>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019! Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, two days, wall-to-wall coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I have been geeking out for two full days now, and speaking of geeking out, I think its going to continue because Christian Reilly is here, back on theCUBE, the vice president and CTO of Citrix. Christian, welcome back! >> Thank you so much, it's been a while. >> It has! >> It really has. >> Well, we hope to make it fun. We have had, like I said, such great conversations with your executives, customers, analysts, everybody is so excited about this obvious pivot that Citrix is making towards the general user. You know, the power users being that 1 percent, and what you guys started off yesterday showing, resonates with everybody. I get it. I want my work day to be far more productive. I want apps and actions brought to me, so I can actually get down to the business of what I was hired to do. And we also are hearing over and over again, how employee experience is now elevated to a c-suite imperative, that is so critical because it directly affects the customer experience. >> Yeah, it's super exciting, isn't it? You know, it's great to watch it all come to life, because, you know, we've been working on this for a number of years behind the scenes and, you know, it's just so great to see all the effort that goes in come out on the big stage. And your right, I mean, we've been very calculated about the approach here. We do a lot of research in trying to understand these problems and these challenges. And, you know, quite frankly, customers are looking for more innovation from Citrix, looking for better ways to work, and, you know, I think we've got a very privileged position in being so important in customer application delivery over the decades that Citrix has been around. And so the, you know, the move, even though it seems like it's a quantum leap, is actually a really natural thing for us to go do, because we've won the trust over three decades of being, you know, the vendor to deliver mission critical apps so this is just an extension of that, but it's, yeah, it's super exciting. >> Yeah, so we've talked about that for the past couple of days. Citrix is a verb within IT. You know, "I'm going to Citrix into the application," or, "Is that on Citrix?" Or, "Is it Citrixed yet?" It is, we commonly understand what it means to be Citrix. But that's something that you guys have built over 30 years, and I think what's really interesting, Dana Gardner, we had him on earlier, he said Citrix is much too modest, there should be a Citrix inside for so many SaaS offerings, so that end-users in end-users understand that the foundational technology for this SaaS service, whether it's some payroll software, or some other third party healthcare solution, is being brought to you. The underlying application didn't have to be rewritten because of Citrix. I think we're at another foundational moment now. What you guys announced yesterday was foundational. I tweeted out as David was talking, saying, "You know what? Citrix is going to be the future of work." Like you know what? We'll follow doing automation. Citrix can't possibly be the- be the future of work. And he announced it, but, I want to try and get you- get this in one answer, hopefully, because it's big, you've been working on this for years, it shows, it's natural for Citrix to say that they're going to go to the next step of integrating different applications because you've been there already. What's the foundational technology? As, you know, when Frame back in 1995 was the foundational technology for virtual applications, what's the foundational capability that you're giving businesses today, that we're going to look back 20 years from now and say, "Obviously, that was the innovation"? >> Yeah, so that's a great question, I think there's a of couple things really, you know, We talked about it in the keynote extensively yesterday about the analytics piece. So, I wouldn't say that analytics is the only thing, but certainly when you think about the way we lined up the analytics conversation around security performance and then productivity. So that's the foundational element, and we're going to look back at that in a few years time and realize that we were very privileged to be in the path of user transactions, and the more you're in the path, the more transactions you get. The more transactions you get, the more source data you get. The more source data you get, the more you can feed the machine learning model, and the more accurate you can be about delivering the context of the workspace, so I think that's super important. The next bit, of course, would be the acquisition that we made of the Sapho technology back in November of 2018. And I think, you know, what you see there in the micros and the micro work flows, is really that big shift from the version 1 of the workspace, which was still very much about the traditional applications, traditional desktops, and then bringing together web and SaaS applications, but we sort of always knew that there was a bigger play, which was really to try and, as PJ talked about yesterday, how do we take work and break it down into atomic units? So we don't think about just the application, we think about the why. Why do people use applications? What is it that they do? And if you think about how that plays out with analytics, the more intelligence that we gather, the more intelligent we make the workspace. So I think with a couple of things, we'll look back at the Sapho acquisition as a key technology piece, but we'll look back at analytics as maybe the thing that helped to be the flywheel to deliver that intelligence within the workspace environment itself. >> And the power that that intelligence has to deliver a personalized experience to each user is huge. If we look at the consumerization and the expectations that we all bring to our business lives we want things to be smart enough to serve up just what I'm looking for. To make my life easier, so that the intelligence and the analytics has huge implications on being able to help companies use their applications better. If I'm having to go in and learn sales floors and try to talk glamor and all these things that as a marketer, I don't need to do, but if I could have technology that's under the covers- under the bonnet, is evaluating that and going to learn, "this is all that she needs to do for her role," how much happier am I going to be? How much more productive am I going to be? It's game-changing. