>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're having a great time here in Atlanta, Georgia and we have one of our CUBE alumni back with us Calvin Hsu vice president of product marketing at Citrix. Calvin thank you for joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be here. >> We have had a great action packed day yesterday half day today or so. What you guys announced yesterday with respect to the digital workspace. The Intelligent Experience is really resonating with the audience here. People are excited about it because we get it. We're all workers, employees of whether it's our own companies or a company like Citrix and we just need things to work. >> Yeah no matter what, as much as anybody loves their job it could always be better, right. There could always be things that are more streamlined or everybody talks about the red tape with the bureaucracy that they get to get through and more and more which is building red tape and bureaucracy into our systems and into our enterprise applications and now we start to blame the technology and it's not really the technology it's just that we're not thinking about what it takes to get through some of these daily work and how we get some of that noise out of their way and just make it more streamlined. >> Some of the stats that David Henshaw shared were shocking that companies waste seven trillion dollars a year on lost output because employees are having to, before they even get to their actual function, you're a marketer, all of the different tasks that you have that are bombarding you and distracting you, is a massive amount of money that companies are wasting every year. >> I love the line that you use also. Basically we're taking knowledge workers and turning them into task workers. Then I think the other part is we take task workers who are supposed to be focused on specific tasks, and they can focus on the wrong task, so there's just a lot of opportunity for people to be either giving them time to be more productive doing the things that they normally would do or time I think in a lot of organizations today to be more innovative, being creative because that certainly we know from psychological studies. That takes concerted blocks of time. That takes thoughtfulness, it takes non-distraction that's why there's all these practices about mindfulness and things like that. Now how can you find time to be mindful if every two minutes you're getting a disruption somewhere? >> So Calvin you're sitting in a unique position. One, you've been at Citrix for almost 15 years and then you're over the security products. So when you look at solving the seven trillion dollar problem there's 1/5 of our work week going to rudimentary tasks. That involves automation. When I as a security guy, ever time I present some type of automation, process automation tool to someone. Oh you don't have to sign into sales force directly. There'll be some back-end system. As you talk to your long term customers that might be a little bit apprehensive if we're looking at this Cloud way of doing legacy technologies. What are some of the insights in however you have pulled those customers along? >> Well first before anyone says anything, I'm not a security guy per say. (laughs) I know the security value my business, I know what we do but I know a lot of security professionals will be like I know Calvin, he's not a security guy. I would say for those organizations, particularly for the ones that have been with Citrix for a long time. Don't try to solve all seven trillion dollars of problems at once. Take it one step at a time. Build some trust in one area. I like what a lot of our customers have started to do and we're starting to plan with them on their first potential implementations of Intelligent Experience in the workspace. That is say, take something that's just really painful, something that gets done a lot and just solve that one thing. Build one micro-app for it, see how that gets adoption learn from it. This is part of the reason we built analytics and telemetry into all of our products so you can start to measure the utilization of it. Are we really achieving the productivity gains that we thought with that one task? Then go from there. Just earn that trust on that one action that one process or workflow and then sooner or later then the business will start to tell IT which things they need to optimize. They'll say, okay that worked great here's the next one I want you to do for me and then it just becomes a matter of prioritizing them. So taking those baby steps, getting started somewhere. I think we see a lot of paralysis by analysis of just trying to solve too much of a problem all at once. >> So as the VP of product marketing you talk with customers a lot. What's been some of the feedback from some of the beta customers who are in there getting their hands dirty and playing with Intelligent Experience. What's some of the feedback that these customers are sharing with you but also how involved were they in saying Citrix, this is where you need to take digital workspace. >> Yeah so second part of it first. In everything from the UI, the interface design process as well as architectural review. We've had customers along the way. So it's been interesting to watch them. We did this thing internally where we set up a bunch of tests of common tasks for people to do. We had them do it the old way and then we had them do it the new way and were just, basically time trialed trying to figure out what kind of productivity savings. So we invite some real end users and customers and things and to do that. So they are definitely very influential in that whole process and in giving us information about what's working and what's not working. A thing I would say is what's getting them really excited is that they see that there's alignment with the bit liner business. So we typically, most of our executive briefings are with the IT part of the house and when you talk to them about what the possibilities are then their eyes light up because they know, hey this is what my liner business has been asking for, this is how I can engage with them, this looks like a meaty project where at the end of the day we