terms of how you guys go to market with an end-to-end sort of life cycle approach as opposed to sort of putting point products in. So I wonder if that narrative that I just laid out, resonates with you, is it sort of consistent with what you're seeing and then maybe some of the reasons why you joined Automation Anywhere? >> Yeah, I would say the most aggressive software growth that I've seen in the last decade or so, and two companies stand out for me. That's VMware and ServiceNow. They don't have a point product, they have a platform and that's what attracted me to Automation Anywhere is this platform approach. And Dave as you know, I've spent most of my career calling on the enterprise' strong relationships with those types of companies and they aren't looking to develop a point product solution and then cobble together lots of disparate islands of solutions. They're looking for a platform that can grow as they grow. They can extend from the back office to the front office but all centered around workforce, transformation, productivity and just as importantly, resiliency. And as we start to develop more and more capabilities that will be delivered through this platform approach, I think we're going to see explosive growth as the industry goes through its explosive growth. >> Well, I know your approach and your approach is to stay very close to customers. So as you were doing your due diligence on Automation Anywhere and as you enter your sort of first part of your 100-day journey here, I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers. What are they telling you? What are the big takeaways right now that you're hearing? >> Yeah, so I think some of the data you pointed out with 4,000 customers in essence, zero churn, the opportunity to upsell those customers with more products and solutions clearly is there. New account acquisition has been a tremendous source of growth for the company in a strong professional services organization that actually is able to deliver the outcomes that our customers expect. From an enterprise perspective, I couldn't have come into a better situation with 4,000 customers, 50% of the fortune 500, 2 million bots deployed, those types of strategic relationships are going to be more and more critical as this company continues to accelerate its growth. Most of the RPA solutions really got in through the back office and candidly, really weren't even a component of an IT solution. Now, as you go to the front of the house, where you're looking at customer facing applications and worker productivity, these are CEO, CFO, COO and IT initiatives. So I really believe we're coming into our own, at the front of the house with senior executives that really want to create a better working environment for their employees and de-risk a lot of these manual processes that have existed for years. >> So I know why you chose Automation Anywhere. My question is, why did Automation Anywhere choose Chris Riley? I know your capabilities but obviously when somebody hires a executive like yourself, they say, "Hey, Chris, we want you to help us "get to the next level," but what does that mean? Are we talking about changes in the go to market? Are we talking about your ability to recruit and coach, to manage complex of sales motions? What is it that you want to bring to Automation Anywhere? >> I think it's all those, Dave. Having built a reputation throughout my 30 plus year career around a people-centric focus, a customer-centric focus and those two things kind of aren't interchangeable. When you look at customers, they put their faith and confidence in people and they put their faith and confidence in companies. And what I see here at Automation Anywhere is that the ability to kind of expand upon the great culture that the company already has but do it with someone whose role in a company at scale globally and can put a lot of the best practices and disciplines in place to do that 'cause it is difficult but also, how do we start to do larger, more complex deals and build relationships with the CIO, the CFO, the CEO? And I think a big reason why I'm here is, that experience in doing that, doing large complex multi-year opportunities but also being able to deliver upon the outcomes that we told our customers we could achieve and do that together with our customers and again we have a strong professional services organization and an incredible ecosystem of partners that have demonstrated year over year, the company's ability to actually deliver upon its promise. >> That was my next question to you, was the ecosystem. One of the big changes from when you started in this business, was it used to be just belly to belly, hardcore, direct sales, the importance and leverage that you get from a partner ecosystem. You point out VMware. In fact ServiceNow, it's interesting. When we first started covering ServiceNow, one of the things we said is we want to see as an indicator of success, the partner ecosystem evolve and then sure enough, it exploded with the SIs and all the kinds of developers. So maybe talk about AA's ecosystem, The Partner System. You obviously have a lot of experience there in your career, how do you see that as a leverage point? >> Yeah, it's huge. This market is far larger than we can cover with a direct sales organization and requires substantial services engagements that go well beyond the kind of professional services organization we want to build out organically in the company. So when you look at that, the company today has 1,900 partners. The global systems integrators are key, especially those with VPO type practices, the regional SIs and candidly, the regional VARs who've built out a strong service malpractice, a strong VMware practice and have the professional services capabilities to do some of these complex automation or automation type work that have also built the trust and confidence of their customers. So, in partnership with these types of companies, we believe we can expand our reach. We believe we can offer a more comprehensive outcome and solution to our customers and we, what I'm going to be looking at is, how do we enhance our channel programs to be the kind of company that the channel partners want to engage with, built upon the reputation of the company, the leadership position we have in the technology and also our willingness to go after this space together. >> So I got to go but last question is, what can you share with us about your 100-day plan? Where are you going to focus? >> On the people. There is a strong culture here, there's incredible sales talent and there's talent throughout the organization. I think Dave, you've seen for me over the years, a clarity of our mission, keep things simple and try and drive a repetitive process to deliver results. I'm very accountability focused. So I think what I'm going to look to assess is where the organization is today, how to get more out of the great talent we have, build stronger and deeper relationships with our customers and really scale and grow through our ecosystem of channel partners. >> Well, Chris, I'm super excited for you. A great hire by Automation Anywhere obviously got my attention. I think it'll get the industry's as well. Best of luck, and of course we'll be watching. >> Good, always great to see you, Dave, take care. >> Yeah, ditto, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it here because this month we're going to be really digging into the ETR data we've been reporting on that horse race between Automation Anywhere and UI Path. The ETR data is in the field and we'll be reporting on that. So look for that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live CUBE coverage here at VMWorld 2017. Three days, we're on our third day of VMWorld, always a great tradition, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE co-hosted by Dave Vellante of Wikibon and our next guest is Keegan Riley, vice president and general manager of North American storage at HP Enterprise. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on, love the pin, as always wearin' that with flair. Love the logo, always comment on that when I, first I was skeptical on it, but now I love it, but, HP doing great in storage with acquisitions of SimpliVity and Nimble where you had a good run there. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> We just had a former HPE entrepreneur now on doing a storage startup, so we're familiar with he HPE storage. Good story. What's the update now, you got Discover in the books, now you got the Madrid coming up event. Software to find storage that pony's going to run for a while. What's the update? >> Yeah, so appreciate the time, appreciate you having me on. You know, the way that we're thinking about HPE's storage it's interesting, it's the company is so different, and mentioned to you guys when we were talking before that I actually left HP to come to Nimble, so in some ways I'm approaching the gold pin for a 10 year anniversary at HP. But the-- >> And they retro that so you get that grand floated in. >> Oh, absolutely, absolutely, vacation time carries over it's beautiful. But the HPE storage that I'm now leading is in some ways very different from the HP storage that I left sic years ago and the vision behind HPE's storage is well aligned with the overall vision of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is we make hybrid IT simple, we power the intelligent edge, and we deliver the services to empower organizations to do this. And the things that we were thinking about at Nimble and the things that we're thinking about as kind of a part of HPE are well aligned with this. So, our belief is everyone at this conference cares about whether it's software defined, whether it's hybrid converge, whether it's all flash so on and so forth, but in the real world what clients tend to care about is kind of their experience and we've seen this really fundamental shift in how consumers think about interacting with IT in general. The example I always give is you know I've been in sales my whole career, I've traveled a lot and historically 15 years ago when I would go to a new city, you know, I would land and I would jump on a airport shuttle to go rent a car and then I would pull out a Thomas Guide and I would go to cell C3 and map out my route to the client and things like that. And so I just expected that if I had a meeting at 2:00 p.m., I needed to land at 10:00 a.m., to make my way to, that was just my experience. Cut to today, you know, I land and I immediately pull out my iPhone and hail an Uber and you know reserve an Airbnb when I get there and I, for a 2:00 p.m. meeting I can land at 1:15 and I know Waze is going to route me around traffic to get there. So, my experience as a consumer has fundamentally changed and that's true of IT organizations and consumers within those organizations. So, IT departments have to adapt to that, right? And so a kind of powering this hybrid IT experience and servicing clients that expect immediacy is what we're all about. >> Okay, so I love that analogy. In fact when we were at HP Discover we kind of had this conversation, so as you hailed that Uber, IT wants self driving storage. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> So, bring that, tie that back, things that we talk a lot about in kind of a colorful joking way, but that is the automation goal of storage is to be available. We talk about edge, unstructured data, moving compute to the edge, it's nuanced now, storage and compute all this where they go through software. Self driving storage means something, and it's kind of a joke on one hand, but what does it actually mean for an IT guy? >> No, that's a great question and this is exactly the way that we think about it. An the self driving car analogy is a really powerful one, right? And so the way we think about this, we're delivering a predictive cloud platform overall and notice that's not a predictive cloud storage conversation and it's a big part of why it made a ton of sense for Nimble storage to become a part of HPE. We brought to bear a product called InfoSight that you might be familiar with. The idea behind InfoSight is in a cloud connected world the client should never know about what's going on in their infrastructure than we do. So, we view every system as being at the edge of our network and for about seven years now we've been collecting a massive amount of information about infrastructure, about 70 million telemetry points per day per system that's coming back to us. So, we have a massive anonymized dataset about infrastructure. So, we've been collecting all of the sensor data in the same way that say Uber or Tesla has been collecting sensor data from cars, right, and the next step kind of the next wave of innovation, if you will, is, okay it's great that you've collected this sensor data, now what do you do with it? Right? And so we're starting to think about how do you put actuators in place so that you can have an actual self managing data center. How can you apply a machine learning and global kind of corelation in a way that actually applies artificial intelligence to the data center and makes it truly touchless and self managing and self healing and so on and so forth. >> So, that vision alone is when, well, I'm sure when you pitched that to Meg, she was like,"Okay, that sounds good, "let's buy the company." But as well, there was another factor, which was the success that Nimble was having. A major shift in the storage market and you can see it walking around here is that over the last five, seven years there's been a shift from the storage specialist expert at managing LUNs and deploying and tuning, to the sort of generalist because people realize, look, there's no competitive advantage. So, talk about that and how the person to whom you've sold and your career has changed. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, it's a great point. And I think it's in a lot of ways it goes to, you're right, obviously Meg and Antonio saw a lot of value in Nimble Storage. The value that we saw as Nimble Storage is as a standalone storage company with kind of one product to sell. You know there's a saying in sales that if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail, right. And so, it's really cool that we could go get on a whiteboard and explain why the Castle file system is revolutionary and delivers superior IOPs and so on and so forth, but the conversation is shifting to more of a solutions conversation. It moves to how do I deliver actual value and how do I help organizations drive revenue and help them distinguish themselves from their competitors leveraging digital transformation. So, being a part of a company that has a wide portfolio and applying a solutions sales approach it's game changing, right. Our ability to go in and say, "I don't want to tell you about the Nimble OS, "I want to hear from you what your challenges are "and then I'm going to come back to you with a proposal "to help you solve those challenges." It's exciting for our sales teams, frankly, because it changes our conversations that makes us more consultative. >> Alright, talk about the some of the-- >> Value conversations. >> Talk about the sales engagement dynamic with the buyer of storage, especially you mentioned in the old days, now new days. A new dynamic's emerging we've identified on theCUBE past couple days and I'll just kind of lay it out for you and I want you to get a reaction. I'm the storage buyer of old, now I'm the modern guy, I got to know all the ins and outs of speeds and feeds against all the competitors, but now there's a new overlay on top of which is a broader picture across the organization that has compute, that has edge, so I feel more, not deluded from storage, but more holistic around other things, so I have to balance both worlds. I got to balance the, I got to know and nail the storage equation. >> Yeah. >> Okay, at well as know the connection points with how it all works, kind of almost as an OS. How do you engage in that conversation? 'Cause it's hard, right? 'Cause storage you go right into the weeds, speeds and feeds under the hood, see our numbers, we're great, we do all this stuff. But now you got to say wait a minute, but in a VM environment it's this, in a cloud it's like this and there's a little bit of bigger picture, HCI or whatever that is. How do you deal with that? >> No, absolutely, and I think that's well said. I mean, I think the storage market historically has always been sort of, alright, do you want Granny Smith apples or red delicious apples? It always sort of looked the same and it was just about I can deliver x number of IOPs and it became a speeds and feeds conversation. Today, it's not just not apples to apples, it's like you prefer apples, pineapples, or vacuum cleaners. Like, there's so many different ways to solve these challenges and so you have to take the conversation to a higher level, right. It has to be a conversation about how do you deliver value to businesses? And I think, I hear-- >> It gets confusing to the buyers, too, because they're being bombarded with a lot of fudd and they still got to check the boxes on all the under the hood stuff, the engine's got to work. >> And they come to VMWorld and every year there's 92 new companies that haven't heard of before that are pitching them on, hey, I solve your problems. I think what I'm hearing from clients a lot is they don't necessarily want to think about the storage, they don't want to think about do I provision RAID 10 or RAID five and do I manage this aggregate in this way or that way, they don't want to think about, right. So, I think this is why you're seeing the success of these next generation platforms that are radically simple to implement, right, and in some ways at Nimble, wen we were talking to some of these clients to have sort of a legacy approach to storage where you got like a primary LUN administrator, there's nothing wrong with that job, it's a great job and I have friends who do that job, but a lot of companies are now shifting to more of a generalist, I manage applications and I manage you know-- >> John: You manage a dashboard console. >> Exactly, yeah, so you have to make it simple and you have to make it you don't have to think about those things anymore. >> So, in thinking about your relationship over the years with VMware, as HP, you are part of the cartel I call it, the inner circle, you got all the APIs early, all the, you know, the CDKs or SDKs early. You know, you were one of the few. You, of course EMC, NetApp, all the big storage players, couple of IBM, couple others. Okay, and then you go to Nimble, you're a little guy, and it's like c'mon hey let's partner! Okay and so much has changed now that you're back at HPE, how has that, how is it VMware evolved from a ecosystem partner standpoint and then specifically where you are today with HPE? >> That's a great question and I remember the early days at Nimble when you know we were knocking on the door and they were like, "Who are you again? "Nimble who?" And we're really proud of sort of the reputation that we've earned inside of VMware, they're a great partner and they've built such a massive ecosystem, and I mean this show is incredible, right. They're such a core part of our business. At Nimble I feel like we earned sort of a seat at that table in some ways through technology differentiation and just grit and hustle, right. We kind of edged our way into those conversations. >> Dave: Performance. >> And performance. And we started to get interesting to them from a strategic perspective as just Nimble Storage. Now, as a part of HPE, HPE was, and in some ways as a part of HPE you're like, "Oh, that was cute." We thought we were strategic to VMware, now we actually are very strategic to VMware and the things that we're doing with them. From an innovation perspective it's like just throwing fuel on the fire, right. So, we're doubling down on some of the things we're doing around like VM Vision and InfoSight, our partnership with Visa and on ProLiant servers, things like that, it's a great partnership. And I think the things that VMware's announced this week are really exciting. >> Thank you, great to see you, and great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> I'll give you the last word. What's coming up for you guys and HP storage as the vice president general manager, you're out there pounding the pavement, what should customers look for from you guys? >> No, I appreciate that. There's a couple things. So, first and foremost are R&D budget just got a lot bigger specifically around InfoSight. So, you'll see InfoSight come to other HPE products, 3PAR, ProLiant servers so on and so forth and InfoSight will become a much more interesting cloud based management tool for proactive wellness in the infrastructure. Second, you'll see us double down on our channel, right. So, the channel Nimble's always 100% channel, SimpliVity was 100% channel, HPE Storage is going to get very serious about embracing the channel. And third, we're going to ensure that the client experience remains top notch. The NPS score of 85 that Nimble delivered we're really proud of that and we're going to make sure we don't mess that up for our clients. >> You know it's so funny, just an observation, but I worked at HP for nine years in the late '80s, early '90s and then I watched and been covering theCUBE for over seven years now, storage is always like the power engine of HPE and no matter what's happening it comes back down to storage, I mean, the earnings, the results, the client engagements, storage has moved from this corner kind of function to really strategic. And it continues that way. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. Appreciate the time. >> Alright, it's theCUBE. Coming up Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE at one o'clock. Stay with us. Got all the great guests and alumni and also executives from VMware coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.