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think that the most important thing to remember about the whole of the the strategy around analytics, is it's constantly learning, so it's not like we just do it once. And if you think about where that goes along the term, you know, we're talking about, obviously, gathering user transaction data that I talked about. That will help us to generate the most valuable micro applications. But then if you think about that a little bit further on, you know, how do we actually then begin to get analytics on the micros themselves, and even begin to free up more productivity. So there's a continuum here that we see. You know, automation, as you mentioned, will be critical, you know, and if you think about what's happening and the industry in general. You know, robotic process information has skyrocketed to the game as organizations look to kind of do exactly what we're talking about, which is to free up the very scarce human capital to work on things that really matter, not on these mundane tasks. And you know, we talked to lots of customers about this, you know, the notion of how much application do you really use, and you know, it's been quite common, and one of the foundation- I guess foundational components that we talked about of why we did what we did was, we looked at enterprise applications that we were delivering through our traditional technologies, and they were really complex for some things that were really actually quite simple. And of course the Pareto thing holds true there that the 80% of people only want to get something out and 20% of people put something in. So that was obviously a key decision point for us to move ahead with, with the intelligent workspace, the micros that you saw. The other thing that's really interesting that we don't really talk about so much is that from a security perspective as well, being able to deliver just a part of the application actually minimizes the entire sort of attack surface, if you like. Whether that's for, you know, nefarious employees internally, or for true people who want to come in or sort of hack into your systems. The less that we can expose generally, then I think that's better overall. So there's actually some other upsides that we don't necessarily talk about in the context of intelligence, but when we talk to CIOs and we talk to the people in the business who really are interested in these technologies and these solutions, then we tend to expand the conversation a little bit into some things that we don't necessarily talk about all the time. >> Yeah, it's surprising how many questions you guys have answered for me today. I was at SAP, sapphire a couple weeks ago, and they were talking about X data, O data, X data being experienced data, and this is the output of digital transformation, and I was having a really tough time wrapping my head around the concept of X data. And I think this is hopefully something you could further along the discussion. When I think of just the access that Citrix has to this raw data, maybe the only other company that has more user data, or more access to user data, would be Microsoft via Windows. But Citrix presents SAP, which 80% of the world's transactions run through, is presented via Citrix a good majority of the time. Your CRM solutions and cloud-based options and sales forces presented again, through Citrix, so you're collecting a ton of data, as customers, you know, say, "okay, what's the account balance out of SAP, let me put it into this CRM solution and sales force". You're capturing that x data. How do you make sense of it? I think is the question, this is where the AI comes in. From a person looking at the process, and they come to Citrix and say, "Christian, you guys have the X data. Help us understand how that X data translates into business productivity. How do I personalize the experience for a individual use?" >> Yeah, absolutely, so I'll give you an example, you know, CTOs like to have a vision, right? So we'll talk a little about the vision. So I'll give you a relatively straight- forward example. So, we tend to see used cases around reviews and approvals and those kinds of things, whether it's expense reports or PTO requests, all the things that we've typically shown in the keynotes and the various demos that we've done as we've grown the solution. So here is what we kind of think about, so let's say, for example, that you have an employee. That employee submits expense reports on a fairly frequent basis and they tend to submit them for under $500. You may get to the point where you say, "actually, why do I keep approving these, because my level of trust with the employee is high, the dollar values of the individual reports is relatively low". So why would the system not just handle that and automatically approve them, until something was an anomaly. So if one came in that was $750, $1000, then I would get an alert. So I think when you talk about the X data, absolutely. The interaction with the X data is really where we see the value from the Citrix perspective, because we can learn how you actually deal with those notifications and those actions. So if there's an example of a micro application which gives you an expense report from let's say SAP Concur, and you never actually open it, you just click the approve button, then is there a real reason for you to continue to see the opportunity to open it? Because, you know, as I've said, the level of trust is high, the dollar value is low, and I could get productivity back that way, by actually looking at it from a sort of, "why should I actually approve this in the traditional way? I'll let the system take care of it until there's something that exceeds the threshold that I've learned that you're comfortable with". >> What- oh, sorry Keith, I was going to say, on that front though, where are enterprise companies in terms of letting that control go to the intelligence in the system? I mean how many times have we all submitted expense reports and maybe some of us like me go to Starbucks twice on the same day, hey, it happens, and you get rejection because it's the exact same dollar amount, and it's wasting all these cycles. But where is the appetite and maybe the trust from some of those larger organizations that culturally say somebody in procurement or finance has to click on every single funding and evaluate every single line item? >> Yeah, so I think the, sort of the beauty of what we've built here, certainly with what you saw yesterday and what we've been talking about at the show here. We're not actually changing any existing business rules or business work flow and gen components, right? So I think that's a really interesting point for us to bring up and to make sure that everybody understands, you know, right now, in the version that we're talking about for release later this year, you know, we're actually honoring most of the business rules and the work flows that are in the system of records. So that could be, you know, the HR system, the finance system, all the ERP system or whatever. So you know, I think when audit perspective, then we're good from that perspective, because you know, when we actually submit things back into the system of record from the micro apps, we're doing it on behalf of the user. So the transactions are still valid as if they were coming from the native experience. So I think that's great that we don't mess with any