get this all done right. Everybody pats each other on the back and says, okay now we know what we need to go do next and I think sometimes IT projects get lost in the procurement and they rack 'em and stack 'em and they're thinking about it in those terms of project lines not what is the business person trying to do at the end of the day? How do we integrate with that? How do we help that move along and improve that process? >> So Calvin talk to us about the foundation. As a long time Citrix customer you come to this show and it's changed. It used to be, day one we talk about product, speeds, fees. Yesterday was all about solutions like okay we're solving this seven trillion dollar problem we're increasing productivity, the Intelligent Experience is the future. Tie the foundation, how do we get from traditional Citrix products into this Intelligent Experience? Where is the connection? >> Yeah so at the core of it I think it's all about-- What we've been doing for generations really is about trying to get applications out to people and so really all we're doing is we're adding to the variety of applications that we're delivering. It's no longer just Windows virtualization which has been a huge part of our history but now it's just standing out into SAS applications and to mobile applications. Along the way I think what we also realized in the past year or so is that if we're powering the future of work, work is not done by applications, work gets accomplished by actions and so can we extract actions out of applications? Then we have a fast path to getting work done. What we're starting to realize now is that anytime we send somebody into an application to get to an action, to get work done, then we've all ready moved them couple steps away. Anytime they have to go to one application to go to another application to go to another application to get to an action then we've all ready wasted a lot of time. That sort of realization has really helped us along the way. I think your point about presenting solutions is a really good one in a sense that that same journey made us realize, well we had a networking business and we had an end user computing business but more and more you can't get to the end using computing components without some networking in between. So there's just this interconnected mesh of have an action and when it connect to another action there's always some kind of connectivity, some kind of networking that has to happen. All these things need to work in concert and if those things are working in concert then you have this amazing opportunity to collect data and get analytics and insights and apply some machine learning against it. So that led us to say let's start talking more about solutions because people aren't going to get it if we try to explain this whole daisy chain of events. Let's just talk about what the outcome is and what we want to achieve. >> People like that, right, we're outcome oriented by nature. Speaking of outcomes I couldn't help but think yesterday when you guys were showing that great demo David showed during his keynote of the marketing manager and the bombardment that happens when that person in the liner business comes in and has five or seven different apps to interact with. Go to the app as you were describing that what can be a complicated process then having to take an action and being able to use intelligence and machine learning to surface, Lisa's a marketing manager, this is how she engages with work day and with sales first so bringing that to the surface based on the data analysis and the insight, I can't help but think another business outcome that we haven't really talked about yet is increased adoption of those SAS, web, and mobile apps that the business is investing in is we all know if you're spending money on applications like that and they're not being effectively utilized by your entire company or all the people that need to use it it's not going to work very well. So I'm even thinking from a product marketing perspective that's got to be one of the benefits, is actually fine tuning even the cost optimization of some of those apps that you guys can now bring that right to the user based on what you know they need. >> Yeah I think there was a couple of important points there that you mentioned. One is bringing the apps to the user so they are not-- Or the actions, sorry. >> The actions yes thank you. >> So instead of them going to multiple places to get them they're all just coming to them in one feed. The other is I'm from the adoption perspective. I think there's a lot of opportunity not just to improve the adoption but also to improve the satisfaction with the usage that's happening there. Anytime somebody talks to me about adoption now I think about this one customer briefing that I had where there was a very unique titled person, they were director of end user experience. Not director of end user computing they were director of experience. Their job was, he was saying, we're in charge of adoption and satisfaction, we have overall experience with it. I said, by adoption are you just creating mandates or policies or saying hey you will use this application not these other four options that you found online just doing a search. I said no because that doesn't lead to good experience. So our NPS scores. So he's rated more on NPS scores than anything else. Our NPS scores go down even if we can drive adoption up, if the NPS scores go down that's a failure for us. So it's not just, because you can get adoption by forcing people to use something and they hate it. You're no better off from an employee engagement perspective. >> It just goes to show how essential the employee experience is to customer experiencing customer satisfaction. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Employees touch in any function some level we're all engaging with our employer's customers and if there's dissatisfaction going on within the employee it has a very good chance of making it to the customer. Customers these days of any product or service, we have a choice. Customer churn is something that all marketers aim to eliminate and prevent but we know we have choice so I thought you guys did a great job yesterday of really elevating the employee experience to a business critical imperative. I don't even want to say it's a (mumbles) topic of discussion it seems to be an absolute imperative because to your point, you can by forcing function, make your teams use certain software applications but if an internal NPS goes down so does an external NPS so the risk thereof. So you guys did a great job of tying those two together is really, this is something that every business needs to be laser focused on is that employee experience. >> Yeah. Well the other thing I think about is a lot of these systems are not necessarily part of the primary function of their job. So unless you're in HR, you're not there to use the HRIS system all day long. So you just got to get them to the point so that they can do the things that they need to do as an employee for a legal or financial reasons and then just get them out of the way and let them go on. They feel productive, feel like they're contributing to the actual outcomes of the company. That goes a long way towards that experience and engagement. >> Absolutely. >> So let's peek a little bit into the future. You know it's funny that we're talking post-digital transformation as most people are still going into digital transformation. Customer experience, employee experience are the output of digital transformation. You get data from your digital transformation. You guys are doing a great job of providing analytics. Let's talk about the importance of those analytics as we go beyond employee experience, digital transformation, and customer experience. When we remove one bottle neck, when I first got my first iPhone it was awesome until the next iPhone came out and then the next one, then the next and my level of expectation changes. So what was good seven years ago, is unacceptable today. As you guys help customers innovate you collect data. What types of x-data, experience data will you continue to collect so even when the employee experience rises, that bar again rises and you help customers meet that bar. How important is analytics to that? >> The whole analytics platform is, I could foresee a day where people almost buy the workspace or buy bio networking solutions to get to the analytics that they want. We are in a unique situation where we have information about who the end user is, what device they're using, what files they're accessing, what networks they're going over, what servers are touching, what Clouds are using, and all of this stuff, it's very rare in industry that all those kinds of things come together in one place. So I think for one, the great thing about the purpose of gathering those analytics is for the machine learning. So the machine learning never stops learning as their end users continue to use it over time it just keeps getting better and better and better. It understands their behaviors, it understands their patterns and so the longevity is actually what helps. It transformed with the end user as long as we're just continuing to provide those sorts of capabilities. I think also the analytics, particularly in the area of engagement and productivity. We go back to the idea of breaking down applications into actions into micro-apps. I think once you start to see what micro-apps people use and what micro-apps people use in concert with each other or in sequence, that also has an interesting analytic behavioral benefit to it. You can see what work flows are developing whether organically or inorganically, whether there are patterns that you should take advantage of or patterns that you should stop and those analytics start to evolve in a way that we're getting a very granular pieces about granular units of work and then we can start to see how those impact the business outcomes. So as long as we keep thinking about not just how analytics apply to one piece of software and the experience with that software but start to think now what is the daisy chain of micro-apps? What is the experience of work and interconnectedness of that, the analytics just become more and more important in bringing that together. You can't do that mentally as a human being. You need some of that help from the machine learning. >> So Calvin last question for you. Lot's of folks here, over 6,000. The keynotes, yesterday and this morning were (mumbles) only. We heard record numbers watching the live stream. Intelligent Experience, not GA yet, we mentioned there's some customers in beta. That was some popular demo here in the Solutions Expo. Long line yesterday. Got to ask you as a VP of product marketing. What are some of the feedback that you've gotten from customers here since that breaking news yesterday morning? >> Number one is, can I get it now? They didn't pay attention to that. >> Of course right. >> So they, can I get it now? The other one I think is really great discussion to have because they see it, they see the end vision of it. It's like the cooking shows. You pull out the finished cake and they're like, oh that's great. How do I make it? How do I get there? So that's been the nature of a lot of those conversations. We're also holding executive briefings here a lot and what I've been hearing from all the teams is we'll start kicking off into a presentation we'll say okay, so let me recap what you saw and they're like, no no no, I like what I saw, tell me how we're going to do it. >> What does it look like? >> You get right into that conversation of execution and planning and who do I need to get on board? Who do I need to talk to? Do I bring in my CHRO? That kind of stuff. That kind of reaction, it's exactly what we were hoping for. >> I'll sneak one more question in because you've been at Citrix for 15 years but looking at the employee experiences as a horizontal across, it's not just IT's issue to make sure things are connected. It's HR, it's people officer, it's marketing, it's sales. Have you seen a big change in how Citrix is going to market? Not just talking to the IT folks but people saying, who do I need to engage in my business to get on board with this direction? >> Definitely. I don't want to overstate like we're in front of everyone. We're not a consumer name yet but in