The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>I Ready, Dave Ante with David Nicholson. We're back at UI Path forward. Five. We're getting ready for the big guns to come in, the two co CEOs, but we have a really special analyst panel now. We're excited to have Daniel Newman here. He's the Principal analyst at Future and Research. And Andy Dai, who's the Vice president and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for making some time to come on the queue. >>Glad to be here. Always >>Good. So, >>Andy, you're deep into ai. You and I have been talking about having you come to our maor office. I'm, I'm really excited that we're able to meet here. What have you seen at the show so far? What are your big takeaways? You know, day one and a half? >>Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm d AI because my last name has AI and I >>Already talk about, >>So, but, but all jokes aside, there are a lot of good things I heard from the conference, right? I mean, one is the last two years because of the pandemic, the growth has been phenomenal for, for a lot of those robotic automation intelligent automation companies, right? So because the low hanging through position making processes have been already taken care of where they going to find the next growth spot, right? That was the question I was looking answers to. And they have some inverse, one good acquisition. They had intelligent document processing, but more importantly they're trying to move from detrimental rules based RPA automation into AI based, more probabilistic subjective decision making areas. That's a huge market, tons of money involved in it, but it's going to be a harder problem to solve. Love to see the execut. >>Well, it's also a big pivot for the, for the company. It started out as sort of a a point product and now is moving to, to platform. But to end of the macro is not in UI pass favor. It's not really in any, you know, tech company's favor, but especially, you know, a company that's going into a transition transitioning to go to market cetera. What are you seeing, what's your take on the macro? I mean, I know you follow the financial markets very closely. There's a lot of negative sentiment right now. Are you as negative as the sentiment? >>Well, the, the broad sentiment comes with some pretty good historical data, right? We've had probably one of the worst market years in multiple decades. And of course we're coming into a situation where all the, the factors are really not in our favor. You've got in interest rates climbing, you've got wildly high inflation, you've had a, you know, helicopters dumping money on the economy for a period of time. And we're, we're gonna get into this great reset is what I keep talking about. But, you know, I had the opportunity to talk to Bill McDermott recently on one of my shows and Bill's CEO of ServiceNow, in case anybody there doesn't know, but >>Former, >>Yeah, really well spoken guy. But you know, him and I kind of went back and forth and we came up with this kind of concept that we were gonna have to tech our way out of what's about to come. You can almost be certain recession is gonna come. But for companies like UiPath, I actually think there's a tremendous opportunity because the bottom line is companies are gonna be looking at their bottom line. A year ago it was all about growth a deal, like the Adobe Figma deal would've been, been lauded, people would've been excited. Now everybody's looking at going, how are they paying that price? Everybody's discounting the future growth. They're looking at the situation, say, what's gonna happen next? Well, bottom line is now they're looking at that. How profitable are we? Are you making money? Are you growing that bottom line? Are you creating earnings? We're >>Gonna come in >>Era, we're gonna come into an era where companies are gonna say, you know what? People are expensive. The inflationary cost of hiring is expensive. You know, what's less expensive? Investing in the cloud, investing in ai, investing in workflow and automation and things that actually enable businesses to expand, keep costs somewhat contained fixed costs, and scale their businesses and get themselves in a good position for when the economy turns to return to >>Grow. So since prior to the pandemic cloud containers, m l and RPA slash automation have been the big four that from a spending data standpoint have been above the line above all kind of the rest in terms of spending momentum up until last quarter, AI and RPA slash automation declined. So my question is, are those two areas discretionary or more discretionary than other technology investments you heard? >>Well, I, I think we're in a, a period where companies are, I won't say they've stopped spending, but you listened to Mark Benioff, you talked about the elongated sales cycle, right? I think companies right now are being very reflective and they're doing a lot of introspection. They're looking at their business and saying, We hired a lot of people. We hired really fast. Do we need to cut? Do we need to freeze? We've made investments in technology, are we getting a return on 'em? We all know that the analytics, whether it's you know, digital adoption platforms or just analytics in the business, say, What is all this money we've been spending doing for us and how productive are we? But I will tell you universally, the companies are looking at workflow automations that enable things. Whether that's onboarding customers, whether that's delivering experiences, whether that's, you know, full, you know, price to quote technologies, automate, automate, automate. By doing that, they're gonna bring down the cost, they're gonna control themselves as best as possible in a tough macro. And then when they come out of it, these processes are gonna be beneficiary in a, in a growth environment even more so, >>Andy UiPath rocketed to a leadership position, largely due to the, the product and the simplicity of the product relative to the competition. And then as you well know, they expanded into, you know, platform. So how do you see the competitive environment? A UI path is again focusing on that platform play Automation Anywhere couldn't get to public market. They had turnover at the go to market level. Chris Riley joined a lot of, lot of hope left Microsoft joined into the fray, obviously is having an impact that you're certainly seeing spending momentum around Microsoft. Then SAP service Now Salesforce, every software company the planet thinks they should get every dollar spent on software. You know, they, they see UI pass momentum and they say, Hey, we can, we can take some of that off the table. How do you see the competitive environment right now? >>So first of all, in in my mind, UI path is slightly better because of a couple of reasons. One, as you said, it's ease of use. >>They're able to customize it variable to what they want. So that's a real easy development advantage. And then the, when you develop the bots and equal, it takes on an average anywhere between two to maybe six weeks, generally speaking, in some industries regulated government might take more so that it's faster, quicker, easier than others in a sense. So people love using that. The second advantage of what they have in my mind is that not only they are available as a managed SA solution on, on cloud, on Azure Cloud, but also they have this version that you can install, maintain, manage any way you want, whether it's a public cloud or, or your own data center and so on so forth. That's not available with almost, not all of them have it, Few have it, but not all of the competitors have it. So they have an advantage there as well. Where it could become useful would be one of the areas that they haven't even expanded is the government. >>Government is the what, >>Sorry? The government. Yeah, related solutions, right? Defense, government, all of those areas when you go, which haven't even started for various reasons. For example, they're worried about laying off people, worried about cost, worried about automating things. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome. But once you overcome that, if you want to go there, nobody's going to use, or most of them will be very of using something on the cloud. So they have a solution for version variation of that. So they are set up to come to that next level. I mean, I don't know if you guys were at the keynote, the CEO talked about how their plans to go from 1 billion to 5 billion in ar. So they're set up to capture the market. But again, as you said, every big software company saw their momentum, they want to get into it, they want to compete with them. So >>Well, to get to 5 billion, they've gotta accelerate growth. I mean, if you do 20% cer over the next, you know, through the end of the decade, they don't quite get there. So they're gonna have to, you know, they lowered their forecast out of the high 20 or mid twenties to 18%. They're gonna have to accelerate that. And we've seen that before. We see it in cloud where cloud, you know, accelerates growth even though you got the lower large numbers. Go ahead Dave. >>Yeah, so Daniel, then how do we, how do we think of this market? How do we measure the TAM for total addressable market for automation? I mean, you know, what's that? What's that metric that shows how unautomated are we, how inefficient are we? Is there a, is there a 5% efficiency that can be gained? Is there a 40% efficiency that can be gained? Because if you're talking about, you know, how much much of the market can UI path capture, first of all, how big is the market? And then is UI path poised to take advantage of that compared to the actual purveyors of the software that people are interacting with? I'm interacting with an E R p, an ER P system that has built into it the ability to automate processes. Then why do I need 'EM UI path? So first, how do you evaluate TAM? Second, how do you evaluate whether UI Path is gonna have a chance in this market where RPAs built into the applications that we actually use? Yeah, >>I think that TAM is evolving, and I don't have it in front of me right now, but what I'll tell you about the TAM is there's sort of the legacy RPA tam and then there's what I would sort of evolve to call the IPA and workflow automation tam that is being addressed by many of these software companies that you asked in the competitive equation. In the, in the, in the question, what we're seeing is a world where companies are gonna say, if we can automate it, we will automate it. That's, it's actually non-negotiable. Now, the process in the ability to a arrive at automation at scale has long been a battle front within the nor every organization. We've been able to automate things for a long time. Why has it more been done? It's the same thing with analytics. There's been numerous studies in analytics that have basically shown companies that have been able to embrace, adopt, and implement analytics, have significantly better performances, better performances on revenue growth, better performances and operational cost management, better performances with customer experience. >>Guess what? Not everybody, every company can get to this. Now there's a couple of things behind this and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to close my answer out cause I'm getting a little long winded here. But the first thing is automation is a cultural challenge in most organizations. We've done endless research on companies digitally transforming and automating their business. And what we've found is largely the technology are somewhat comparable. Meaning, you know, I, I've heard what he is saying about some of the advantages of partnership with Microsoft, very compelling. But you know what, all these companies that have automation offerings, whether it's you know, through a Salesforce, Microsoft, whether it's a specialized rpa like an Automation Anywhere or a UI path, their solutions can be deployed and successful. The company's ability to take the investment, implement it successfully and get buy in across the organization tends to always be the hurdle. An old CIO stat, 50% of IT projects fail. That stat is still almost accurate today. It's not 50% of technology is bad, but those failures are because the culture doesn't get behind it. And automation's a tricky one because there's a lot of people that feel on the outside rather than the inside of an automation transformation. >>So, Andy, so how do you think about the, to Dave's question, the SAPs the service nows trying to, you know, at least take some red crumbs off the table. They, they're gonna, they're gonna create these automation stove pipes, but in Automation Anywhere or, or UI path is a horizontal play, are they not? And so how do you think about that progression? Well, so >>First of all, all of this other companies, when they, they, whether it's a build, acquire, what have you, these guys already have what, five, seven years on them. So it's gonna be difficult for them to catch up with the Center of Excellence knowledge on the use cases, what they got to catch up with them. That's gonna be a lot of catch up. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft Power Automate has been there for a while, right? They're supposedly doing well as well, but they still choose to partner with the UiPath as well to get them to the next level. So there's going to be competition coming from all areas, but it's, it's about, you know, highlights. >>So, so who is the competition? Is it Microsoft chipping away an individual productivity? Is it a service now? Who's got a platform play? Is it themselves just being able to execute >>All plus also, but I think the, the most, I wouldn't say competition, but it's more people are not aware of what areas need to be automated, right? For example, one of the things I was talking about with a couple of customers is, so they have a automation hub where you can put the, the process and and task that need to be automated and then you prioritize and start working on it. And, and almost all of them that I speak to, they keep saying that most of the process and task identification that they need to do for automation, it's manual right now. So, which means it's limited, you have to go and execute it. When people find out and tell you that's what need to be fixed, you try to go and fix that. But imagine if there is a way, I mean the have solutions they're showcasing now if it becomes popular, if you're able to identify tasks that are very inefficient or or process that's very inefficient, automatically score them up saying that, you know what, this is what is going to be ROI and you execute on it. That's going to be huge. So >>I think ts right, there's no shortage of, of a market. I would, I would agree with you Rob Sland this morning talked about the progression. He sort of compared it to e R P of the early days. I sort of have a love hate with E R P cuz of the complexity of the implementation and the, and the cost. However, first of all, a couple points and I love to get your thoughts for you. If you went back, I know 25 years, you, you wouldn't have been able to pick SAP out of a lineup and say that's gonna be the leader in E R P and they ended up, you know, doing really, really well. But the more interesting angle is if you could have figured out the customers that were implementing e r p in, in a really high quality fashion, those are the companies that really did well. You buy their stocks, they really took off cuz they were killing their other industry competitors. So, fast forward to automation. Will automation live up to its hype and your opinion, will it be as transformative and will the, the practitioners of automation see the same type of uplift in their markets, in their market caps, in their competitiveness as did sort of the early adopters and the excellent adopters of brp? What are your thoughts? Well, >>I think it's an interesting comparison. Maybe answer it slightly different way. I think the future is that automation is a non-negotiable in every enterprise organization. I think if you're a large organization, we have absolutely filled our, our organizations with waste too much overhead, too much expense, too much technical debt and automation is an answer. This is the way we want to interact, right? We want a chat bot that actually gives us good answers that can answer on a Tuesday at 11:00 PM at night when we want to know if the right dog food, you know, and I'm saying that, you know, that's what we want. That's the outcome we want. And businesses have to be driven by the outcome. Here's what I'm not sure about, Dave, is we have an era where over the last three to five years, a lot of products have become companies and a lot of 'EM products became companies ended up in public markets. >>And so the RPA space is one of those areas that got this explosive amount of growth. And you look at it and there's two ways. Is this horizontally a business rpa or is this going to be something that's gonna be a target of those Microsofts and those SAPs and say, Look, we need hyper automation to be deeply integrated at the E R P crm, hcm SCM level. We're gonna build by this or we're gonna build this. And you're already hearing it in the partnerships, but this is how I think the story ends. I I think either the companies like UiPath get much bigger, they get much more rounded in their, in their offerings. Or you're gonna have a large company like a Microsoft come in and say, you know what? Buy it rather >>Than build can they can, they can, can this company, maybe not so much here, but can a company like Automation Anywhere stay acquisition? Well, >>I use the, I use the Service now as an, as a parallel because they're a company that I thought would always end up inside of a bigger company and now you're like, I think they're too big. I think they've they've dropped >>That, that chart. Yeah, they're acquisition proof. I would agree. But these guys aren't yet Nora's automation. They work for >>A while and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes getting bit bought is good, but what I mean is it's gonna be core and these big companies know it cuz they're all talking >>About, but as independent analysts, we want to see independent companies. >>I wanna see the right thing. >>It just makes it fun. >>The right thing >>Customers. Yeah, but you know, okay, Oracle buy more customers, more >>Customers. >>I'm kidding. Yeah, I guess it's the right thing. It just makes it more fun when you have really good independent competitors that >>We >>Absolutely so, and, and spend way more on r and d than these big companies who spend a lot more on stock buyback. But I know you gotta go. Thanks so much for spending some time, making time for Cube Andy. Great to see you. Good to see as well. All right, we are wrapping up day one, Dave Blan and Dave Nicholson live. You can hear the action behind us, forward in five on the Cube, right back.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Licia Spain in Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my cohot Paul Gillon, who's been putting in some pretty good work talking to incredible people. And we have, I don't wanna call, heard the face of CNCF, but you kind of introduced me to, you don't know this, but you know, charmer executive director of CNCF. You introduced me to Kuan at Cuan San Diego's my one of my first CU coupons. And I was trying to get my bearings about me and you're on stage and I'm like, okay. Uh, she looks like a reasonable person. This might be a reasonable place to learn about cloud native. Welcome to the show. >>Thank you so much for having me. And that's so nice to hear >><laugh> it is an amazing show, roughly 7,500 people. >>Yes, that's right. Sold out >>Sold. That's a big show. And with that comes, you know, uh, so someone told me, uh, CNCF is an outstanding organization, which it, which it is you're the executive director. And I told them, you know what, that's like being the president of the United States without having air force one. <laugh> like you get home. I dunno >>About that. You >>Get, no, you get all of the, I mean, 7,500 people from across, literally across the world. That's true at Europe. We're in Europe, we're in, we're coming out of times that have been, you know, it can't be overstated. It, this, this is unlike any other times. >>Yes, absolutely >>Difficult decisions. There was a whole co uh, uh, I don't know the term, uh, uh, cuffa uh, or blow up about mask versus no mask. How do you manage just, just the diversity of the community. >>That is such a great question, because I, as I mentioned in my keynote a little bit, right? At this point, we're a community of what, 7.1 million developers. That's a really big group. And so when we think about how should we manage the diversity, the way I see it, it's essential to treat each other with kindness, professionalism, and respect. Now that's easy to say, right. Because it sounds great. Right. Old paper is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Great >>Concept. 0.1 million people later. >><laugh> exactly. And so, uh, this is why like, uh, I phoned a friend on stage and, um, van Jones came and spoke with us. Who's the renowned CNN contributor, uh, commentator, sorry. And his advice was very much that in such a diverse community, there's always gonna be lots of perspectives, lots opinions. And we need to a always bring the version of ourselves, which we think will empower this ecosystem, BEC what are, what we are doing. If everybody did that, is that gonna be a good thing or a bad thing? And the other is we need to give each other space and grace, um, space to do what we need to do. Grace. If there are mistakes, if there are challenges. And so those are, those are some good principles for us to live by. And I think that in terms of how CNCF tries to enable the diversity, it's by really trying to hear from everybody possible, the vocal loud voices, as well as the folks who you need to reach out a little bit, pull in a little bit. So it's an ongoing, it's an ongoing challenge that we do our best with. >>How do you balance? And I've been to a lot of trade shows and conferences over the years, their trade organizers are very coin operated. You know, they're there, they're there for the money. Yeah. <laugh> and you have traditional trade shows and you have a situation here where an open source community that is motivated by very different, um, principles, but you need to make money. You need the show to be profitable. Uh, you need to sell some sponsorships, but you also need to keep it available and open to the people who, who don't have the big budgets. How are you balancing that? >>So I would actually like to, uh, share something that may not be obvious, which is that we don't actually do the shows to make money. We, um, as you said, like, uh, a lot of trade shows are coin up and the goal there is like, um, well actually they're different kinds of, I think if it's an independent event organization, it can be like, Hey, let's make as much revenue as possible. If it's part of a large, um, large company, like, like cloud provider, et cetera, the events tend to be lost leaders because they're like lead gen, I think, >>But they're, they're lost leaders, but they're profit makers ultimately >>Long term. Yeah. Yeah. It's like top of the funnel. I, I guess for us, we are only doing the events to enable the community and bring people from different companies together. So our goal is to try and break even <laugh> >>Well, that's, that's laudable. Um, the, how big does it get though? I mean, you're at the point with 7,500 attendees here where you're on the cusp of being a really big event, uh, would you limit it size eventually? Or are you just gonna let this thing run? Its course. >>So our inherent belief is that we want to be accessible and open to more and more and more people because the mission is to make cloud native ubiquitous. Right. Uh, and so that means we are excited about growth. We are excited about opening the doors for as everyone, but I think actually the one, one good thing that came out of this pandemic is that we've become a lot more comfortable with hybrid. So we have a virtual component and an in-person component. So combining that, I think makes it well, it's very challenging cause like running to events, but it's also like, it can scale a little bit better. And then if the numbers increase from like, if they double, for example, we're still, I think we're still not in the realm of south by Southwest, which, which feels like, oh, that's the step function difference. So linear increases in number of attendees, I think is a good thing. If, and when we get to the point where it's, um, you know, exponential growth at that point, we have to think about, um, a completely different event really. Right, >>Right. So 