of that, because I think the higher, you know, we kind of make the hurdles for people to adopt by, and then, you know, whether it's cultural or whether it's regulatory, that obviously, you know, there's a downside to that. So, I think that's a good sort of first pass for us. I would suspect that as we go through this a little bit later though, there's going to be some potentially interesting questions that come up about, certainly of highly regulated environments about, you know, the legality of a robot, or digital assistant, or some kind of, you know, ancillary system being able to submit and do things on your behalf. So, you know, that's- this is not a GDPR thing by the way, or anything of that nature, it's more a, you know, if something was to happen in the system that wasn't intended, who's responsible? Is it the robot or is it the individual that's allowed the robot to work on their behalf? So I think there will be some interesting questions that come up along those lines, but I think, you know, in the v1 we're honoring the business rules, we're honoring the business logic and the work flow. And so, you know, I'm expecting that most customers will look at this and say, "yeah, I kind of get it," and you know, it's more valuable than it is a problem. That's certainly the goal. >> So let's talk about scale of this new foundational capability. Like I can easily see this working inside of your existing set of VDI products. You have visibility into the analytic data, but at some point, you're going to have enough data that the VDI isn't needed to create these work flows and these solutions. I can see this actually freeing up desktops for some employees where the only reason why they ever needed a desktop because they had to go on to Concur or the time management solution. If I do 40 hours every week for 52 weeks, I don't need to log into a portal to do that. How tied to your existing set of products is this capability? Is this something that, from a total addressable market that you- whether it's a mobile app or mobile first app that you guys can ingest this type of capability into? >> Yeah, so you know, as you know well, Kieth, we've been talking about the death of the PC in the industry for a decade, right? And it's- the reality is that most customers have an application portfolio that's heavily reliant on Windows. Now, having said that, there are obviously cases- and we look at sort of, some of the, what we call the customer jobs to be done, okay? Which is a Harvard business thing that came from Clayton Christianson. And it's a really interesting way of making sure that the innovations that we bring are actually addressing things that customers need to get done within their own environments. So if you take a used case, let's say it was a field technician. So you're going out, you're going to fix a faulty gas meter, or you're going to go out and perform some kind of maintenance work. It's highly likely that you're going to use a mobile device. And so, what we showed yesterday with the mobile version of the intelligent experience, what we show with the work space assistant, absolutely. I see used cases where we can give them instant productivity. So you know to pull and to push data into the systems of record, where the underlying operating system on the mobile device is kind of academic. But there will certainly be used cases where VDI or physical Windows desktops will be around for a very long time. So I think the value that we have is making sure that all those user transactions go through the workspace one way or another, so that helps us with the analytics piece. But I think I'll look a little bit further out, you know, again, we showed some demos of it yesterday, in one of the CTO breakout sessions that we had. The real ultimate goal is to think about the work space overall as more of an experience that will evolve. It's not necessarily an app, an app is one way to consume it, but we want to build a platform that can consume and be consumed by other things. So whether that's Microsoft teams that we showed yesterday, whether that becomes slack, Facebook for work, or whether it's an integrated voice assistant within, you know, an Apple device, or a Microsoft device, or a Google device, or a Samsung device. See, the value of that from a choice perspective is that we really then don't demand what the customers use, and ultimately their end use. So I think when we get a little bit further along in the thinking on the platform itself, it opens up endless possibilities to interact with the information you need. And it's not predicated upon any operating system because hopefully we can be ubiquitous. >> So, Citrix has over 400,000 customers worldwide. I think I read 98-99% of the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100, intelligence experience goes generally available later on this year, there's some customers in beta. What are you looking forward to as 2019 continues, coming off the high that is Citrix Synergy 2019? >> Well, you know, so like I said at the start here, I've been working on this thing with, frankly, the brilliant team we have here at Citrix for just about three years, so I wouldn't say it was quite stealth, but we've gone through these kind of programmatic changes internally. I'm looking for- I'm most looking forward to when customers understand the power of what we're going to give them with the builder. So the builder, again, is something we showed yesterday, but, you know, you think about the approach that we have is that we're going to, obviously, help customers to get productive and to get going with the intelligent experience by creating these out with the box micro apps and micro work flows for many of the most popular SaaS applications. The real big thing I'm looking forward to is when people can actually take the builder that we've developed and give it to their line of business people and say, "hey, you can create as many micro apps as you think are necessary within the constructs of your business process to enable your people". So that, to me, is kind of like, going to be the ultimate wow, when people say, "actually, I can give this to a person who is capable of creating a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel," as an example. And they can then actually use the technologies that we provide to create the micros and micro work flows for their own part of the business without the help of traditional development. I think that's going to be huge and I can't wait until we've got, you know, the first examples of people who have said, "hey, you've made my life easier, I can't work without Citrix". >> While businesses can be built on that, the new Excel uh, Citrix builder, the new Excel. >> I hope so, I hope so. >> Well, we'll all be excited to- and be watching with close eyes. Christian, thank you for joining Kieth and me on theCUBE, but Synergy 2019! >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Kieth Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching! (electronic music)