the past several months the audiences that we've been talking to it's not uncommon that we'll have a briefing with the CIO and the next time we talk the CHROs in there with them. Somebody else from the from the liner business. There are chief revenue officers and they are starting to bring people in that we've never met with before and I think that's good for the CIO too. It says, I'm invested in this business, I understand what our business is and I found a way to help you and let's talk about how to do it. >> Exciting times, never a dull moment. Well Calvin thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. At Synergy we've heard so many exciting things talking a couple more of your innovation award. Nominees this afternoon. Really great stuff from Citrix. >> Really good flock this year of the innovation award finalists. >> Outstanding. >> Great. >> I love how you guys do the voting too that it's, some of the public gets a chance to vote as well as some of the experts. I thought that was very cool. >> American Idol us. >> American Idol style. >> Exactly. Well Calvin thank you, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Center G 2019. Thanks for watching.

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

>> Man: Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend live from Atlanta, Georgia. We're at Citrix Synergy 2019, the first time theCUBE has been back here in eight years and I'm geakin out even more, yes, I know it's early, two man hand CMO and EBP of Strodigy CIRTIX TIBB, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Well thanks for joining us here. >> The Keno was awesome this morning, Keith and I were both tweeting like crazy and like and we were like, Wow, we're going to have a great couple of days. >> Thank you. >> You can hear all of the networking and the innovation and the conversations going on behind us here in the Solutions EXPO. I think record number of people attending live, as well as watching the live stream today. There was at least one round of applause, standing here all night. Citrix, a lot of transformation in the last year alone. Really talking about the employee experience as a critical enabler of digital business transformation. Talk to us about that. Yeah, absolutely I mean, with all the technology, technology choices we've had with Cloud and Sass and Mobile. We've created a lot of opportunity but we've also created a lot of complexity. Both through IT and especially for the employee who now needs no navigate across all of this different environment to try get a bit of information or to get their key work done. And so, Citrix and our Customers were saying: Hey look, employee experience has become a sea level and board level imperative. So what we've done is, we've unveiled and continued to extend upon our digital work space. Not just a place where we've unified access to everything an employee needs to be productive. All their Sass Apps, Web Apps, Mobile Apps and content, wrapper that in a layer of security so that IT and the company are confident that Applications and information is more secure in the workspace than now. But now we're infusing intelligence into the workspace. Machine learning and simplified work flows, in order to guide an employee through their day, so they don't need to spend all their time navigating multiple apps, but the tasks and insides that they need to get done are presented to them veery quickly, they can move on and get to perform their best work. >> So Tim, you're literally preaching to the choir. Me and Lisa, we get it, we understand it and then even at they key note, David was preaching to all the major announcements, big claps. Thousands of people clapping. The innovation and ideal of extending the workspace to the intelligent experience, I think the Citrix faithful today, get that. But a seven trillion Dollar problem that you guys are addressing, you just mentioned, but now we're talking about talking to the CEO, the CIO, the CMO, the COO. Talk about expanding message beyond the faithful into the sea squeed. How's that impacting your jobs and how are you getting that message out there? >> Yeah, that's a great question. You're absolutely right. Employee experience is something that is shared. In fact, we've just done a considerable amount of research into that with the Economist on a global basis. What we were finding is IT and HR are sharing this problem together. The rethinking, not just the digital environment of how they're delivering technology to the employee but the physical space and the culture and how it all weaves together. And how we're engaging within Citrix at a much higher level with not just the CIO but with the Chief Human Resources officer, the CEO, the CFO, is because employee experience and how well an employee feels when they have access to the information and tools they need to get their job done, is directly related to the business outcomes the company is trying to achieve. You know, its proven to deliver greater customer satisfaction, increase revenues, greater profitability, all the metrics that really move a business. >> And you know, this is pervasive across any industry and every roll in every organization. I mean, the cool video that David showed this morning, show an example of a Senior Marketing Manager who wants to deliver Rock Star campaigns for her company, but she's got before Citrix workspace and intelligent experience. All these different apps and all this distraction, every couple of minutes distraction. And you think about how that impacts that Marketing Manager's role even all the way to like a call center. And how a call center employee is in the front lines with the customer, whether it's your ISP or something who has so much choice. If that call center person doesn't have access to all the apps and the information that they need, not only are you effecting the employee experience and potentially causing attrition, but the end user customer that service might say, forget it, I'm going to go somewhere else. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, we all have that experience where you call a call center and they might not have the answer for you or in some cases the connection might be poor. So really what we're trying to do with the digital workspace is eliminate that. We talk about experiences, it's not just unifying and infusing intelligence into it, but we also leverage our networking portfolio to ensure reliable connectivity. So that employee has access to the applications they need, they can reliably access the information they need and any kind of their telephony or your voiceover IP is consistent. So you or I think they're on a landline in a big call center and they might be working from home but still have access to everything they need through the Citrix Workspace. >> So just a couple of weeks ago, I was at SAP Sapphire, we're talking about customer experience, employee experience. Kind of the ex-data versus the old-data, operational data. And Citrix in the past has been about operational data. You have to share stuff with your warehouse about improving analytics so administrators and engineers can deliver applications and experiences better. Lets talk about the user experience in this new, or the employee experience in this future of work. I have this SAP green screen and man, would my job be so much easier if I could just push a button and get that data into Salesforce, but I have to engage IT for that. I have to open the ticket and we have to take it through project, 6 months later we abandon it because the industry has moved on. How's Citrix going to make that faster for the employee and improving my employee experience? >> Well fist of all, coming from an Enterprise application background, myself, including SAP, I know the depth of functionality of those applications. And for specialized roles, whether you're in supply chain or finance or alike, they spend their day in that core application. However, the rest of us, we're hired for a specific purpose. Whether its the example we gave onstage today about Maria, the Senior Marketing Director, or whether its an engineer who wants to spend their time building product. We were at hight to spend our day navigating, expense reporting apps or performance review apps or other types of applications that we're all exposed to. They're not our primary application, we have to learn a new interphase, we have to manage different authentication. And what the workspace does is in the words of one of our customers, is by unifying is all and being able to reach into those applications and extract out the information and task that's very personal to you. One customer says to their employees, you may never need to log into an enterprise application again, but you'll still get all the utilities, all the value because you have all the insides you need and you can get them quickly without needing to navigate or search across multiple applications. So you can get that task, approve that expense report like that. Without needing to go through 4 screens to do it and take you away from your core job. So really what this is all about, is removing the noise from an employees day so they can perform at their very best. >> So critical because, Sorry Keith, one of the stats aslo I think David shared this morning, was that enterprise software is designed for power users. Which is 1% of the population. So for those folks who need to get their job done as effectively as possible, so that their delivering what they need to and the big end users experience is what it should be. That's to be able to say, you don't ever have to log into an enterprise application again and making that experience personalized, Game changers. >> Absolutely, I mean we think about the frustration that employees have today and that they would share the findings today from the Gallops study but 80% of employees are disengaged at work. The number one reason happens to be around their level of their manager, but the number two one is they don't feel they have access to the right information tools to do their job. They want to get that noise out of their day so they can do what they were hired to do and what they're passionate about. >> So we talked a lot today about the familiarization of enterprise tech. We love these things. We don't love these things because the hardware is great, we love these things because we're able to do our jobs. So whether I'm downloading a app or Angry Birds or whatever experience that I'm having on it is, I get instant gratification from this devise. Talk to us about the overall potential of speed to value in a repeatable process that Enterprises can enjoy around digital transformation based on Citrix versus you know, I've heard similar things from ISV's. They can come in and write a customization from an Enterprise app into another solution, simplify a specific job, but if I have to do that for every application, one I don have the money, bandwidth, time and the industry will pass me up. How are you guys bringing this consumerized experience to the future world. >> Yeah, that's a great illustration is our mobile devices. We live on our mobile devices. A lot of Enterprise application have created really good mobile applications. You know, concur from SAP where I came from, that's a great experience. Very quick to go in. Salesforce, an awesome tool, their mobile experience is different from their regular experience so you have to relearn and navigate. And then there's others that never really created a mobile experience so we're all doing this on our phone and trying to get that done. And even if every, to your point, if every individual enterprise app had a great mobile experience, that still means we need to navigate a whole bunch of interfaces. What we're doing by unifying this into a single digital workspace by curating and personalizing your workday and creating a work stream very similar to what Facebook and others have done for our personal screen and how we get information through that feed, how we get news through that feed. We're doing the same for work. So on a mobile device that experience is so much richer than we've seen since almost the invention of the smart phone. >> So as we talk about the consumerization of Tech, big announcements with Azure and Google. How does that impact that new audience when you go talk to another CMO at a big Car Manufacturer? Why should they