7 billion people in the world approaching 8 billion, 7.1 members in the community. Technology is obviously an enabler where I it's enabled me to, to be here and Licia Spain experiencing this beautiful city. There's so much work to be done. What mm-hmm <affirmative> what is the role of CNCF in providing access to education and technology for the rest of the world? >>Absolutely. So, you know, one of the key, uh, areas we focus on is learning and development in supporting the ecosystem in learners beginners to start their cloud native journey or expand their cloud native journey with training certifications, and actually shared this in the keynote every year. Uh, the increase in number of people taking certifications grows by 216% year over year growth. It's a lot, right? And every week about a thousand people are taking a certification exam. So, and we set that up primarily to bring people in and that's one of our more successful initiatives, but we do so many, we do mentorship programs, internship programs. We, uh, a lot of diversity scholarships, these events, it all kind of comes together to support the ecosystem, to grow >>The turning away from the events, uh, toward just toward the CNCF Brit large, you have a growing number of projects. The, the number of projects within CNCF is becoming kind of overwhelming. Is there an upper threshold at which you would, do you tighten the, the limits on, on what projects you will incubate or how big does that tent become? >>Right. I think, you know, when we had 50 projects, we were feeling overwhelmed then too, but we seem to have cop just fine. And there's a reason for that. The reason is that cloud native has been growing so fast with the world. It's a representative of what's going on in our world over the course of the pandemic. As you know, every company became a technology company. People had to like double their engineering staffs over without anybody ever having met in person mm-hmm <affirmative> right. And when that kind of change is going around the world cloud needing be being the scaffolding of how people build and deploy modern software just grew really with it. And the use cases we needed to support grew. That's why the types of projects and kinds of projects is growing. So there's a method. There's a reason to the madness I should say. And I think, um, as the world and, uh, the landscape of technology evolves cloud native will, will evolve and keep developing in either into new projects or consolidation of projects and everything is on the table. >>So I think one of these perceptions Riley Arone is that CNCF is kind of where the big people go to play. If you're a small project and you're looking at CNCF, you're thinking one day I'll get big enough. Like how should small project leaders or leaders of small projects, how should they engage CNCF? >>Totally. And, you know, I want to really change this narrative because, um, in CNCF we have three tiers of projects. There's the graduated ones, which are at the top. These are the most mature ones we really believe and put our sand behind them. They, uh, then there's the incubating projects, which are pretty solid technologies with good usage that are getting there. And then there's the sandbox, which is literally a sandbox and op open ground for innovation. And the bar to entry is low in that it's, uh, easy to apply. There's a mass boat to get you in. And once you're in, you have a neutral IP zone created by being a CNCF project that you can attract more maintainers, more companies can start collaborating. So we, we become an enabler for the small projects, so everybody should know that >>FYI. Yeah. So I won't be interested to know how that, so I have an idea. So let's say I don't have an idea, but let's say that idea have, >>I'm sure you have an idea. <laugh>, I'm >>Sure I have idea. And, and I just don't have the infrastructure to run a project. I need help, but I think it it's going to solve a pro problem. Yeah. What's that application process like, >>So, okay. So you apply after you already have let's a GitHub repo. Okay. Yeah. >>So you, I have a GI help repo. >>Yeah. As in like your pro you've started the project, you started the coding, you've like, put it out there on GitHub, you have something going. And so it's not at just ideal level. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, it's at like early stage of execution level. Um, and so, and then your question was, how do you apply? >>Yeah. So how do I, so I have, let's say that, uh, let, let's talk about something I'm thinking about doing, and I actually do, is that we're thinking about doing a open store, a cloud native framework for people migrating to the public cloud, to, or to cloud native. There's just not enough public information about that. And I'm like, you know what? I wanna contribute what I know to it. So that's a project in itself, not necessarily a software project, but a IP project, or let's say I have a tool to do that migration. And I put that up on my GitHub report. I want people to iterate on that tool. >>Right. So it would be a simple process of literally there is when you go to, um, our, uh, online, uh, materials, there's a simple process for sandbox where you fill a Google form, where you put in your URL, explain what you're doing, or some basic information hit submit. And we batch process these, um, about every once a month, I think. And, uh, the TC looks at the, what you've filled in, takes a group vote and goes from there. >>When about your operating model, I mean, do, do you, you mentioned you don't look to make a profit in this show. Do you look, and I wanna be sure CNCF is a non-profit, is that correct? Correct. Do you look, what models do you look at in determining your own governance? Do you look at a commercial business? Do you look at a nonprofit? Um, like of ourselves? Yeah. What's your model for how you run CNCF. >>Oh, okay. So it's a nonprofit, as I said, and our model is very simple. We want to raise the funds that we are able to raise in order to then invest them into community initiatives that play the supporter enabler role to all these projects we just talked about. We're not, we are never the project. We are the top cheerleader of the project. Think of us like that. And in terms of, um, but interestingly, unlike, I, I mean, I don't know much about other found, uh, nonprofit session compare, but interestingly, the donating companies are relevant, not just because of their cash that they have put in, but because those companies are part of this ecosystem and they need to, um, them being in this ecosystem, they help create content around cloud native. They, they do more than give us money. And that's why we really like our members, uh, they'll provide contributing engineers to projects. They will help us with marketing with case studies and interviews and all of that. And so it, it becomes this like healthy cycle of it starts with someone donating to become a member, but they end up doing so many different things. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and ultimately the goal is make cloud native ubiquitous and all this goes towards >>That. So talk to me about conflict resolution, because there's some really big projects in CNC, but only some stuff that is changed, literally changing the world, but there's competing interest between some of the projects. I mean, you, you, there there's, if you look at service mesh, there's a lot of service mesh solutions Uhhuh. Yes. And there's just different visions. Where's the CNCF and, and kind of just making sure the community aspect is thought across all of the different or considered across all the different projects as they have the let's say inevitably bump heads. >>Yeah. So by design CNCF was never meant to be a king maker where you picked one project. Right. And I think that's been working out really well because, um, one is when you accept a project, you're not a hundred percent sure that specific one is gonna take over that technology space. Right. So we're leaving it open to see who works it out. The second is that as every company is becoming a technology company, use cases are different. So a service mesh service mesh a might work really well for my company, but it really may not be a fit for your code base. And so the diversity of options is actually a really good thing. >>So talk to me about, uh, saw an interesting note coming out of the keynote yesterday, 65% of the participants here at CU con are new to Kuan. I'm like, oh, I'm a, I'm a vet. You are, I went to two or three before this. So O GE yeah, OG actually, that's what I tweeted OG of Kuan, but, uh, who, who are they like, what's making up? Are they developers? Are they traditional enterprises? Are they contributing companies? Who's the 65%, >>Um, who's the 65%, >>Right? The new, new, >>Well, it's all kinds of C companies sending their developers, right? It's sometimes there's a lot of them are end users. I think at least half or a third, at least of attendees are end user companies. And, uh, then there is also like the new startups around town. And then there is like the, every big company or small has been hiring developers as fast as possible. And even if they've always been a player in cloud native, they need to send all these people to this ecosystem to start building the relationships start like learning the technology. So it's all kinds of folks are collecting to that here. >>As I, as I think about people starting to learn the technologies, learn the communities, the one thing the market change for this coupon for me over others is the number of customers, sharing stories, end user organizations. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, mm-hmm, <affirmative> much of the cuon that I've been through many of the open source conferences. It's always been like vendors pushing their message, et cetera. What talk, tell me about that. C change. >>One thing that's like just immediate, um, and the case right now is that all the co-chairs for the event who are in charge of designing the agenda are end users. So we have Emily Fox from apple. We have Jasmine James from Twitter, and we have Ricardo Roka from se. So they're all end users. So naturally they're like, you know, picking talks that they're like, well, this is very relevant. Imma go for that and I'm here for it. Right? So that's one thing that's just happening. The other though is a greater trend, which is, as I was saying in the pandemic, so many companies has to get going and quickly that they have built expertise and users are no longer the passive recipients of information. They're equal contributors. They know what they need, what they want, they have experiences to share. And you're seeing that reflected in the conference. >>One thing I've seen at other conferences in the past that started out really for practitioners, uh, is that invariably, they want to go upscale and they wanna draw the CIOs and the, oh yeah. The, uh, you know, the executive, the top executives. Is that an objective, uh, for you or, or do you really want to keep this kind of a, a t-shirt crowd for the long term? >>Hey, everyone's welcome. That's really important, you know? Right. And, um, so we, and that's why we are trying to expand. It's like, you know, middle out as they had in the Silicon valley show the idea being, sorry, I just meant this a little. Okay. So the idea being that we've had the core developer crews, developer, DevOps, SRE crowd, right op over the course of the last virtual events, we actually expanded in the other direction. We put in a business value track, which was more for like people in the business, but not in as a developer or DevOps engineer. We also had a student thing where it's like, you're trying to get all the university crowd people, and it's been working phenomen phenomenally. And then actually this, this event, we went, uh, in the other direction as well. We hosted our inaugural CTO summit, which is for senior leadership and end user companies. And the idea is they're discussing topics of technology that are business relevant. So our topic this time was resiliency in multi-cloud and we're producing a research paper about it. That's gonna come out in some weeks. So BA so with, for us, it's about getting everybody under this tent. Right. And, but it will never mean that we deprioritize what we started with, which is the engineering crowd. It's just an expansion >>Stay true to your roots. >>Yes. Well, Prianca, we're going to talk to a lot of those startup communities tomorrow. Ah, tomorrow's coverage. It's all about startups. Why should CTOs, uh, new startups talk to these upstarts of as opposed to some of the bigger players here on the show floor, over 170 sponsoring companies, the show floor has been vibrant engaging. Yes. And we're going to get into that community tomorrow's coverage on the cube from Valencia Spain. I'm Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the cube, the leader and high tech coverage.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante >> In its early days, robotic process automation emerged from rudimentary screen scraping, macros and workflow automation software. Once a script heavy and limited tool that largely was used to eliminate mundane tasks for individual users, and by the way still is, RPA's evolved into an enterprise-wide mega trend that puts automation at the center of digital business initiatives. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we present our quarterly update of the trends in RPA and automation and share the latest survey data from enterprise technology research. RPA has grown quite rapidly and the acronym is becoming a convenient misnomer in a way. I mean the real action in RPA has evolved into enterprise-wide automation initiatives. Once exclusively focused really on back office automation and areas such as finance, RPA has now become an enterprise initiative as many larger organizations especially, move well beyond cost savings and outside of the CFO's purview. We predicted in early "Breaking Analysis" episodes that productivity declines in the US and Europe especially, would require automation to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. And that's what's happening. Automation today is attacking not only the labor shortage but it's supporting optimizations in ESG, supply chain, helping with inflation challenges, improving capital allocation. For example, the supply chain issues today, think about what they require. Somebody's got to do research, they got to figure out inventory management, they got to go into different systems, do prioritizations, do price matching, and perform a number of other complex tasks. These are time consuming processes. Now the combination of RPA and machine intelligence is helping managers compress the time to value and optimize decision making. Organizations are realizing that a digital business goes beyond cloud and SaaS, and puts data, AI and automation at the core leveraging cloud and SaaS but reimagining entire workflows and customer experiences. Moreover, low code solutions are taking off and dramatically expanding the ability of organizations to make changes to their processes. We're also seeing adjacencies to RPA becoming folded into enterprise automation initiatives. And that trend will continue for example Legacy software testing tools. This is especially important as companies SaaSify their business and look for modern testing tools that can keep pace with their transformations. So the bottom line is, RPA or intelligent automation has become a strategic priority for many companies. And that means you got to get the CIO involved to ensure that the governance and compliance edicts of the organization are appropriately met. And that alignment occurs across the technology and business lines. A couple of years ago, when we saw that RPA could be much much more than what it was at the time, we revisited our total available market or TAM analysis. And in doing so, we felt there would be a confluence of automation, AI, and data and that the front and back office schism would converge. That is shown here. This is our updated TAM chart, which we shared a while back with a dramatically larger scope. We were interested that, just a few days ago by the way Forrester put out a new report, picked up by Digital Nation, that the RPA market would reach 22 billion by 2025. Now, as we said at the time our TAM includes the entire ecosystem including professional services as does Forrester's recent report and the projections they're in. So see that little dotted red line there, that's about at the 22 billion mark. We're a few years away but we definitely feel as though this is taking shape the way we had previously envisioned. That is to say a progression from back office blending with customer facing processes becoming a core element of digital transformations and eventually entering the realm of automated systems of agency where automations are reliable enough and trusted enough to make realtime decisions at scale for a much, much wider scope of enterprise activities. So we see this evolving over the 2020s or the balance of this decade and becoming a massive multi hundred billion dollar market. Now, unfortunately for later investors, this enthusiasm that I'm sharing around automation has not translated into price momentum for the stocks in this sector. Here are the charts, the stock charts for four RPA related players with market values inserted in each graphic. We've set the cross hairs approximately at the timing of UiPath's IPO. And that's where we'll start. UiPath IPOed last April and you can see the steady decline in its price. UiPath's Series F investors got in at $30 billion valuation, so that's been halved, more than half. But UiPath is the leader in this sector as we'll see in a moment. So investors are just going to have to be patient. Now, you know the problem with these hot tech companies is the cat gets let out of the bag before the IPO because they raise so much private money, it hits the headlines and then, at the time you had zero interest rates, you had the tech stock boom during the pandemic, so you're just going to have to wait it out to get a nice return if you got in sort of post IPO. You know, which... I think this business will deliver over the long term. Now, Blue Prism is interesting because it's being bought by SS&C Technologies after a bidding war with Vista. So that's why their stock has held up pretty reasonably. Vista's PE firm, which owns TIBCO and was going to mash it, Blue Prism that is, together with TIBCO. That was a play I always liked because RPA is going to be integrated across the board. And TIBCO is an integration company, and I felt it was in a good position to do that. But SS&C obvious said, "Hey, we can do that too." And look, they're getting a proven RPA tech stack for 10% of the value of UiPath. Might be a sharp move, we'll see. Or maybe they'll jack prices and squeeze the cashflow, I honestly have no idea. And we shelled the other two players here who really aren't RPA specialists. Appian is a low code business process development platform and Pegasystems of course, we've reported on them extensively. They're a longtime business process player that has done pretty well. But both stocks have suffered pretty dramatically since last April. So let's take a look at the customer survey data and see what it tells us. The ETR survey data shows a pretty robust picture frankly. This chart depicts the net score or customer spending momentum on that vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness relative to other companies and technologies in the ETR dataset, that's on the horizontal. That red dotted line at the 40% mark, that indicates an elevated spending level for the company within this technology. The chart insert you see there shows how the company positions are plotted using net score and market share or Ns. And ETR's tool has a couple of cool features. We can click on the dot and it allows you to track the progression over time, in this case going back to January, 2020 that's the lines that we've inserted here. So we'll start with Microsoft and we'll get that over with. Microsoft acquired a company called Softomotive for a reported a hundred million dollars thereabout, it's a little more than that. So pretty much a lunch money for Mr. Softy. So Microsoft bought the company in May and look at the gray line where it started showing up in the October ETR surveys at a very highly elevated level, typical Microsoft, right? I mean, a lot of spending momentum and they're pretty much ubiquitous. And it just stayed there and it's gone up and to the right, just really a dominant picture. But Microsoft Power Automate is really kind of a personal productivity tool not super feature rich like some of the others that we're going to talk about, it's just part of the giant Microsoft software estate. And there's a substantial amount of overlap between, for example, UiPath's and Automation Anywhere's customer bases and Power Automate users. And it's speaking with the number of customers. They'll say, "Yeah, we use Power Automate," but they see enterprise automation platforms as much more feature rich and capable and they see a role for both. But it's something to watch out for because Microsoft can obviously take a bite out of virtually any platform and moderate the enthusiasm for it. But nonetheless, these other firms that we're mentioning here, the two leaders, they really stand out, UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Both are elevated well above that 40% line with a meaningful presence in the data set. And you can see the path that they took to get to where they are today. Now we had predicted in 2021 in our predictions post that Automation Anywhere would IPO in 2021. So we predicted that in December of 2020 but it hasn't happened yet. The company obviously wasn't ready, and it brought in new management. We reported on that, Chris Riley as the Chief Revenue Officer, and it made other moves to show up their business. Now let me say this about Riley. I've known him him for years, he's a world class sales leader, one of the best in the tech business. And he knows how to build a world class go to market team, I guarantee that's what he's doing. I have no doubt he's completely reinventing his sales team, the alliances, he's got a lot of experience of that when he was at EMC and Dell and HPE, and he knows the channel really well. So I have a great deal of confidence that if Automation Anywhere's product is any good, which the ETR data clearly shows that it is, then the company is going to do very well. Now, as for the timing of an IPO, look, with the market choppiness, who knows? Automation Anywhere, they raised a ton of dough and it was last valued around... In 2019, it was just north of 7 billion. And so if UiPath is valued at 15 billion, you could speculate that Automation Anywhere can't be valued at much more than 10 billion, maybe a little under, maybe a little over. And so they might wait for the market volatility to chill out a little bit before they do the IPO or maybe they've got some further cleanup to do and they want to get their metrics better, but we'll see. Now to the point earlier about Blue Prism, look at its position on the vertical axis, very respectable. Just a finer point on Pega. We've always said that they're not an RPA specialist but they have an RPA offering and a presence in the ETR data set in this sector. And they got a sizeable market cap so we'd like to include them. Now here's another look at the net score data. The way net score works is ETR asks customers, are you adopting a platform for the first time? That's that lime green there. Are you accelerating spending on the platform by 6% or more relative to last year, or sometimes relative to some other point in time, this is relative to last year. That's the forest green. Is your spending flat or is it, that's the gray, or is it decreasing by 6% or worse? Or are you churning? That's that bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score which is shown for each company on the right along with the Ns in the survey. So other than Pega, every company shown here has new adoptions in the double digits, not a lot of churn. UiPath and and Automation Anywhere have net scores well over that 40% mark. Now, some other data points on those two, ETR did a little peeling of the onion in their data set and I found a couple of interesting nuggets. UiPath in the Fortune 500 has a 91% net score and a 77% net score in the Global 2000. So significantly higher than its overall average. This speaks to the company's strong presence in larger companies and the adoption and how larger companies are leaning in. Although UiPath's actually still solid in smaller firms as well by the way but... Now the other piece of information is, when asked why they buy UiPath over alternatives customers said a robust feature set, technical lead and compatibility with their existing environment. Now to Automation Anywhere. They have a 72% net score in the Fortune 500, well above its average across the survey, but 46% only in the Global 2000 below its overall average shown here of 54. So we'd like to see a wider aperture in the Global 2000. Again, this is a survey set, who knows, but oftentimes these surveys are indicative. So maybe Automation Anywhere just working that out, more time, figuring out the go to market in the Global 2000 beyond those larger customers. Now, when asked why they buy from Automation Anywhere versus the competition customers cited a robust feature set, just like UiPath, technological lead, just like UiPath, and fast ROI. Now I really believe that both for Automation Anywhere and UiPath, the time to value is much compressed relative to most technology projects. So I would highlight that as well. And I think that's a fundamental reason, one of the reasons why RPA has taken off. All right let's wrap up. The bottom line is this space is moving and it's evolving quickly, and will keep on a fast pace given the customer poll, the funding levels that have been poured into the space, and, of course, the competitive climate. We're seeing a new transformation agenda emerge. Pre COVID, the catalyst was back office efficiency. During the pandemic, we saw an acceleration and organizations are taking the lessons learned from that forced March experience, the digital I sometimes call it, and they're realizing a couple things. One, they can attack much more complex problems than previously envisioned. And two, in order to cloudify and SaaSify their businesses, they need to put automation along with data and AI at the core to completely transform into a digital entity. Now we're moving well beyond automating bespoke tasks and paving the cow path as I sometimes like to say. And we're seeing much more integration across systems like ERP and HR and finance and logistics et cetera, collaboration, customer experience, and importantly, this has to extend into broader ecosystems. We're also seeing a rise in semantic workflows to tackle more complex problems. We're talking here about going beyond a linear process of automation. Like for instance, read this, click on that, copy that, put it here, join it with that, drag and drop it over here and send it over there. It's evolving into a much more interpreter of actions using machine intelligence to watch, to learn, to infer, and then ultimately act as well as discover other process automation opportunities. So think about the way work is done today. Going into various applications, you grab data, you trombone back out, you do it again, in and out, in and out, in and out of these systems, et cetera, NASM, and replacing that sequence with a much more intelligent process. We're also seeing a lot more involvement from C-level executives, especially the CIO, but also the chief digital officer, the chief data officer, with low code solutions enabling lines of business to be much more involved in the game. So look, it's still early here. This sector, in my view, hasn't even hit that steep part of the S-curve yet, it's still building momentum with larger firms leading the innovation, investing in things like centers of excellence and training, digging in to find new ways of doing things. It's a huge priority because the efficiencies that large companies get, they drop right to the bottom line and the big ER the more money that drops. We see that in the adoption data and we think it's just getting started. So keep an eye on this space. It's not a fad, it's here to stay. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research this week's topics and Alex Myerson on the production team who also manages the Breaking Analysis Podcast, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, helped get the word out on social. Thanks guys. Your great teamwork, really appreciate that. Now remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR's website at etr.ai. And we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me directly, david.vellante@siliconangle.com is my email. You can DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (outro music)

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and pleased to welcome back. One of our cube alumni, Christian rowdy, the VP of technology strategy at Citrix Christian. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. And thanks for having me. Great to see you again, and we'll be virtually at this time. >>Great to see you too. It's been a couple of years and quite a few things have changed since we got to sit down at synergy a couple of years together together. Citrix has an exciting new announcement. Let's unpack that. Talk me to me about what you're announcing and what it's going to deliver. >>Sure. You know, as you said, actually, I can't believe it's been a couple of years since we last saw each other. And I think, you know, time's kind of just disappeared within the pandemic. So it actually, as a result of some of those things that we've seen, you know, people get so tired of being stuck in the same place and tired of being on this constant stream of video. And one of the things that we wanted to do was, was actually a vital Citrix launch part, which is kind of our new announcement series that will be delivered via LinkedIn live. But he's really intended to be kind of a short burst approach to providing updates to some of them really important things that we're working on at Citrix. So, uh, hopefully, uh, people would love to say a reason and get some rich information from them. >>And there's going to be a series of three launchpad programs. Now we've seen so much change since the rapid pivot to work from home. Now this worked from anywhere hybrid environment. We've seen the, the massive adoption of cloud and SAS. We've also seen the threat landscape, the attack surface, just expand and expand. Talk to me about why Citrix is doing the launch pad series and then we'll go through each of the three series. >>Yeah, absolutely. So maybe I think just to set a little bit of context, you know, we, we were working on some pretty interesting things, uh, pre pandemic, you know, uh, as a result of the, kind of the, the evolution of Citrix as an organization, but perhaps more importantly, the journey that our customers were on globally, you know, every customer that we had in, in any industry across the world, we're all at various stages of their own digital transformation. And I think what the pandemic has done apart from all the really bad things, actually, if you look at it as a, perhaps one gleaming bit of light in the whole thing was that we've given organizations, whether we realize it or not the opportunity to try this huge remote work experiment. And I think what it has done above anything else has shown that remote work actually works. >>And so as a result of that, what we've seen coming out of the pandemic is that organizations are really going to use that as a springboard. So implement some new strategies, new technologies, and really drive the next generation of that business. So with one eye on that, I think if you were to categorize the three big things that we're looking at from a Citrix perspective, it's really about how to help, we'll continue to help our customers with that accelerated it modernization to really help them understand what it takes to have secure, flexible work in this new post pandemic world. And then also to think about productivity, what does productivity mean in a world of ever more distributed teams? And so the events that we're talking about and specifically the cloud one, we'll focus on some of the new offerings from Citrix, some of the new technologies and talk about the trends that we've seen within our customers. >>So, you know, one of the big things that Citrix has always been very proud of is our market leading position in virtual application and virtual desktop delivery. And even that itself has now begun to emerge into what we call desktop as a service. And there's a ton of new innovations that we've been working on in that space as well. But also if you think about what's happening in cloud, as you talked about, you know, the evolution of applications being from traditional on premises, wills to SAS applications, what we're also seeing is things like the network services that use to support those applications when they looked slightly different, which from a deployment perspective, and now all moving to cloud services, the security that you alluded to in terms of how complicated that is, but how important it is for it, organizations, those services also moving to cloud as the applications begin to look very differently in the future. So extremely excited about the cloud launch. Patino, we're going to talk a lot about those things that we're doing both in the public cloud, in the hybrid cloud. And I think it will resonate well with customers around the world. >>I think it will as well. And you mentioned there are glimmers of hope that we've seen in the last 18 months. And one of the things that this has proved is that work from home can be productive, can be successful. Employees need to be empowered to be able to do that. Let's go ahead and talk through the first, um, program accelerating it monetization. This is Tuesday, September 28th. Let's talk about some of the, of the Citrix innovations that you're going to be announcing. >>Yeah, so I mean, as I mentioned know, we, we, we think about sort of ecstatic. I see modernization in various parts. You know, we tend to start with the classic infrastructure and we've seen over the years that lots of infrastructure, you know, he's leaving the building. And by that we mean the traditional realms of on-premise data centers or co-location facilities, this constant evolution and migration of those services, uh, to, to infrastructure as a service providers from the huge cloud companies that are out there. And we can continue to see that as a, as a huge trend. Of course. Um, one of the things that off the back of that of course is our move from the traditional world of virtual desktops, which was a very on-premise concept into desktop as a service. So really the key around desktop as a service, it's a simplification, some cost optimization and the things that it are looking at in terms of how they can really bring things to the party for their organizations going forward. >>And of course, as we move into that world of everything being delivered as a service know, things like network services, security services, they almost follow. So some of the things that you'll hear about that is really around our application, delivering security and also our move from VDI to DAS. And, you know, you'll hear a lot about what we're doing with the world's leading cloud providers to really add more Citrix value or build on what we've already done with them, but lots, lots more, uh, and really support the, the, the notion of the, every customer is on a journey to cloud one way or the other. And of course, districts will be ready to help at any stage of that journey. >>Every customer is on the journey to cloud. And we've seen that accelerate so much in the last 18 months. Talk to me a little bit about if we, if we think of desktop as a service, as an evolution of VDI, is that what you're saying? >>Yeah. You know, you think about sort of the traditional VDI scenario was that your virtual desktops, where we were using instead of physical desktops, you know, in inside the usual office location, but during the pandemic, you know, we saw so many customers rely on moving to VDI, to cloud, for reasons of scalability and reasons of security, but then also needing to still in many cases, provide access to those sort of traditional physical PCs. And of course, Citrix has had solutions for that for fundamentally many, many years. Um, but what we're also seeing is that organizations are striving for simplicity. You know, the kind of the value of the desktop is being able to deliver it on demand to the end user securely from wherever they are in the world on whatever device they're on. And as we see this sort of establishment of these new working norms, and I'm not a great fan of the phrase, the new normal, I think we have a new now and that now will evolve. You know, they almost daily as we come through the other side of the pandemic. So the real key drivers for us there obviously flexibility, reliability, security, and also cost optimization, which of course is the bread and butter of most conversations we have with CIO and CTO is around the world. >>That's critical. And I'm going to borrow that, um, the new, now, if you don't mind, I'll cite you credit. But I like that. I agree that I hope this is not the new normal, but one of the things that we've seen in the new now on the security front is we've seen this massive increase in ransomware. Everybody went to work from home almost overnight. Suddenly you have millions of devices, IOT devices connecting to corporate networks. Security became the acceleration of security, became a huge challenge for customers in any organization globally. Let's talk about now the second announcement. This is going to be Tuesday, October 5th, empowering a secure distributed workforce. >>Yeah. And I, and I think you you've hit the nail on the head there. I think the one thing that was perhaps completely staggering to everybody was the speed in which organizations were forced to lock their employees out of the physical office locations and by force. I mean, for all the right reasons that are around the health and wellbeing. I mean, if I think back to my earlier career, you know, before I joined Citrix, I was in a large organization and we would, you know, perform these fire drills every so often where we would go through our disaster recovery business continuity plans and really play scenarios out. Like the office in London was unavailable or the office in LA was unavailable, but never once do I remember is doing every office. And every location is offline from tomorrow. And there's no negotiability. If you have a device at home, please use it. >>You know, we can't provide laptops quick enough, especially with the global chip shortage now as well. So whatever device you have, we'll do our best to, to make that secure. And I think there was, uh, an expectation that the employees would sort of play nicely in that scenario. But of course, you know, if you have your home device, you probably don't update it as much as a work device. So it really does require a new set of thinking. And of course, Citrix has been at the forefront of the zero trust evolution. Now the technologies that we have in place do permit remote work and have them for many years. But I think what we're seeing now is a slightly different type of remote work, you know, with different types of, of applications and devices, as you said, different locations, you know, needing to knit all of that together in a sort of a more contextual way so that we can understand, you know, combinations of the end user, their location, the types of applications that they're using the state of their devices, and sort of bring it all that together to really understand, you know, just exactly how much security needs to be applied. >>I think the traditional challenges are still there, you know, too much security and end users will find a way around it because it's not a good user experience. And, you know, perhaps too much user experience without the security leaves, big holes and big problems for organizations. So, yeah, I think this balancing act is really key. And of course, uh, as we go through the launch funnel security, we'll talk about some of the great innovations and solutions that are coming from central. >>You're right with the fact that, uh, you know, this rapid pivot security, the changes, the things that people are saying, the workforce needs to be empowered. You know, we saw this sudden dependence on all these SAS applications to communicate and to collaborate. We also saw with that rapid PennDOT to work from home ransomware, I was doing some research recently, Christian, and that's it, it's up almost 11 X just in the first half of 2021 DDoSs is massively up. People are, are working from home in environments that are just suddenly a bit chaotic. And it's challenging from a security perspective when you have so many distractions to be able to make sure that you're following all the right steps as an employee, um, that you're not clicking on nefarious links and that you're really doing your own due diligence. So having that zero trust and help from folks like Citrix is really key to this new. Now, as you say, >>It is, you know, the unfortunate thing is that wildlife, uh, no end user, or certainly I would hope that no one user would willingly cause a problem from a security perspective. I think just by the very nature of the way that end users thing, can they interact with links in emails or the, uh, you know, interact with attachments in emails? Unfortunately, relying on the human is always going to be the weakest link in the chain. And I think that's why we have to have new approaches to how we address the use of behavior. You know, can we actually, uh, you know, guide people in different ways. There are plenty of technologies that are out there now. And then many, many from Citrix that actually allow us to what we've lovingly said is, is to save the users from themselves. You know, we can't simply rely on every user to be diligent for every single email or every single link that they see. So, you know, being able to actually understand, you know, where the threats are as it relates to the end user and the likely interaction they have, and then being able to combat those threats in the technology at a seamless way is really part of the excited evolution of, of what we're doing with Citrix. And again, lots of great things to come as we go through the security. >>And the third announcement is around worker boosting worker productivity. That's been a challenge that we've all faced in the last 18 months of having, like I said, a minute ago, you know, people that have suddenly kids learning from home spouses, working people competing for bandwidth. Talk to me about some of the things that Citrix is doing to help those workers be more engaged, be plugged in and really be able to get their jobs done from anywhere. >>Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I can give you the benefit of my experience, you know, being, uh, in a, in a home office for, for, for almost 20 months has been completely the antithesis of the opposite of the rest of my career. You know, I've, I've always been very mobile, um, you know, kind of picking up different devices and using them for different things, just purely from a, you know, the perspective of what's most convenient to me. And I think, you know, if you take that and extrapolate it to, to every employee and every organization around the world who has had to invite work into their home, you know, and another soundbite that I use quite often now is that, you know, for the last 20 months, we really haven't been working from home. We've been living at work, you know, and, and, and it's, it's a fact, you know, we've probably done more hours than ever before. >>We've run the risk of burnout more than ever before. And, you know, prior to the pandemic, I know, talked to you and I talked about this very thing, uh, at synergy, you know, w we talked about the notion of needing to focus on employee experience and employee productivity. You know, we saw plenty of examples in customers with huge initiatives around employee experience and employee productivity. You know, CIO is partnering with HR leads and really trying to figure out a map, the employee journey, you know, what is it that they do every day? You know, how can we make their life easier? And perhaps interestingly, how can we reduce some of the mundane overhead, you know, approvals or requests or things that we see in our everyday life, but actually give the employees more time to be valuable and, and do great cognitive work, which is of course, what, what humans do best. >>And so, you know, you remember, we talked about the micro apps back then. We, we we'd completed the acquisition of Sappho, uh, as you and I talked last time when we unveiled micro apps and micro workflows, as a way to really help end users interact within Citrix workspace. So the systems that they use every day, but provide a new way to do that. And just earlier this year, we completed the acquisition and integration of Reich, which was a fantastic addition to the Citrix portfolio. And so we've really begun to think about, you know, how can we actually help employees to do their best work? You know, w w what are the new capabilities that we need within Citrix workspace? What are the new capabilities that we need in Reich? How do we bring all that together with some of the other solutions that we have Citrix Podio is a really interesting suite of productivity applications that we have really aimed at that number one problem, which is how can I get people to be productive, to stay engaged, to lower the burnout and help them do their best work. And I'm really, really excited because there's some fantastic things. So we announced that the work version of the launch pod, which is on October 12th, >>All of those are so critical. You know, I I've always said employee productivity employee is directly related to the customer experience. I've used Wrike myself before, um, for different projects and being able to have productivity tools that allow the employee to engage, to be able to empower them to move projects forward, especially in a time that is still somewhat chaotic is, is critical as is to your point, ensuring that there are the proper tools to facilitate folks so that they get what they need when they need it to help reduce burnout. That's been a big challenge. You're right. That the living at work thing is real, it's persisting, and we're going to be in this hybrid environment for some TBD amount of time longer. So having the ability to be empowered and productive in a secure way, leveraging cloud capabilities is really key. And it's exciting to hear what Citrix launchpad is going to announce over those three days and deliver. >>Yeah. You know, I, I would just say, you know, in, in, in sort of summary where we're, we're really excited about the three areas now, and they really do sort of all come together in some of those challenges that we talked about, you know, specifically around how we can help organizations to address that accelerated it modernization to drive secure, flexible work in the new now, and also to really reach that goal of having extremely productive, distributed teams as we come out the other side of the pandemic. So, you know, lots going on a fantastic time to, to be here and to talk to you and to be at Citrix, of course, with so many, you know, huge customer issues that we, that we have to solve. And we're really excited for the challenge. >>Excellent. And we all are looking forward to that, the Citrix launchpad series, Christian, where can folks go to register for these different programs? >>Yeah, sure. So it's pretty simple. So if we just go to HTTP bit dot Lee, bit dot L Y forward slash Citrix launchpad, and we can sign up through that. >>Excellent. I've already signed up. I'm looking forward to these series, this series, to learn more about what you guys are doing and kind of dig in double click on some of the things that you spoke about Christian. Thank you for joining me today, talking about the launch pad series and letting folks know where they can go to register. >>Thank you. Great to be on the great to see you again. >>Likewise, for Christian Riley, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a cube conversation.