get excited about Azure or Google compute? They really don't see that. >> There's no doubt that the world is moving to the cloud, but everyone's moving at their own pace right? Companies has invested decades in some cases of infrastructure and I promise they're not going to move that to the cloud over night, but they are beginning to move certain workloads, certain styles and, by the way, they want to choice of multiple clouds. Which is why Citrix has invested to partner with all the major cloud providers to allow our customers to have that choice. So if they want to leverage some aspects of Azure, they want to move some of the Citrix workloads there, they can do that. If they want to virtualize, as you heard today, the announcement with Google, if they want to take some of their Citrix virtualization, virtual apps or virtual desktops and move that to Google cloud, that's available to them. Including now, as we announced today, with automated provisioning. So IT can quickly set up a desktop, maybe its for a new hire, maybe its for a contractor to come in and give him the tools they need to be productive. So if companies want choice across those clouds, they don't want to have locked in, and they're going to move at their own pace. As we heard today from Partner's Healthcare for example, security first, cloud considered. Their considering aspect is to move to the cloud when it makes sense and they want to have that flexibility to allow them to move at their own pace and make it seamless with their on-premises infrastructure. And that's what we provide. >> That flexibility is key and you brought up, every business today lives in a hybrid multi cloud world. So employees, with that employee experience, needs to deliver access to Sass apps, mobile apps, web apps. To deliver that great employee experience, but I want to turn the times a little bit and take a look at what you guys are doing with marketing and on the business strategy side of Citrix to help deliver that outstanding employee experience to your customers. By way of you CSM team and you even have a relatively new adoption marketing team. I'd love to know how that ladder fits into your business strategy. >> Right, so I'll come to the adoption marketing team in a moment, but the first thing we're doing is, as illustrated here earlier, is that this discussion around employee experience, as it becomes a sea level and board level imperative, it's become a company wide initiative. And so, from a marketing perspective, we have not only gone higher up in the organization having a much more strategic discussion around how we can drive the business outcomes of the companies want to achieve. But also making sure we're putting it in the language of these other roles. All right, HR wants to talk about employee engagement and how we can demonstrate through the work space of how we're doing that. IT wants to talk about adoption of their technologies in the like. So getting to the customer adoption component, so within, as you move to the cloud, it's no longer, I'll sell you a product, good luck. When you engage with a customer, once you get that agreement, that's when the real work starts, right. You're in a long term service agreement and the value they extract from your application, the adoption they get, is going to determine their level of success and their level to renew with you at the end of the term. So we've put a lot of investment as a company into what we call our customer success team. Folks that are 'view them as the coach at the gym'. That's the difference between you buy a treadmill at home, you might use it for a while and it becomes a towel rack. Or you join the gym and your trainers there telling you how to get the best performance. That's what our customer success team does, but top do that at scale and to engage on a real time basis, we've paralleled that with the customer adoption marketing team. And really, we're providing both out-of-product and in-product marketing queue to the customer, to the user of how best to take advantage of the product they've already subscribed to. >> That's exciting, Tim. Speaking of customers' success, the last question as we wrap here. You guys kind of have the American Idol of Customer Awards, The Innovation Awards, there are down to three finalists. We will get to speak to all three of them over the next two days. But something that I mentioned to you that really peaked my interest is, is this is an Awards opportunity for other folks to vote on. And then the winner, all our Ryan Seacrests' are going to be here to announce it on Thursday. Tell us a little bit about the Customer Innovation Awards and how these customers are really articulating the value prop of Citrix. >> Yeah the Citrix Customer Innovation Award's one of my favorite times of the year. The program's been around for a number of years and its really grown a cold following within the Citrix community as customers get nominated based on their deployment and the business outcomes they're driving. We have an, initially an individual panel that widows all those nominations down so that panel consist of former winners as well as analysts and other influencers in the community. And then to your point, the three finalists that we have right now, we expose their stories to the world to everyone here at Synergy and beyond. And they get to vote. So the votes are going to be tallied, I believe the voting polls close on Wednesday night and then we'll announce the winner on Thursday and the customers love it. Not only do they get the recognition, but the other customers love it because I have those same problems. I want to be able to solve it and I want to understand how Citrix can help me. >> And that is as a marketer you know, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but there's no better brand validation than the voice of your customer articulating how their business is benefiting significantly and giving them the opportunity to talk to peers and in the industry. >> Absolutely, that's why we're in it, for the customer's success. >> Well, we'll be anxiously awaiting to hear the results on Thursday Tim, I'm already excited for next year. So, thank you so much for having theCUBE, Keith and me >> Great >> At Synergy 2019 >> Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure, for Keith Townsend and I'm Lisa Martin, live from Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys as well. Good to see you again. >> All right, so I feel like one of those CNBC guys. It's like, Tom, I remember back when Force10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on and converged in infrastructure, but of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. >> Tom: That's correct. >> So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. >> Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC, and then recently I picked up what we called our converged infrastructure business or the VxBlock, Vscale business. And I continue also to manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically any time our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth. We support them with Dell EMC certified parts, and then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, Cumulus, Big Switch, things like that. Riverbed, Silver Peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. >> Yeah, well luckily there's no change in any of those environments. >> Tom: No, no. >> Networking's been static for decades. I mean they threw a product line that I mean last I checked was somewhere in the three to four billion dollar range. With the VxBlock under what you're talking there. >> Yeah it's a so, yeah-- >> Maybe you could talk, what does this mean? 'Cause if I give you your networking guy. >> Right. >> Keith and I are networking guys by background, obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to-- >> Tom: Sure. >> Get to this stuff. >> Well I think when you talk about all these solutions, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VxBlock and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. So that's probably the reason primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division 'cause that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side. And see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to this not your do-it-yourself but do-it-for-me environment. >> All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence, and there's other parts of the group that have hyper convergence. How do you square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? >> Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyper converge, converge, or do-it-yourself, you build your own block so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack, they want it pre-tested, they want it certified, they want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and Cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are in essence looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor but might be a different IP as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking. Some 4 1/2 years ago. Now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. >> Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends it's scale. >> Right. >> It's how do customers really help scale these environments? >> Exactly, exactly. It depends a lot around the customer environment and what kind of skill sets do they have. Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process. Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases. But we kind of have this buying conundrum of build versus buy. I think my old friend, Chad Sakac, used to say, there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build-it-themselves, or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in a networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software, and in some cases even disaggregated software. Putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center. Rather than buying a full proprietary stack, well we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. >> So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the Open Source community. And I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the Open Source relationship or the relationship that Dell Networking has with the Open Source community? >> Absolutely, we first made our venture in Open Source actually with Microsoft in their SONiC work. So they're creating their own network operating software, and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface, or side. So that was put into the Open Compute Project probably around 3 1/2, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base, or what's known in the Linux foundation as OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation, where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware, creates this switch subtraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon, and bringing it to a control plane, which allows APIs to be connected for all your north-bound applications or your general analysis that you want to use, or a disaggregated analysis, what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and Open Source software. We really think that this trend is moving, and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. >> So that was an awful lot of provider talk. You covered both the provider's base and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. You know the provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plug-ins for disaggregated networking. And then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? >> Well, I think it's this move towards software-defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today, and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clarke. The whole world is moving to software-defined. It's no longer if, it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage, and moving from traditional software-defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software-defined, they could look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. In a manner of which they can kind of continue to manage the old world, but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software-defined with the same infrastructure. You know it's not well-known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases, and the customer environment. So, traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. >> So