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest, 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, my co-host this week. Day two keynote coverage, Jeff. Good to hear all the great commentary, good stuff great to see you. >> Yeah. You too, John. You know it is a great way to start the day too, with Chris Riley and you've interviewed him a ton. I've interviewed him a ton. I don't know how many times he's been on theCUBE but he's, he's such a sharp guy and he's very articulate. And he speaks in really simple analogies. And it's really easy to keep track of what he's talking about and really focusing on the edge, you know, and he even broke down what exactly is the edge. And he said it very simply right, you just moving compute to the location where the data is gathered, as well as words consumed. And he had a great example of, of, you know, an edge device on a railroad track, keep the track of the trains. And how do you manage that? How do you keep track of it? If there's a problem with it, how do you, how do you fix it so that you can use these, these devices out on the edge to, you know, provide the data and the telemetry to avoid things like everyone trying to avoid. Like unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime or potentially having some little issue that forces you to reroute a bunch of the trains and you can't get out there to fix it for so much time. So, really bringing this intelligence to the EDS and being able to bring that compute there. Still supported by a data center for a lot of stuff but really again, just fundamentally moving compute to the edge, loves this story. >> Yeah, yeah. Chris is a great, great guy, CTO of Red Hat. We've been here many times in theCUBE. Keep alumni tech athlete as we say, but if you think about it, I mean, we go back to OpenStack. When we first started interviewing Chris. And what's interesting, Jeff of this keynote is, 5G and edge was a big part of it. If you look at the rise of the telco cloud, that was Pat Gelsinger at VMworld, just recently. Talked about this telco cloud. And if you look at kind of what's going on, OpenStack was supposedly dead by Amazon. OpenStack really has brought in the whole private cloud or the telco cloud. If you look at where OpenStack has been successful over the years. You get this new rise of the telco cloud. Okay. If you bring that in, again, bring back Pat Gelsinger, his comment around how telco and 5G is a B to B app, not a B to C. Businesses will be leveraging 5G. And that is clearly an IOT use case. The internet of things at the edge is going to be people, devices, everything. Purpose-built to programmable. And so this is a huge positioning shift in the marketplace as companies have to level up and figure out the edge. So, you know, Chris nails it, in my opinion. If you want to innovate, you've got to automate at the edge. This again is a nice tailwind for Red Hat and Ansible because it brings the Ansible automation in, with open shift and all the work that they've been doing over the years. So, it kind of is a coming home if you will, for all the work from OpenStack to open shift, to public hybrid and now multi-cloud and with private cloud aka the telco cloud. So, this is a fundamental change. I think 5G is going to be a real go-bigger-go-home, moment, I think.(chuckles) I'm praying that it's going to be faster, cheaper, smaller for us consumers, but companies got to get on this. And the pandemic has shown that connectivity security is required. And this is only going to put more pressure on the networks. It's just going to be incredible. I think he hit a home-run with the keynote. I'm super glad Red Hat's thinking this way because it really shows what I think the future will be. >> Yeah. Another thing that Chris talked on actually took some notes here. I, I just want to quote from my notes, is he talked about automation, right. A lot of this automation is the theme we hear about, automation all the time. But he had an interesting quote that it's more than a tool but a process, the constant process on and on. That you need to embed automation as a fundamental component or the organization. And I thought that was really interesting, right. We hear this over and over about so many themes, right. It's not, it's not a destination, it's a journey. And to really think about automation, in more of the context of a journey where you can input it in, as many processes as you can. Now, we had a great interview with, you know, Google, way back when talking about trying to get all the the lameness out of everyday jobs, right. To do the automate, the minutia, I think was the quote. So, that people can get on to higher value things. So, I thought it was a really interesting take-tip, to take out of a higher level view of automation and think about applying it in as many places as you possibly can. And it is a journey versus, you know, a one-stop shop. You put it in and move on to your next task. >> Yeah, that's a great point about the organizational impact. Because if you think about and again, he kind of addressed this in the keynote. And it's kind of sprinkled throughout the theme but also we've been reporting on it through theCUBE interviews. Is that it's, it's connecting through that last mile automation at scale. That's a core message we've heard. That's the capabilities of the tech. But the skills gap and the skills to actually address these challenges of the IOT edge with 5G, are being developed. Cybersecurity, space, DevOps, secops. These are skill areas, was not enough people to do the job and there's more automation coming. So you need, again skills gap, so organizations will address that. And finally, trust and security are huge. So you got the, you know, the capabilities, the skillset and trust and security. Because if you got to have these devices, whether they're purpose built or software defined, this truly impacts an organization. Not just by having the speeds and feeds, the trust and security, and then the skills. Who's going to build it? Who's going to implement it? Who's going to manage it? This is all a whole new generation. And this is what's clearly coming out of all the data we're seeing in the market. It's not just the edge it's, it's everything to do with this kind of like last mile, IOT piece. And it's large scale. So, it's not going away. >> Right. And Matt Jones touched about on that a little bit. And he's, in his keynote as well, talking about using automation to build community. And to your point, John, it comes up over and over in all those keynotes is trust, trust, trust, right. You have to trust the people that you're working with so that you can build community. And you know that they're going to do their part of the job, and you can do your part of the job. And the way you build trust is with collaboration, so that you can cross those barriers whether it's interdepartmental, or I think the, one of the lines from the keynotes was, you know, between Dev and networking. He talks about them being locked up, you know, behind special magnetic locks and hard to get to. So, if you can't get to them, you can't collaborate with them, hard to build trust. So really I think it's again, an interesting twist to use automation as a vehicle to build trust. Really important concept. Again, as you said, in, in 2020 as we come to the end of 2020 and into 2021, you know, COVID has changed the dynamic of DevOps and the way DevOps teams work and how they work, and what they measure and how they collaborate. So if you don't have trust that puts you in a real bad spot. >> Well, trust is multiple dimensions. Right. You mentioned the people side but also infrastructure as code. One of the ethos of DevOps is, you got to trust the infrastructure. If you're coding and programming the infrastructure, you got to understand that that infrastructure as code is going to work. And they'll contain the workloads or, or still only about 15% penetrated give or take, IDC says. So, more containerization is going to happen. More infrastructures' code is going to happen. You need trust there. And what we're hearing at the show here is and kind of teased out the keynote is, customers are thinking about the, their infrastructure automation strategy. But open source still matters. And that's where the trust comes in. The automation space in light of other major cloud vendors promoting their own platforms. Cross cloud integration and automation are starting to become key things that people are starting to talk about. Not just AWS public cloud, you've got Azure, Google and other clouds. As customers start thinking about the trust relationship and open source, this has been kind of becoming a big point. So, you know, hope being open is the way to go. That's where open source is. So I think, the trust equation will be very interesting to see how that plays out. Not only on the infrastructure as code, from a resiliency standpoint and scale, but open source when you add the people component and this collections and content, it's going to be very interesting to see how that all plays out. >> Yeah, it's, it's going to be a good show. And the other thing is that it still feels, it still really feels like Ansible, right. It's still really feels like Red Hat. It doesn't feel like the, you know, kind of the IBM acquisition has had a material impact in the way that they go to market, and the way that the community engages and, and just kind of the voice to me. Still sounds pretty consistent. So you know, good for IBM for, you know, taking a great asset and letting it continue to, continue to run. >> Yep. Well, the thing that I'm looking for at going forward, coming out of this event, is the big mega trend on the business model side is everything is a service also called XAAS. We're hearing that from Cisco, VMware, everyone's talking about everything as a service. And it's easier to give a mandate, "Oh, everything is a service. Jeff, go build it out. Everything is a surge." You go, "Okay." The you go, "Okay, how do we make that happen?" It's not trivial. So you have clustering, you have multi clusters, policy governance. All the things under the covers of making everything as a service, you need automation. And I think the conversation will shift from automation, automation, automation to services, services, services. Because to get to anything as a service, you got to have the under, underpinnings, you got to have the data, you got to have the automation. These are critical architectural foundational things. And you can start to hear that from some of the influencers in the industry. Automation is great, but to get to the services as everything is a service, it's kind of work.(chuckles) It's easier to say. It's hard to do. And we'll keep an eye on that. >> All right. Great. Well, John, again, thanks for sharing your thoughts. We will jump into the program and hear from of the great folks at Ansible and some of their fantastic guests for this continuing coverage of theCUBE, at AnsibleFest 2020. Ready, John? >> All right. Let's do it. A lot of great interviews. Stay with us. >> Jeff: Alright. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Robotic process automation solutions remain one of the most attractive investments for IT buyers. This is despite our overall 2020 IT spending forecast, which remained depressed at minus four to minus 5% for the year. Relative to previous surveys, we do see some softness in traditional RPA strongholds such as large financial services and big insurance and giant public and privates. But RPA relative to other IT investments remains at the top as a sector with the highest spending momentum ahead of machine learning, ahead of AI, ahead of containers, and ahead of cloud computing. Hello, everyone, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on the latest RPA trends and share fresh ETR data with our community. So let's get right into it with a quick summary. Now, as I said, despite our pretty tepid IT spending outlook for the entire year in 2020, demand for RPA software continues to grow at a 60 to 70% clip. Now remember, RPA mimics human computer interactions, it uses software scripts or robots that execute human tasks in a runtime assembly of discrete steps. The practice first became popular for back office functions mostly, is unattended bots. The pandemic appears to be accelerating front office adoption and this is creating a bit of a schism between front and back office. Digital transformation initiatives in many ways, they're going to create the connective tissue between front and back of the house. Now competitive dynamics are heating up. The two emergent leaders Automation Anywhere and UiPath are separating from the pack. Large incumbent software vendors like Microsoft, IBM and SAP are entering the market and positioning RPA as a feature. Meanwhile, legacy business process automation players continue to focus on taking their install bases on a broader automation journey. However, all three of these constituents are on a collision course in our view, where deeper automation objective is kind of the North Star. Now there are two material changes to our previous scenario. First, we've expanded our thinking on the RPA TAM, and we're extending this toward a broader automation agenda more consistent with buyer goals. In other words, the TAM is much larger than we initially thought, and we'll explain why. Second, we no longer see this as a winner take all or even winner take most market. In this segment, we'll look deeper into the leaders and share some new data. In particular, well, it appeared in our previous analysis that UiPath was running the table in the market, we see a much more textured, competitive dynamic setting up. And the data suggests that other players including Automation Anywhere, and even some of the larger incumbents will challenge UiPath for leadership in this space. Now, as with many developing software markets, the ultimate leader is not crystal clear at this point. Let's talk about the effects of the pandemic. A conventional wisdom really suggests and by the way, we would agree that the automation mandate has accelerated by several years due to Coronavirus. It's three points here. One is that yes, COVID has put digital transformation on the front burner of executives priority lists. Second is automation isn't trivial. So there's a real difference between wanting and achieving. And third, we believe there's another driver for the automation mandate, which will survive a vaccine or herd immunity, and that is the productivity gap. So this chart here underscores that point and was brought to our attention by a friend of ours, Dave Moschella. Specifically, we've seen a noticeable decline in productivity in the US and EU, since remember the personal productivity boom from the personal computer? The PC and the internet brought forth those trends in Moschella's premise and we agree is that in order to solve the grand challenges of the 2020s and beyond automation is going to be necessary. Think about climate change, global competitiveness, aging populations and infrastructure, massive deficits, mass immigration, sustainable food sources, healthcare. These are all going to require huge injections of automation into the system to solve problems associated with these areas. Human labor just isn't the answer. So this in part has influenced our expanded thinking on the total available market. The diagram we're showing here updates our expectations on the TAM for RPA. The first takeaway is that we're envisioning a market for business automation well beyond software bots, which are represented really in the first two layers, that back office and front office divide, if you will. And we see that coming together in the third layer, those two are really going to happen through digital transformation initiatives. But we also envision a massive market for automated decision making, and very deep business integration where systems are communicating to each other, system to system, machine to machine, and also making real time decisions on behalf of humans. Sometimes we call that systems of agency. Now, I won't go deep into this TAM, as it's a bit academic, but suffice it to say this is an enormous market comprising many layers of the tech stack and services stacks. And this represents a serious opportunities for multiple players, both vendors and buyers. Okay, let's get a little bit more tactical and look at the spending data, the latest spending data, from the ETR survey. The chart we're showing here is one of our favorites. And it compares leading RPA vendors on two dimensions. The y-axis is net score or spending momentum. It's a simple metric, that for this last survey asked buyers are you spending more or less in the second half of the year than you had originally planned. Net score is derived by subtracting the lesses from the mores, and is really shown in the upper right of this chart. You can see that in the green highlights. Note that the total N in the survey is around 1200. And you can see that the number of responses for each vendor is shown in the upper right in that gray area. We eliminated any RPA vendor that didn't get at least 25 mentions in responses in the survey. And you can see that Automation Anywhere and UiPath have essentially traded positions on the vertical axis. Indicating that Automation Anywhere customers expect greater spending momentum with the company than UiPath customers for the second half of this year, than they did in the first half. UiPath at 62% net score is still very, very high but this marks the first time since our reporting that AA, has taken the lead ahead of UiPath in net score. And the small arrow show the general direction of their respective momentum over the last couple of surveys, and I'll discuss this later on. Now on this chart, you can also see Blue Prism and Pegasystems and, while they're significantly below Automation Anywhere and UiPath, these are very respectable net scores for more mature players like these. But I don't really consider them RPA specialists, and especially Pega. I mean, they have an automation play well beyond RPA and have built really an awesome business and in many ways are benefiting from the hype being created by the newbies. I have to say I'm in awe of the business that Alan Trefler and his team have built. We're talking about a billion dollar company here. They've got a valuation, over 9 billion, the stock's near an all time high, and they never took a dime of outside capital prior to their IPO, which is just unreal. Oh, yeah, one more thing I want to call your attention to. There's Microsoft with power automate, and kind of crashing the party with a 1.0 product that is making some noise in the marketplace. Now on the y-axis, you can see UiPath has the market share lead, but I want to remind you what this is. Market shares I mentioned of pervasiveness in the data set in the survey and is, calculated by dividing the number of mentions for a vendor in a sector by the total mentions in the survey. So you can see that UiPath has the share of voice lead, but it's still under 10% of the total survey base. So lots of room for this market to grow. But I want to make an important note here because UiPath has historically been a collection of point products, whereas Automation Anywhere their go to market typically involves going to larger accounts and selling this sort of Mongo and digital transformation project to the line of business. As I said earlier, these two and other companies are on a collision course because that is the big prize. UiPath has restructured its product and pricing strategy, done some acquisitions to go after this. But it stands to reason that UiPath has a bigger presence in the ETR data set as measured by market share. So it makes sense that Automation Anywhere, their number one net score position, it makes it even more impressive. Now the other nuance is that ETR tends to be somewhat weighted to the IT side of the house. And although it most certainly picks up line of business spending, there's a bias in the data toward IT. So that means RPA is most likely even stronger in the context of spending initiatives, and it's already number one relative to other sectors. So that's pretty impressive. Now let's look at how net score has changed over time. This chart shows the change in net score or spending momentum for Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism and Pegasystems over the last three survey periods. You see last October, this past April, the height of the lockdown in the US and the most recent July survey. And here you see that Automation Anywhere is accelerating and taking the lead over UiPath. And is the only one in the chart growing net score. Again, UiPath remains elevated despite the relative decline from previous surveys. The other two, I have to caution you again, the Pegasystems for example, and they're killing it in the market. The stock is up nearly 40% year to date, it's over 60% in the last 12 months. So because they're not so RPA only focused and they really are not an IT play per se, the survey data has to be digested in that context. But you do see them coming down from elevated levels last October. Now here's a time series view of that net score. This chart really what it does is it just extends the timeframe and shows more granularity of survey data back to January 2018. So we're talking about 11, quarterly survey data points and snapshots here. This really underscores the power of the ETR platform, because you can stretch the data over time. And you'll see Automation Anywhere overtakes UiPath for the first time since we started capturing the segment. UiPath along with the other shows a noticeable decline in net score in this survey, except for Microsoft, who's, you know, they're just showing up, as I said, they're elbowing their way into the marketplace. Now let's take that same sort of time series view but let's flip to market share. And this next chart shows that other favorite metric that we use all the time as market share or pervasiveness in the dataset, over a time series. Now remember, this is really mentions as a percent of the total. It's not an indication of spending amount, but it's a data point and we pay attention to this. And you can see how UiPath broke away from the pack. They did this back in October 2018, and that coincides with their big push on things like, events, and training, they really have done a good job of building a presence and awareness in the market. I've superimposed on the chart the upper left corner for context that shows net scores in the green and shared N in the gray. It's sorted off of that shared N. This refers to the number of mentions in the dataset for each vendor out of the 1192 total responses. So some of these have small Ns. So I'm not going to put too much emphasis on this except, that UiPath escalation is notable and hopefully I've explain that sufficiently. Okay, let's wrap. So we talked about the automation mandate, and the COVID wrecking ball effect. But it's more than that. The productivity pressures on the US and EU in particular make it exceedingly difficult to just throw labor at the world's grand problems. So this has opened up an enormous opportunity for technology companies and practitioners to drive automation. You know, we said this during the initial in the early days of the big data era. In fact, Peter Goldmacher, had this discussion with us on theCUBE really in the early part of last decade, that those companies that can implement automation at the time he was talking about big data are going to be the big big winners. So it's not just the tech players. Now of course, as we've seen, many of the big tech companies are benefiting enormously from the mega automation trend, but the broader set of industries has massive, massive upside. Now what this sets up is a multi-dimensional competitive environment. We have Automation Anywhere and UiPath battling it out to achieve escape velocity. Automation Anywhere just brought in Chris Riley to run go to market. So you know they're serious. He's a player who understands complex enterprise selling. And now you have UiPath, they're hiring engineers as fast as they can. And the other dimension is a classic battle of best of breed specialists like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, up against the bundlers, selling RPA as a feature of their services. Microsoft, IBM, SAP, etc, all see automation is a huge opportunity and everyone's going to hop on the bandwagon because this is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, at least. Okay. Thanks for watching this episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. Check it out, we've also put up an archive of all the breaking analysis segments on wikibon.com. There's a link on the menu bar right at the top of the homepage that has all 46 episodes that we've done since inception. I write weekly on that wikibon.com platform and I also publish on siliconangle.com where you can find all the relevant news. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data and analysis. Go there and sign up for a trial of the software. It's awesome. Okay, this is Dave Vellante, be well, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM. We're back and this is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cube and we're covering wall-to-wall the IBM 2020 I think digital experience. Rob Thomas is here. He's the senior vice president of clouds and data. Right. Warm rub. Always a pleasure to see you. I wish you were face to face, but Hey, we're doing the best we can. As you say, doing the best we can. Great to see you Dave. Hope family safe, healthy, happy as best you can be. Yeah. Ditto. You back out your Robin. Congratulations on on the new role, you and the cube. We've been riding this data wave for quite some time now. It's really been incredible. It really is. And last year I talked to you about how clients, we're slowly making progress on data strategy, starting to experiment with AI. >>We've gotten to the point now where I'd say it's game on for AI, which is exciting to see and that's a lot of what the theme of this year's think is about. Yeah, and I definitely want to dig into that, but I want to start by asking you sort of moves that you saw you're in there seeing your clients make with regard to the cobot night covert 19 crisis. Maybe how you guys are helping them in very interested in what you see as sort of longterm and even, you know, quasi permanent as a result of this. I would first say it this way. I don't, I'm not sure the crisis is going to change businesses as much as it's going to be accelerating. What would have happened anyway, regardless of the industry that you're in. We see clients aggressively looking at how do we get the digital faster? >>How do we automate more than we ever have before? There's the obvious things like business resiliency and business continuity, managing the distributed workforce. So to me, what we've seen is really about, and acceleration, not necessarily in a different direction, but an acceleration on. The thing is that that we're already kind of in the back of their minds or in the back of their plans now that as we'll come to the forefront and I'm encouraged because we see clients moving at a rate and pace that we'd never seen before that's ultimately going to be great for them, great for their businesses. And so I'm really happy to see that you guys have used Watson to really try to get, you know, some good high fidelity answers to the citizens. I wonder if you could explain that initiative. Well, we've had this application called Watson assistant for the last few years and we've been supporting banks, airlines, retailers, companies across all industries and helping them better interact with our customers and in some cases, employees. >>We took that same technology and as we saw the whole covert 19 situation coming, we said, Hey, we can evolve Watson assistant to serve citizens. And so it started by, we started training the models, which are intent based models in Watson assistant on all the publicly available data from the CDC as an example. And we've been able to build a really powerful virtual agent to serve really any citizen that has questions about and what they should be doing. And the response has been amazing. I mean, in the last two weeks we've gone live with 20 organizations, many of which are state and local governments. Okay. Also businesses, the city of Austin children's healthcare of Atlanta. Mmm. They local governments in Spain and Greece all over the world. And in some instances these clients have gotten live in less than 24 hours. Meaning they have a virtual agent that can answer any question. >>They can do that in less than 24 hours. It's actually been amazing to see. So proud of the team that built this over time. And it was kind of proof of the power of technology when we're dealing with any type of a challenge. You know, I had a conversation earlier with Jamie Thomas about quantum and was asking her sort of how your clients are using it. The examples that came up were financial institutions, pharmaceutical know battery manufacturers, um, airlines. And so it strikes me when you think about uh, machine intelligence and AI, the type of AI that you're yeah, at IBM is not consumer oriented AI. It's really designed for businesses. And I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. Yeah, let's distinguish the difference there. Cause I think you've said it well consumer AI is smart speakers things in our home, you know, music recommendations, photo analysis and that's great and it enriches all of our personal lives. >>AI for business is very different. This is about how do you make better predictions, how do you optimize business processes, how do you automate things that maybe your employees don't want to do in the first time? Our focus in IBM as part of, we've been doing with Watson is really anchoring on three aspects of AI language. So understanding language because the whole business world is about communication of language, trust meaning trusted AI. You understand the models, you understand the data. And then third automation and the whole focus of what we're doing here in the virtual think experience. It's focused on AI for automation. Whether that's automating business processes or the new announcement this week, which is around automating AI opera it operations for a CIO. You, you've talked the years about this notion of an AI ladder. You actually, I actually wrote a book on it and uh, but, but it's been hard for customers to operationalize AI. >>Mmm. We talked about this last year. Thanks. What kind of progress, uh, have we made in the last 12 months? There's been a real recognition of this notion that your AI is only as good as your data. And we use the phrase, there's no AI without IAA, meaning information architecture, it's all the same concept, which is that your data, it has to be ready for AI if you want to too get successful outcomes with AI and the steps of those ladders around how you collect data, how you organize data, how you analyze data, how you infuse that into your business processes. seeing major leaps forward in the last nine months where organizations are understanding that connection and then they're using that to really drive initiatives around AI. So let's talk about that a little bit more. This notion of AI ops, I mean it's essentially the take the concept of dev ops and apply it to the data pipeline if you will. >>Everybody, you know, complains, you know, data scientists complained that all, they spent all their time wrangling data, improving data quality, they don't have line of sight across their organization with regard to other data specialists, whether it's data engineers or even developers. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that announcement and sort of what you're doing in that area. Sure. So right. Let me put a number on it because the numbers are amazing. Every year organizations lose 2016 point $5 billion of revenue because of outages in it system. That is a staggering number when you think about it. And so then you say, okay, so how do you break down and attack that problem? Well, do you have to get better at fixing problems or you have to get better at avoiding problems altogether. And as you may expect, a little bit of both. You, you want to avoid problems obviously, but in an uncertain world, you're always going to deal with unforeseen challenges. >>So the also the question becomes how fast can you respond and there's no better use of AI. And then to do, I hope you like those tasks, which is understanding your environment, understanding what the systems are saying through their data and identifying issues become before they become outages. And once there is an outage, how do you quickly triage data across all your systems to figure out where is the problem and how you can quickly address it. So we are announcing Watson AI ops, which is the nervous system for a CIO, the manager, all of their systems. What we do is we just collect data, log data from every source system and we build a semantic layer on top that. So Watson understands the systems, understands the normal behavior, understands the acceptable ranges, and then anytime something's not going like it should, Watson raises his hand and says, Hey, you should probably look at this before it becomes a problem. >>We've partnered with companies like Slack, so the UI for Watson AI ops, it's actually in Slack so that companies can use and employees can use a common collaboration tool too. Troubleshoot or look at either systems. It's, it's really powerful. So that we're really proud of. Well I just kind of leads me to my next question, which I mean, IBM got the religion 20 years ago on openness. I mean I can trace it back to the investment you made and Lennox way back when. Um, and of course it's a huge investment last year in red hat, but you know, open source company. So you just mentioned Slack. Talk about open ecosystems and how that it fits into your AI and data strategy. Well, if you think about it, if we're going to take on a challenge this grand, which is AI for all of your it by definition you're going to be dealing with full ecosystem of different providers because every organization has a broad set of capabilities we identified early on. >>That means that our ability to provide open ecosystem interoperability was going to be critical. So we're launching this product with Slack. I mentioned with box, we've got integrations into things like PagerDuty service now really all of the tools of modern it architecture where we can understand the data and help clients better manage those environments. So this is all about an open ecosystem and that's how we've been approaching it. Let's start, it's really about data, applying machine intelligence or AI to that data and about cloud for scale. So I wonder what you're seeing just in terms of that sort of innovation engine. I mean obviously it's gotta be secure. It's, it seems like those are the pillars of innovation for the next 10 plus years. I think you're right. And I would say this whole situation that we're dealing with has emphasized the importance of hybrid deployment because companies have it capabilities on public clouds, on private clouds, really everywhere. >>And so being able to operate that as a single architecture, it's becoming very important. You can use AI to automate tasks across that whole infrastructure that makes a big difference. And to your point, I think we're going to see a massive acceleration hybrid cloud deployments using AI. And this will be a catalyst for that. And so that's something we're trying to help clients with all around the world. You know, you wrote in your book that O'Reilly published that AI is the new electricity and you talked about problems. Okay. Not enough data. If your data is you know, on prem and you're only in the cloud, well that's a problem or too much data. How you deal with all that data, data quality. So maybe we could close on some of the things that you know, you, you talked about in that book, you know, maybe how people can get ahold of it or any other, you know, so the actions you think people should take to get smart on this topic. >>Yeah, so look, really, really excited about this. Paul's the capitalists, a friend of mine and a colleague, we've published this book working with a Riley called the a ladder and it's all the concepts we talked about in terms of how companies can climb this ladder to AI. And we go through a lot of different use cases, scenarios, I think. Yeah. Anybody reading this is going to see their company in one of these examples, our whole ambition was to hopefully plant some seeds of ideas for how you can start to accelerate your journey to AI in any industry right now. Well, Rob, it's always great having you on the cube, uh, your insights over the years and you've been a good friend of ours, so really appreciate you coming on and, uh, and best of luck to you, your family or wider community. I really appreciate it. Thanks Dave. Great to be here and again, wish you and the whole cube team the best and to all of our clients out there around the world. We wish you the best as well. All right. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think 20, 20 digital, the vent. We'll be right back right after this short break. This is Dave Volante.

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. Everyone's two cubes Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS reinforce. This is Amazon Web services Inaugural conference around Cloud security There first of what? Looks like we'll be more focused events around deep dive security to reinvent for security. But not no one's actually saying that. But it's not a summit. It's ah, branded event Reinforce. We're hearing Mark Ryland off director Office of the Sea. So at eight of us, thanks for coming back. Good to see you keep alumni. Yeah, I'm staying here before It's fun. Wait A great Shadow 80 Bucks summit in New York City Last year we talked about some of the same issues, but now you have a dedicated conference here on the feedback from the sea. So as we've talked to and the partners in the ecosystem is, it's great to have an event where they go deep dives on some of the key things that are really, really important to security. Absolutely. This is really kind of a vibe that how reinvents started, right? So reinventing was a similar thing for commercial. You're deep, not easy to us. Three here, deeper on Amazon. But with security. Yeah, security lens on some of the same issues. One thing that happened >> and kind of signal to us that we needed an event like this over the years with reinvent was consistently over the years, the security and compliance track became one of the most important tracks that was oversubscribed in overflow rooms and like, Hey, there's a signal here, right? And so, but at the same time, we wanted to be able to reach on audience. Maybe they wouldn't go to reinvent because they thought I'd say It's all the crazy Dale Ops guys were doing this cloud thing. But now, of course, they're getting the strong message in their security organizations like, Hey, we're doing cloud. Or maybe as a professional, I need to really get smart about this stuff. So it's been a nice transition from still a lot of the same people, but definitely the different crowd that's coming here and was a cross pollination between multiple and I was >> just at Public sector summit. They about cyber security from a national defense and intelligence standpoint. Obviously, threesome Carlson leads That team you got on the commercial side comes like Splunk who our data and they get into cyber. So you started to see kind of the intersection of all the kind of Amazon ecosystems kind of coming around security, where it's now part of its horizontal. It's not just these are the security vendors and partners writes pretty much everyone's kind of becoming native into thinking about security and the benefits that you guys have talk about that what Amazon has to have a framework, a posture. Yeah, they call it shared responsibility. But I get that you're sharing this with the ecosystem. Makes sense. Yeah, talk about the Amazon Web service is posture for this new security >> world. Well, the new security world is if you look at like a typical security framework like Mist 853 120 50 controls all these different things you need to worry about if you're a security professional. And so what eight obvious able to do is say, look, there's a whole bunch of these that we can take care of on your behalf. There's some that we'll do some things and you got to do some things and there's some There's still your responsibility, but we'll try to make it easy for you to do those parts. So right off the bat we can get a lot of wins from just hey, there's a lot of things will just take care of. And you could essentially delegate to us. And for the what remain, You'll take your expertise and you'll re focus it on more like applications security. There still may be some operating systems or whatever. If using virtual machine service, you still have to think about that. But even there, we'll use we have systems Manager will make it easy to do patch management, updating, et cetera. And if you're willing to go all the way to is like a lambda or some kind of a platform capability, make it super easy because all you gotta do is make sure your code is good and we'll take care of all the infrastructure automatically on your behalf so that share responsibility remains. There's a lot of things you still need to be careful about and do well, but your experts can refocus. They could be very you know like it's just a lot less to worry about it. So it's really a message for howto raise the bar for the whole community, but yet still have >> that stays online with the baby value properties, which is, you know, build stuff, ship fast, lower prices. I mazon ethos in general. But when you think about the core A. W. S what made it so great Waas you can reduce the provisioning of resource is to get something up and running. And I think that's what I'm taking away from the security peace you could say. We know Amazon Web service is really well, and we're gonna do these things. You could do that so us on them and then parts to innovate. So I get that. That's good. The other trend I want to get your reaction to is comments we've had on the Cube with si SOS and customers is a trend towards building in house coding security. Your point about Lambda some cool things air being enabled through a B s. There's a real trend of big large companies with security teams just saying, Hey, you know what? I wanna optimize my talent to code and be security focused on use cases that they care about. So you know, Andy Jazz talks about builders. You guys are about builders you got cos your customers building absolutely. Yet they don't want Tonto, but they are becoming security. So you have a builder mindset going on in the big enterprises. >> Yes, talk about that dynamic. That's a That's a really important trend. And we see that even in security organizations which historically were full of experts but not full of engineers and people that could write code. And what we're seeing now is people say, Look, I have all this expertise, but I also see that with a software defined the infrastructure and everything's in a P I. If I pair up in engineering team with a security professional team, then well, how good things will happen because the security specials will say, Gosh, I do this repetitive task all the time. Can you write code to do that like, Yeah, we can write code to do that. So now I can focus on things that require judgment instead of just more rep repetitive. So So there's a really nice synergy there, and our security customers are becoming builders as well, and they're codifying if you moment expression in code, a policy that used to be in a document. And now they write code this as well. If that policy is whatever password length or how often we rode a credentials, whatever the policy is where Icho to ensure that that actually happening. So it's a real nice confluence of security expertise with the engineering, and they're not building the full stack >> themselves. This becomes again Aki Agility piece I had one customer on was an SMS business. They imported to eight of US Cloud with three engineers, and they wrote all the Kuban aged code themselves. They could have used, you know, other things, but they wanted to make sure it's stable so they could bring in some suppliers that could add value. So, again, this is new. Used to be this way back in the old days, in House developers build the abs on the mainframe, build the APS on the mini computers and then on I went to outsourcing, so we're kind of back. The insourcing is the big trend now, >> right in with the smaller engineering team, I can do a lot that used to require so many more people with a big waterfall method and long term projects. And now I take all these powerful building blocks and put an engineering team five people or what we would call it to pizza team five or six people off to the side, given 34 weeks, and they can generate a really cool system that would have required months and not years before. So that's a big trend, and it applies across the board, including two security. >> I think there's a sea change, and I think it's clear what I like about this show is this cloud security. But it's also they have the on premises conversation, Mrs Legacy applications that have been secured and or need to be secured as they evolve. And then you got cloud native and all these things together where security has to be built in. Yeah, this is a key theme, so I want to get your thoughts on this notion of built in security from Day one. What's your what's your view on this? And how should customers start thinking >> about it? And >> what did you guys bringing to the table? Well, I think that's just a general say maturation that goes on in the industry, >> whether it's cloud or on Prem is that people realize that the old methods we used to use like, Hey, I'm gonna build a nap And then I'm gonna hand it to the security team and they're gonna put firewalls around it That's not really gonna have a good result. So security by design, having security is equal co aspect of If I'm getting doing an architecture, I look a performance. I look, it cost. I look at security. It's just part of my system designed. I don't think of it as like a bolt on afterwards, so that leads to things like, you know, Secure Dev ops and kind of integration teams through. This could be happening on premises to it's just part of I T. Modernization. But Cloud is clearly a driver as well, and cloud makes it easier because it's all programmable. So things that are still manual on premises, you can do in a more automated getting into a lot of conversations here under the covers, A lot of under the hood conversations here around >> security BC to one of the most popular service is you guys have obviously compute a big part of the mission Land, another of the feature VPC traffic flows, where mirroring was a big announcement. Like we talked about that a lot of talking about the E c two nitro. You gave a talk on that. Did you just unpacked it a little bit because this has been nuanced out there. It's out there people are interested in. What's that talk about inscription is, is in a popular conversation taking minutes? Explain your talk. Sure, So we've talked for now a year and 1/2 >> about how we've essentially rien. Imagine reinvented our virtual machine architecture, too. Go from a primarily soft defined system where you have a mainboard with memory and intel processor and all that kind of a coup treatments of a standard server. And then your virtual ization layer would run a full copy of an operating system, which we call a Dom zero privileged OS that would mediate access between the guest OS is in this and the outside world because it would maintain the device model like how do I talk to a network card? How I talked to a storage device. I talked through the hyper visor, but through also a dom zero Ah, copy of Lennox. A copy of Windows to do all that I owe. So what we just did over the past few years, we begin to take all the things we're running inside that privileged OS and move that into dedicated hardware software, harbor combination where we now have components we call nitro components their actual separate little computers that do dbs processing. They do vpc processing they do instance, storage. So at this point now, we've taken all of the components of that damn zero. We've moved it out into these You could call Cho processors. I almost think of them is like the Nitro controllers. The main processor and the Intel motherboard is a co processor where customer workloads run because the trust now is in these external all systems. And when you go to talk to the outside world from easy to now you're talking through these very trusted, very powerful co processors that do encryption. They do identity management for you. They do a lot of work that's off the main processor, but we can accelerate it. We could be more assured that it's trustworthy. It can it can protect itself from potential types of hacks that might have been exposed if that, say, an encryption key was in the and the main motherboard. Now it's not so it's a long story until one hour version and doing three minutes now. But overall we feel that we built a trustworthy system for virtual. What was the title of talk so people can find it online? So I was just called the night to architecture security implications of the night to architecture. So it's taking information that we had out there. But we're like highlighting the fact that if you're a security professional, you're gonna really like the fact that this system has it has no damn zero. It has no shell. You can't log into the system as a human being. It's impossible to log in. It's all software to find suffer driven, and all the encryption features air in these co processors so we can do like full line made encryption of 100 gigabits of network traffic. It's all encrypted like that's never been done before. Really, in the history of computing, what's the benefit of nitro architectural? Simply not shelter. More trust built into it a trusted root. That's not the main board encryption, off load and more isolation. Because even if I somehow we're toe managed to the impossible combination of facts to get sort of like ownership of that main board, I still don't have access to the outside world. From