I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell and this show, I mean it is a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which will be opening in a little bit, but on the networking side, you've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces, to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe, give us kind of the update on the overview, the ecosystem, where Dell wins. >> Yeah, yeah I mean, if you think about 30-something years ago when Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about. It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and x86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies in the networking area whether it's Dell EMC or to VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market. Virtualization, Layer two, day or three disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of Velocloud by VMware. We're really hoping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP infusion, and Pluribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area while we lead with Velocloud, we have Silver Peak and we also have Versa Technology, which is getting a lot of upkick in the area. Both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity and their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open, and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they go through their IT transformation. >> So, Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software-defined. Couple of Dell EMC World's ago, big announcement Chad talked about, ScaleIO, and abstracting, and giving away basically, ScaleIO as a basic solution for free. Then you guys pulled back. And you said, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a packaged solution. So we're talking on one end, total disaggregation and another end, you know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want packaged solutions. >> Tom: Yeah. >> Can you talk to the importance of software-defined and packaged solutions? >> Right, it's kind of this theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our vSAN operating or vSAN ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, and we tested it, we certified it, most importantly we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are again, am I building it myself or do I want to buy a stack. If I'm somewhere in the middle maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a Rail type of solution, where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio, can help them at any point of the venture or at any part of the solution. So I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You've got those that want everything from a single point, and you got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an Opex standpoint are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock 'em in to a single solution. It doesn't get 'em into that long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. >> Tom, sometimes we have the tendency to get down in the weeds on these products. Especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was, the whole SDN wave, didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses' challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story. What you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples we'd love to hear. >> Yeah, no so, I think networking plays a critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage, the networking component was kind of the lagger. It was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network. Because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall are I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again, of disaggregation, of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well, and it's really starting to see an uptick. And the customer experiences as follows. One is, open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CapEx standpoint. But because they moved towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux, or even our own OS10 is now based in Linux. Look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute. And the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CapEx, they're saving anywhere between 40 and 50% on their Opex. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having this decisions of sending a network engineer to a closet to do CLI, down in the dirt as you would say, and reconfigure the switch, a lot of that now has been attracted to a software lever, and getting the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric, or to segregate it using NSX micro segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So, just the incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CapEx. You know, cheaper hardware, cheaper ASICs, et cetera. It's all about Opex. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. >> So we all have this nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking. Add to that a software layer this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically whether it's in the server provider perspective or on the enterprise. What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? >> Well obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware. >> Keith: Right. >> And so you have vRealize and vROps and so forth, and in fact in the new VxBlock 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearings, a lot of our development towards the vRealize suite, so that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more, a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even it from the storage participation like SAP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute, networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000-foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers, do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment, and can those be brought down to the entire stack? >> All right, well Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know, I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. >> Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think we're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technology's networking. >> All right. Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)