there, I have to go through a whole another layer of very secure software that mediates between the inner world of where customer were close run and the outside world where the actual cloud is. So it's just a bunch of layers that make things more secure, >> and I'm sure Outpost will have that as well. Can you waste on that? Seem to me to hear about that. Okay, Encryption, encrypt everything. Is it philosophy we heard in the keynote? You also talked about that as well. Um, encrypting traffic on the hour. I didn't talk about what that means. What was talked to you? What's the big conversation around? Encryption within a. W s just inside and outside. What's the main story there? >> There's a lot of pieces to the pie, but a big one that we were talking about this week is a pretty long term project we call Project lever. It was actually named after a ah female cryptographer. Eventually Park team that was help. You know, one of the major factors, including World War Two, are these mathematicians and cryptographers. So we we wanted to do a big scale encryption project. We had a very large scale network and we had, you know, all the features you normally have, but we wanted to make it so that we really encrypted everything when it was outside of our physical control. So we done that took a long time. Huge investment, really exciting now going forward, everything we build. So any time data that customers give to us or have traffic between regions between instances within the same region outside reaches, whenever that traffic leaves our physical control so kind of our building boundaries or gates and guards and going down the street on a fiber optic to another data center, maybe not far away or going inter continent intercontinental links are going sub oceanic links all those links. Now we encrypt all the traffic all the time. >> And what's the benefit of that? So the benefit of that is there. Still, you know, it's it's obscure, >> but there is a threat model where, you know, governments have special submarines that are known to exist that go in, sniff those transoceanic links. And potentially a bad guy could somehow get into one of those network junction points or whatever. Inspect traffic. It's not, I would say, a high risk, but it's possible now. That's a whole nother level of phishing attacks. Phishing attack, submarine You're highly motivated to sniff that line couldn't resist U. S. O. So that's now so people could feel comfortable that that protection exists and even things like here's a kind of a little bit of scare example. But we have customers that say, Look, I'm a European customer and I have a very strong sense of regional reality. I wanna be inside the European community with all my data, etcetera, and you know, what about Brexit? So now I've got all this traffic going through. A very large Internet peering point in London in London won't be part of Europe anymore according to kind of legal norms. So what are you doing in that case? Unless they Well, how about this? How about if yes, the packets are moving through London, but they're always encrypted all the time. Does that make you feel good? Yeah, that makes me feel good. I mean, I so my my notion of work as extra territorial extra additional congee modified to accept the fact that hey, if it's just cipher text, it's not quite the same as unscripted. >> People don't really like. The idea of encrypted traffic. I mean, just makes a lot of sense. Why would absolutely Why wouldn't you want to do that right now? Final question At this event, a lot of attendee high, high, high caliber people on the spectrum is from biz dab People building out the ecosystem Thio Hardcore check. He's looking under the hood to see SOS, who oversee the regime's within companies, either with the C i O or whatever had that was formed and every couple is different. But there's a lot of si SOS here to information security officers. You are in the office of the Chief Security Information officer. So what is the conversations they're having? Because we're hearing a lot of Dev ops like conversations in the security bat with a pretty backdrop about not just chest undead, but hack a phone's getting new stuff built and then moving into production operations. Little Deb's sec up So these kinds of things, we're all kind of coming together. What are you hearing from those customers inside Amazon? Because I know you guys a customer driven in the customers in the sea SOS as your customer. What are they saying? What are they asking for? So see, so's our first getting their own minds around >> this big technical transformations that are happening on dhe. They're thinking about risk management and compliance and things that they're responsible for. They've got a report to a board or a board committee say, Hey, we're doing things according to the norms of our industry or the regulated industries that we sit in. So they're building the knowledge base and the expertise and the teams that can translate from this sort of modern dev ops e thing to these more traditional frameworks like, Hey, I've got this oversight by the Securities Exchange Commission or by the banking regulators, or what have you and we have to be able to explain to them why our security posture not only is maintained, it in some ways improved in these in this new world. So they're they're challenge now is both developing their own understanding, which I think they're doing a good job at, but also kind of building this the muscle of the strength. The terminology translate between these new technologies, new worlds and more traditional frameworks that they sit within and people who give oversight over them. So you gotta risk. So there's risk committees on boards of these large publics organizations, and the risk committees don't know a lot about cloud computing. So s O they're part of what they do now is they do that translation function and they can say, Look, I've I've got assurance is based on my work that I do in the technology and my compliance frameworks that I could meet the risk profiles that we've traditionally met in other ways with this new technology. So it's it's a pretty interesting >> had translations with the C I A. Certainly in public sector, those security oriented companies, a cz well, as the other trend, they're gonna educate the boards and they're secure and not get hacked the obsolete. And then there's the innovation side of it. Yeah, we actually gotta build out. Yes. This is what we just talked about a big change for our C says. That we talk to and work with all the time is that hey, we're in engineering community now. We didn't used to write a lot of code, and now we do. We're getting strong in that way. Or else we're parting very closely with an engineering team who has dedicated teams that support our security requirements and build the tools. We need to know that things are going well from our perspective. So that's a really cool, I think, changing that. I think that is probably one >> of my favorite trends that I see because he really shows the criticality of security was pretty much all critically, only act. But having that code coding focus really shows that they're building in house use case that they care about and the fact that I can now get native network traffic. Yeah, and you guys are exposing new sets of service is with land and other things >> over the top. >> It just makes for a good environment to do these clouds. Security things. That seems to be the show >> in a nutshell. Yeah, I think that's one of the nice thing about this show. Is It's a very positive energy here. It's not like the fear and scary stuff sometimes hear it. Security conference is like a the sky's falling by my product kind of thing Here. It's much more of a collaborative like, Hey, we got some serious challenges. There's some bad guys out there. They're gonna come after us. But as a community using new tooling, new techniques, modern approaches, modernization generally like let's get rid of a lot of these crusty old systems we've never updated for 10 or 20 years. It's a positive energy, which is really exciting. Good Mark, get your insights out. So this is your wheelhouse Show. Congratulations. >> You got to ask you the question. Just take your see. So Amazon had off just as an industry participant riding this way, being involved in it. What is the most important story that needs to be told in the press? In the media that should be told what's as important. Either it's being told it, then should be amplified or not being told and be written out. What's the What's the top story? I don't think that even after all this time that you know when people >> hear public cloud computing. They still have this kind of instinctive reaction like, Oh, that sounds kind of scary or a little bit risky and, you know, way need to get to the point where those words don't elicit some sense of risk in people's minds, but rather elicit like, Oh, cool, that's gonna help me be secure instead of being a challenge. Now that's a journey, and people have to get there, and our customers who go deep, very consistently, say, And I'm sure you've had them say to you, Hey, I feel more confident in my cloud based security. Then I do my own premises security. But that's still not the kind of the initial reaction. And so were we still have a ways, a fear based mentality. Too much more >> of a >> Yeah. Modernization base like this is the modern way to get the results in the outcomes I want, and cloud is a part of that, and it doesn't not only doesn't scare me, I want to go there because it's gonna take a community as well. Yeah, Mark, thanks so much for coming back on the greatest. Be hearing great Mark Mark Riley, direct of the office of the chief information security at Amazon Web services here, sharing his inside, extracting the signal. But the top stories and most important things >> being being >> said and discussed and executed here, it reinforced on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

>> live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the two you covering Citric synergy, Atlanta 2019. Brought to You by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin with Keith Tones in wrapping up Day two Vault Evil coverage of Citrix Energy. 2019 Keith. What a two days we have had. >> This was not a boring show. This has been really exciting. >> It has my cheeks hurt from smiling. >> You know what I've been to shows where the messaging can be repetitive. What we did almost 20 interviews over the past couple of days talking to executives, three of the their customers, all that actually more than three cups way. We talkto four customers, and all the conversations have been different and dynamic and exciting. And that's really great to say about Citrix again. Citrix is exciting. If I were a citrus customer today at, definitely invite them and get it, and I didn't make the show at my invite him in and have a conversation find out what's going on. The intelligent experience is a secretion said. They've been working on it for a few years, releasing today not a surprise, but definitely a great start. >> Absolutely. You know, they came out of the gates yesterday morning in the general session. Really, with this massive pivot for Citrix of really developing technology for the end user for four, rather the general user like those who are not power users, those who shouldn't have to become power users to do their job, whether they're in supply, chain our marketing or finance. So that pivot towards that general purpose user, which is the majority of users, was very ostensible. And it was welcome from not just all the customers we talked about, the analysts as well. Yeah, I think that's >> one of those things that you look at A a Iot. You've said something repeatedly that interesting stat We heard yesterday that applications are designed for the 1% the power user and what we heard today wass the basically commoditization of a I and M l. I've always thought that a M l A. At some point, we'll get to the point that we can push it down to the user and the user would use a female of the same with the use Microsoft excel Today, Citrix is kind of flipped it on me and and and presented way to use a i M. L in a way that I had not thought of, which is to take processes. Business process is not it processes, but business processes packaged them up. What, no matter what APS, they're being used to deliver that process package stat up into a micro, eh? And in users themselves will be able to build a Christian Riley Citrix. CTO said he's mostly aside. That was a great question. Next, mostly aside of about 2019 putting this builder, the citric builder in a hands of not T administrators. But business process. >> So and I wish we had more time on that front. I was curious. What does that do to shadow it? T empowering this business users? Just that I don't want it to get your perspectives on that. Yeah, >> So you know what? It's exciting and scary at the same time. You know, the idea of that a business user can automate a process, and what she takes data out of one system and put it into another one on surface is pretty cool. But I've been kind of keeping my eye out on this multi cloud thing. What happens from a security perspective. When a user build something and eight of us and they have sales force and they have their Oracle database online and they create a workflow, this builder will give them the capability to basically built a multi cloud. I'm quoting, calling at, ah, multi cloud business process that becomes that becomes a competitive advantage to the business and then becomes a business critical application as a result. So you know what we're I see why the excitement is there but from, you know, just a bureaucratic person that's over 20 years of experience and just can't get out of me. There's a lot t kind of just be Riri of and planned for. It's all good stuff >> it is. But you're right, you bring up. You know, I just was kind of envisioning this proliferation of pipe of these sort of custom applications that lines of business users are going to be able to build a lot of enablement there. But then, of course, in terms of this application, exponential growth within a company, what are some of the implications you talked about security. We talked about that a lot the last couple of days, so that's absolutely critical, but in terms of that AP proliferation, what are your thoughts on that? >> You know you >> think about, would you? >> Interesting term, early nineties or late nineties. And we're just in e commerce. And it was very controversial. Amazon was patterning business processes. The one klick to purchase was a big, big deal. Competitors couldn't do that in users who have a completely different perspective. Teo, too. This is a tool. You know, it doesn't matter if this is a Samsung phone. IPhone doesn't matter. This is the tool so that I can get a business thing done. The results. You know, where we've put imaginary barriers, you know, the S 400 sales force shall never touch. Well, it's business. Users will destroy those barriers. They'll see these applications, they'll see these uses. And then we were on to, you know, typical problems. You will create 1,000 of these in a single organization. How did you find them? Like you're out discovery. 1,000 When you want a new app on your iPhone finding, they have to do it a specific thing. You know, Aiken probably search for flashlight on my iPhone and get you what? apse. Which one is the one for my process and best for my process. I can see that at proliferation, been a problem in the enterprise, >> something that we'll have to keep our eyes on. Another thing I was curious to get your feedback on is our p. A. You are the one of the first ones and Twitter to call that out yesterday, saying Alright of Citrix wants >> to be >> delivering the future of work. Automation is going to be essential. And then voila! There's the intelligent experience, but something that we heard a lot yesterday as well. We hear this at every show. Is these massive workforce talent shortages that we're going to be seeing in the next few years? Some industries are already facing them. So, looking at the talent shortage and then the concern over A and R P taking over jobs, they seem to sort of do balance each other out. I'm sure it's not that simple. Yeah, >> we've talked about this awful lot in my circles. There were some people who just won't be able to make the transition to being to delivering higher value, uh, work output. My son talked about a co worker who did not know how to maximize excel. And, you know, we look at that now kind of chuckle, maybe >> a little bit, >> but that's painful. What? What happens when that when our P A auto makes their job their job? Is it definitely ah, process that there could be automated? But on the flip side, we need people to write our Ph scripts. We need people to, you know, way talked about. You know, there always be someone to operate. The robots are is a definitely area that we know not only need people talk, create the robots. We need someone to maintain them. What happens when a regulation changes? You know, Christian talks about liability if something is automated, and we forget that it's automated regulation changes and we continue to go along with the automated process and we're in violation of a standard or compliance law. Wei need someone to go in and quickly make a change. Who are these people? Were those that talent coming from and then this place workers. How do we find work for them to do this value? Add that they could make the transition to do so. It's a lot of complicated questions yet to be answered. >> Well, another thing that was really obvious the last couple of days is the bread of customer success. That's Citric, says having we were able to talk without you. Mentioned four customers from the Miami Marlins. So Major League Baseball to financial managed, a wealth manager company, Schroeder's in the UK We spoke with Indiana University based here in the States and and what they're doing to enable end users like you and me from students. Two consumers of wealth management technology to baseball fans is radically different. But at the same time, it's all about delivering this experience that's personalized. That's customized and tailored to what each individual wants to achieve. And this >> is without even giving the new product from cities We had Dana Garner Alice on earlier today, who said that Citrix really needs to to their own horn. There should be a Citrix inside. I remember early SAS products from companies like a teepee, uh, get support calls on it. I go Teo and uses death type, and they say I'm using this ADP software. This is before a stall for as the service was really a big thing and I looked at him. Oh, this's just Citrix going into another, going into, ah, data center somewhere else. Today, that is very much a sass service, and Citrix is an underlying foundation of that. So it was no surprise from a technology your perspective to see what you are doing. Or is that effort was doing, or a shoulder or even the Marlins? What was surprising was the impact they're having, you know, the providing, ah, accessibility applications to rule parts of Indiana. Ah, the 200,000 in points from a university. This is not, you know, you think of 200,000. There's a lot of clouds. Ah, Cloud company's ass Cos that would love to have 200,000 device is accessing its infrastructure. So extremely diverse set of customers that sister says, And the capability, even without the products announced today, uh, pretty exciting, >> I'm excited to hear and the next, you know, six months or so from those beta customers who've been testing out intelligent experience and seeing what other enhanced business outcomes they're achieving, also wanted to get your perspective on what you heard of the last couple of days with respect to How does it change the game for Citrix from a competitive advantage standpoint? >> Yeah, the tweeted out that Veum where is either going to acquire or quickly announced a Arpaio type solution? This is something that businesses will care about. This is not something that can be ignored. You AI path, which is a complimentary solution to Citrix, just got a $568,000,000 Roundy. Let's put this in perspective. We're hearing software companies get $60,000,000 rounds to create hardware. This is a salt for on Lee Company. A machine learning that does R. P s were robotic process automation. Investors are seeing the value in this company enough that they're going to give a software company who doesn't have buildings they don't have. Uh, this is just to invest in sales. Portia sells people in R and D $568,000,000 to make it happen. You're going to see competitors like being where citrus is a friend of mine. I'm sorry. Nutanix is a frenemy of say tricks, you know, they go to market a lot together, but they have their frame solution. Citrus is, I think, put, you know, all in and said You know what? V m word nutanix frame put up or shut up. This is this is you know, this is this is a seismic move in industry. >> So I gather that you're leaving here pleasantly surprised by some of the things that were unveiled. >> I did not expect Citrix to move so quickly into our p a roar wanted process automation. And this is not something that they thought of last minute. So you know, Christian said they've been working on this for three years. So this is something that they've given quite a bit of thought to. If the same thought hasn't happened already at frame that competitive solution for desktop as a service or if it hasn't already happened. And bm we're workspace and they're set of Ah VD I solutions than Citrix is obviously three years ahead >> and your thoughts on the announcements with respect to deepening relationships and partnerships with Microsoft with Google. >> Yeah, and some of that. It is catch up the VM where has had a solution with azure for quite some time bringing desktops as a service there. So then where has a slight lead on that? But Citrix you know what? Citrix is still a verb. The even when customers are using other solutions, they say You just like this the Kleenex I'm like I would like Citrix access. Well, it's horizon, this frame, whatever I want. I need to get my job done, and I hear that I have to get a citrus account to get it done. So I think Citrix has definitely caught up with both Nutanix when tannic says the Airframe solution and VM, where we're horizon with solutions and azure and then what went on in that? What went, I think unnoticed is that Citrix partners with Veum where to deliver the Xan desktop solution. And then where's via MacLeod on a W S O. That went unnoticed over the past couple of days. But again, more choice. If I were a customer looking at VD I desktop workspace modernization, be pretty excited about my options in the competitive landscape. >> Think they did a great job of positioning themselves as being enablers of the future of work? We talked a lot about today's workforce with five generations of active workers. We saw a great example of I guess a baby boomer with Dr Madeleine Albright on stage, it's going to get 82 years old. See here, >> Baby Boomer, which issues of the greatest generation? I think she's that fifth thatyou know that fifth oldest generation, 82 years old, And I hope >> I'm not >> a sharp is that now. And I'm a little bit more than half that age told, uh, it's not looking too good for me. >> I mean, either way, how she talked about when she was secretary of state, didn't have a computer on her desk. And now she's writing in driverless vehicles >> and presenting at tech conferences and with respect. This is not always Automat Mall. Albright. What? What can she have to offer us? It was an engaged audience, Uh, even with purse like leaning on political power policies. She gets some, and she got a standing ovation at a tech conference. So, you know, it's an amazing testament to what you can offer. No matter you're your age. >> Exactly, and Citrix is doing a great job of being able to deliver and enable their customers to help all of their workers at any age at any generation. Just get the stuff done. Keep it has been such a great time. Such a pleasure working with you for the last couple of days. Thank you for being my partner in crime. >> Turned out better than we hoped. We said we were gonna have fun. I think we have more fun than we thought we would. >> I agree. Well, thanks so much. Say, flight home. I know. I'll see if the next show sometime in some city soon. >> You know, the Cube is at four places right now. I'm pretty sure we'll be in the same location. Pretty So >> I think so. Keith and I want to thank you so much for watching the cubes to day coverage of citric synergy. 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia, We've had a blast. We hope you've had a blast watching. Thank you.

>> from Mountain View, California It's the Cube covering the fifteenth annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by A C. G S V. >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube at the Computer History Museum for the fifteenth annual TGS Grow Awards. Can you hear the collaboration of the innovation going on behind me? Very excited to welcome to the Cube, one of tonight's award winners from a Jaso Technologies, Norby, Jericho B and the President and CEO of Modesto. Congratulations on the Emerging Growth Award that adjuster has been honored with tonight. >> Thank you very much. We're very honored to be here. So you've been at >> the helm of a desert for a long time. I'd like our audience to hear a little bit from you about whom destiny is what you do. What makes you different. >> Perfect. So we are at a technology company on our products are used primarily in Internet of things, applications across many, many segments. Most off our businesses within the industrial segment on our customers use our products to actually build a Iot solutions for their end markets. Our products include semiconductor chips that are used at the edge of Coyote EJ gateway devices that connects the local networks to the more broad networks on. Basically, we enable our customers to take data from the physical world and send it up into the clouds >> to you guys. Our have had a great great trajectory, obviously being recognized by the emerging growth winner from a C. G S B. Tell me a little bit about it was looking at some information from you guys and on twenty eighteen, You guys did a great job of executing on your strategic initiatives to really make twenty eighteen a transformative year couple of acquisitions to us about the last year, in particular in the group that you have seen the momento and you're bringing into twenty nineteen. >> Correct? Correct. So we started. We enter twenty eighteen as a provider up application specific memory devices for I ot however, we realize that for our customers to take true benefit off the technologies we provide, we need to be a more holistic supplier of solutions. So as a result, we went through a whole process off looking at other technologies that can complement what we have in a very similar way, with strategic focus in the markets that we were focused, and as a result, we made two acquisitions in past summer that ended up its expanding our market opportunity, broadening our reach within existing customer and significantly expanding our offering portfolio to foreign markets. >> Negroes have a really strong position with tear one customers in the industrial sector. You mentioned that expecting Don't be a little bit more than about your leadership here in what makes these large industrial cheer. One players say Augusto is for us, >> right? So before I asked her that let me talk a little bit about the difference between industrial I ot and Consumer >> Riley's Yes, >> So if you think about consumer, I ot, it's what grabs headlines. It's the fitness trackers, the latest home smart thermostats, and the smartwatch is on so forth. The's are new markets. Volumes are girl very fast, but if next year and new shiny object is created, it's easy for the consumers to replace. They basically buy the new one. Repent replaced the old. One interesting thing about industrial I ot is that industrial I ot has this fragmented legacy systems that today run in their businesses. So if you look at the building we're in Today there is a fired and safety system that runs there's H Vac system that runs the business. There's a security systems, and this could have been installed here decades ago. There are billions of connected things in that industrial network today, but the data is unable to go up into the cloud. Where come cloud providers? Aye, aye. Providers can actually take the data on provide benefits to the business owners. We understand the language of industrial I ot very well because off our roots in that space. And we also understand this universe very well because of our roots being in Silicon Valley. So for industrial customers to benefit from this transformation, it's very important to be able to understand the OT world operational technology world of old days on the IT world that we're very familiar with. So with addition off these acquisitions that we've done this summer very well, positions with the building blocks that way can put together on offer differentiated solutions to our customers? >> Well, no, but it's been a pleasure having you on the queue. But the fifteenth annual acey GSP grow words. Congratulations to adjust of your whole team for the emerging growth award. And we look forward to seeing what happens this year in the space with you. Thank >> you. Thank you very much. Thank you. >> Lisa. Martin, you're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Live for London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the theCUBE here in London, England for Nutanix .NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost, Joep Piscaer. Happy to welcome you to the program, first time guest. Simon Townsend was the chief marketing officer of EMEA for IGEL. Thanks so much for joining us. No, thanks very much for having me. All right, so I see your team has a booth here and it's the end-user computing space, the EUC, as we look at it... We look at... The VDI marketplace is one that's been around for quite a while, but EUC has been heating up quite a bit. Maybe help set the stage for us as to what you're seeing in the marketplace, what's so important now. >> Yeah, I mean, the EUC market's served me very well across my career. I've been in it for probably near on 20 years and for the majority of that, I've seen Citrix dominate that market. When we talk about EUC, we typically are talking about desktop virtualization or terminal services, as it has been for many years. EUC, to me, interestingly enough, probably extends out to these types of devices that you've got in front of you as well now, right? We shouldn't think EUC is just desktop virtualization or desktop as a service. It's how we deliver the workspace, how we deliver applications and data to our users. But yeah, in the last couple of years, we've really started to see a few new, big players come into the market. And I think as we look forward now to 2019, we're now starting to see even more technology and new vendors come into this space as well. >> I actually had a friend of the program, Christian Riley, who is actually now with Citrix, had him on the program two years ago at the Nutanix European show in Vienna. He actually had educated me early on, back when he was at Bechtel, and he said, "We did a disservice to the market calling it "desktop virtualization." Because it's really not about the desktop. It's about the applications and how I get them. And therefore, if I can make that experience on a tablet or on a phone, get it to the mobile workforce, as it were, we're breaking down it into pieces and just enabling the workforce. And therefore, that end-user computing was a better nomenclature. And therefore, architecture's changed greatly from what we called VDI back in the day. >> You're exactly right. And I think as we move forward, at the moment, end user computing... A lot of organizations who historically have had separate VDI teams and separate Windows desktop teams, those two parts of the organization within IT, have actually come together now. And now we have Windows engineering or end user compute teams. But what's interesting is not just the new technology and, perhaps, new organizations, vendors that are coming into the market, but also what's going on on the endpoint at the moment with regard to to Windows. Right? Microsoft is moving very much to this Windows as a service. Lots of organizations are still considering how they're gonna get to Windows 10, but more importantly, how they're gonna deal with Windows 10 once they get there. And IT, to be frank, has been used to building a machine, putting an operating system on it, putting applications on it, giving it to a user, and saying, "Hey, come back in four years time "when it breaks." And Microsoft is changing that. They want to deliver updates significantly quicker as I'm sure everybody's that's watching knows. And I think, actually, that alone coupled with security, which tends to be a key priority for the CIO at the moment as well, that is actually driving some of this change and this fact that this market is heating up again. Because people are saying, "Well, how can I challenge how I deliver applications again? "How can I overcome some of the challenges that Windows 10 "and desktop endpoint management presents me? "And how can I deal with it differently?" >> Yeah, gosh, I think back to... I used to read Bryden Madden when I wanted to learn about VDI He said, "All I need is Microsoft to flip the switch." Because Microsoft Licensing was one of the major things holding us back >> Yes, it was. >> I give Microsoft great kudos as to the push that they've done to sass-ify the world. They not only gave the green light, but they're pushing customers to move to Office 365. And therefore, it's moving to a sass world And so, it sounds like that same floodgate is helping in the EUC space. >> 100%. I mean, if you roll the clock back to Ignite, they announced their Windows Virtual Desktop service that sits on Azure, and about how organizations can (mumbles) for a much lower price point. And then only last week, they did the acquisition of FSLogix, who again, enhance how things like Office 365 are being delivered on those types of non persistent platforms. So Microsoft are putting some investment and some time into desktop as a service or what we would know as VDI, which to be fair, in my opinion, is probably the first time we've seen that in the 20 years I've been working in the EUC space. For many, many years, Microsoft sort of sat back and said, "Well, we've got this terminal services technology, "but somebody else, and A and other vendors "can build that market and sell that product." And now, obviously, Microsoft (mumbles) service. So, things are gonna get interesting. Are they suddenly gonna take over the world? Probably not. People are still gonna wanna deploy things on-prem. People are still gonna want to utilize technologies like Nutanix to deliver a scalable performant desktop at a known price point. It's gonna be a hybrid, but I think it definitely validates the market, and it makes sure that when we're talking about end user compute, VDI or desktop as a service, and virtualized (mumbles) is a serious and key consideration. Yeah. >> But it does move the goal post from it being a problem of hardware, a problem of the operating system, towards solving problems around the applications so that you deliver, solving problems around security or latency. So how does that changing market affect IGEL? >> How does it affect us as (mumbles) organization? IGEL have been around for over 20 years producing... Let's not beat around the bush, it's thin client technology. But as you scratch the surface and you look into what this organization is actually built on, it's actually a operating system organization. The fact that we've got some hardware, the fact that it's German engineered hardware and that we ship hundreds of thousands of these units every year, that's great. And those thin clients, if you like, are provided a way in which organizations can access those virtual desktops, whether that be Citrix, VMware or whatever else the market might offer. But the strength of what we're now doing is in this operating system. And whether that's an operating system that we are delivering via SCCM or an endpoint management tool or whether it's on a USB key, it's the operating system. And the simplicity and the security about Linux space operating system that is changing how people think about the endpoint. And so when I couple what's going on in the virtualization, desktop as a service space, and then also the challenges that people are facing with security and endpoint management, all of a sudden, we have a very unique proposition. It's slightly disruptive because, ultimately, you're saying, "Well, does Windows belong on the endpoint anymore?" Right? There's a strong argument to say that, Microsoft now validating it, saying that Windows probably deserves to belong in the data canter where it's a lot easier to manage, it's a lot easier to patch and deploy applications to, and what you actually need is something that is simple and secure on the endpoint that you're not wasting weeks' worth of time on to try and keep it up to date or to patch it. And it's that operating system that IGEL is providing our customers with that extends the life of the endpoint, but also offers significantly lower operational costs. >> All right, so Simon, Nutanix did a good job of simplifying a good chunk of the stack here. Update us on the relationship, where you see the joint customers, where that's leading in the marketplace. >> Yeah, I've really enjoyed yesterday and today, by the way, at this event. And one of the key reasons for that is not just the joint customers that I get to talk to, but more importantly, the joint partners that we get to talk to. I think there's three words I would use, simple, scalable, and performant. And I think when you're delivering a desktop or applications and data services (mumbles) a user, you want something that's easy and simple to do. You want something that is easily scalable, both up and down. But also something that is performant. And I think when you combine... Particularly historic, when you look at combining Nutanix, Citrix, and IGEl, all of a sudden, you've got all the right ingredients there to provide a very simple, secure and performant environment. As I said, a lot of the people that are here today, joint customers that are using our technologies, we're worry about how we can simplify and secure the EDGE. They're worrying about... Nutanix is really looking at how we simplify and scale the data center and how those desktops are delivered. We've got a whole host of joint activity in the market that goes on, lots of joint customer case studies. But more importantly, I think... And kudos to a lot of the partners that are here. It's the partners that tend to pull a lot of these things together. It's very easy for IGEL and Citrix and Nutanix to say, "Let's work together, do some joint marketing, "et cetera, and go to market." But it's the partners, the valuated reseller, the systems integrators, they're the brains that are pulling these together. And actually, they're removing the complexity of what the products are and the technologies underneath, and providing a solution to their customers. >> All right, Simon Townsend, really appreciate the updates on IGEL, for Joep Piscaer. I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here from Nutanix 2018 in London. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (slick electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at the Nutanix .Next Conference in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, but a partnership we've been talking about since the early days of Nutanix. Bernie Hannon, Strategic Alliance Director with Citrix, and Raghu Nandan, Senior Director of Product Management, Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining me. Happy to be here. Great to be here. AlL right, so Bernie, let's start with you, how long have you been with Citrix, a little bit of background and when will you start working for Nutanix? (Bernie laughs) Ten years at Citrix, and we'll see about Nutanix. But no, I'm Strategic Alliances Director. I manage our alliance partnership with Nutanix, and I've been doing that now for about two-and-a-half years. AlL right, Raghu, little bit about your background, and you must have worked for Citrix before, right? I did, coincidentally, work at Citrix for a while, pretty close to ten years, actually, and I've been at Nutanix for almost three years now. I'm part of the product team, managing the full-stack journey that we've been on, building beyond software-defined storage with the Ember virtualization with AHB, the ops, artistration layers on top, and coincidentally, given the background with Citrix it was the first logical place for us to start to make Citrix a tailored-fit for the particular full stack offering,. That's what we've been working on too. Yeah, and let's talk about that Bernie. 'Cause most people for a couple of years, it was like oh, well Nutanix, they're that little VDI company, and do that, and that of course was a strong partnership between Citrix and Nutanix, but, it's much more that. So maybe, give us a little bit, kind of, the breath and depth of the partnership. Well, yeah, so, Nutanix was not shy about letting us know that they shared a common vision about what HCI could do, and what a partnership together could do to be able to strengthen or to further each others' strategies. And it was really all about trying to simplify the customer experience with EDI. And that's always been a challenge for our customers. And Nutanix, very quickly, was able to demonstrate that they could make deploying Citrix on the infrastructure so much easier for customers. And that's really what we've been about working on since we started this partnership. Yeah, and it's been the perfect-tailored workload like I said before, right. So we're on this journey of re-platforming the data center and collapsing as many silos as possible while bringing that public cloud-like consumption margin where people in the IT departments can go focus on applications and services and more business-oriented functions and kind of let IT be a functional thing without spending inordinate amounts of time. While we started our journey as a company with EDI, we've expanded certainly to a bunch of other workloads. But, when we brought this next new concept to the marketplace in September of 2015 by embrating the scavian derived HyperWiser as a built in part of the overall solution, Citrix was a natural place for us to start and that's kind of what we've been working on in that dimension. Yeah, Cloud has been a strategy, it's gone through a lot of changes in the industry but last year I talked to Christian Riley little bit about Citrix Cloud. Nutanix has had the Enterprise Cloud rolling out various pieces. Maybe you could both speak a little bit to kind of, those Cloud strategies. Sure, from a Citrix standpoint, we've been busy migrating our customers from the perpetual license model to a subscription model. And to leverage that through our Citrix Cloud, where we've moved the Citrix control plane up into the Cloud as a service. So, again, another step in making the whole process of deploying Citrix even easier. So, that's really been our strategy. And working with Nutanix we've made that process even easier through the automation tools that they've developed and now, shortly with the next release, Nutanix solutions are going to come Citrix Cloud ready. And that essentially means that customers can not only have the benefits of that subscription model, but they'll also be able to have the benefits of being able to manage Citrix as a service in Citrix Cloud and get the best of both worlds. And that for our customers is really a true hybrid cloud experience. And the Enterprise Cloud for us as Nutanix is really a fabric that kind of envelops the public, the private infrastructure and even stretches out into the edge, right in pleasing to use the disperse Cloud. And in the context of Citrix like Bernie said while Citrix Cloud makes the deployment of the entire Citrix software start, a non-hassle experience for customers, there is still something to be said for the actual infrastructure where the user re-amps a provision. This is the classic use case for hybrid in a sense because it all comes all the desktops and service bottlenecks where you have users on campus logging onto desktops in the public Cloud, yet the applications they need to access are having to help them back into the Enterprise Data Center and this combination of the Citrix Cloud and on tram Nutanix infrastructure, that just in one click plugs to the Citrix Cloud, lets people experience the best of both worlds. This zero, kind of like a one minute deployment of Citrix software stock and a one click experience from Prism to connect the infrastructure to start provisioning the stops and you can be from nothing to a production environment in literally minutes. Yeah. How does management play between the two of your companies, the management layer? The management layer from a Citrix Cloud standpoint, or? So talked a little bit about Prism there, to talking about how Comm fits in. Citrix has a number of software pieces. Just trynna understand, kind of, the boundaries overlaps integrations. That's really where Comm has done an excellent job of making a lot of that transparent, right. So the whole idea is that from the start, with just a couple of clicks, you're able to make the connection to Citrix Cloud, register and then drop the Citrix Cloud connector onto a Nutanix infrastructure and from there Prism is really managing that management experience. It's really two dimensions right. So think of the Citrix management layer as everything that encapsulates the policies, the governance models, everything around the performance expectations of VDI. Who gets what kind of a desktop, what kind of a profile, persistent, non persistent, all those kinds of things. Seamlessly plugs into Prism, which manages the rest of the infrastructure, physical, virtual, with ops and orchestration. So, I don't have to worry about this user needs a graphics enabled desktop, where would I go provision this? The system just automatically detects that. Or I have this thousand user environment and I don't quite know whether I've provisioned the right amount of compute and memory to the right kinds of users. Prism just tells you through behavioral learning, these users VM seem under provision, these users VM seem over provision. So you're getting the best ROI, in terms of your infrastructure span. So think of Prism as everything that manages the physical data central infrastructure including virtualizing and ops. And the Citrix management stack just plugs into that to layer on the governance policies on top. And then things that Citrix does in the background, in terms of managing the scale out. And making sure that everything is kept evergreen. And that the tools are always being refreshed. That happens automatically and seamlessly in the background. Great, Nutanix has been announced at their last show the Google Cloud partnership. My understanding, there's potential intersections between GCP, Citrix and Nutanix, talk to us a little bit about what we would see going forward, how those potentially play together. So Citrix has a new partnership with Google, Google Cloud platform, and our Citrix workspace and environment, the entire digital desktop now is available to deploy onto Citrix. I'm sorry, onto Google Cloud platform. And we believe that with a vergening partnership that's taking place with Nutanix and Google Cloud platform that there's an opportunity in the future to develop some new stories, better together, so it's something that we're just beginning to explore now, but we think there's a lot of possibilities there. I mean, I'll give you a classic example, right, last week I was speaking with a customer that's running Citrix on Nutanix and they're running it for a certain number of users, let's say a few thousand users, and every year at holiday season, they have these three or 400 contracting employees that come online, that they need extra capacity for these temporary desktops. And this combination of Citrix with Google Cloud platform and the Jorte Cloud services provides the perfect solution in which you could create on demand capacity for kind of, burst expectation of resources and once the contract was (mumbles), the environment shrinks back. So this is a start of a journey and we'll figure some things out, but there are some pretty strong synergies for the three to come together to solve for those kinds of interesting use cases. Great example and we think there's a lot more like those to come. Okay, want to give you both the last word. Either customers, any customer story you can tell, or anything else we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Well, from a Citrix standpoint, I have to say that they are really appreciative of the partnership that we have with Nutanix. I think they feel good knowing that it's an alliance partnership that we have with Nutanix. So that they can make their investments with confidence. They've had a relationship with Citrix for a long time. And there's trust that goes with that. And in the Citrix name. And the fact that we have a strong alliance partnership, makes them feel good investing in Nutanix and then seeing how that better together story is really unfolding for them. And it's a great partnership for several reasons, but I think the single most important reason is the amount of customer delight it offers. When people bring Citrix and Nutanix together. And I've lost count of the number of customers that are appreciative of how much better their environments are. And we are super excited about how much further we can take that journey with this combination of Citrix Cloud with this one take experience within Prism. Yeah it's not just a promise if it's actually being delivered in this thing, it's actually happening. Bernie and Raghu, thank you so much for giving us the update on the partnership there. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.