>> live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the two you covering. Citric Synergy. Atlanta 2019. Brought to You by Citrix >> Welcome back to the Cubes. Continuing coverage of Citrix Energy, 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin. My co host for the event is Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to talk. Teo, one of the Citrix Innovation Award nominees, Indiana University, with a couple of folks from Indiana University joining us. Stephanie Cox, manager, a Virtual Platform Services and Mat Link, associate vice president of research Technologies Guys, thanks so much for joining Keith and me, Thank you. And congratulations on Indiana University being nominated for an innovation award. I was talking with Tim in hand there CMO yesterday, saying there was over a thousands nomination. So to even get down to being in the top three is pretty exciting stuff. Talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. Us. This is a a big, big organization. Lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Matt, let's start with you. Give us that picture of what's going on there. Yes, so I >> u is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We've got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is were consolidated shop. So there are 1,200 of us and I you that support the entire university and all the campuses and anyone point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services. >> That's a Big 70 talk. Talk to us about your virtual a footprint. How How big is the location? Data centers? What's the footprint? >> Well, we have two data centers. One of them is in Indianapolis, which is my home. It's one of our larger campus is calling Indiana University Purdue University affectionately, I U P y. There is a data center there, but our large danna center is at the flagship campus, which is in Bloomington, Indiana, >> and to support 100,000 plus people and to hundreds of any given the 2nd 200,000 devices. How have you designed that virtual infrastructure to enable access to students, faculty, etcetera and employees. >> So from the network perspective, we have several network master plans that have rolled, and we're in our 2nd 10 year next network master plan, and the network master plan is designed to continually upgrade the network. Both the physical network, the infrastructure and the wireless network in our last 10 year budget, for that was around $170,000,000 of investment just to support the network infrastructure. And then Stephanie rides on top of that as the virtual platform with Citrix to deliver the images anywhere on campus. Whether it's wirelessly or whether it's connected via network connection >> kill seven campuses is already a bit. If you ever look at a map, Indiana sits Christ map damp in the middle of the country. It's a big space. Right before we hit record, we were just talking about that. Drive off I 65 from Indianapolis to Chicago is just a lot of rules area, and I'm sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is the sensible thing. Everyone in Indiana talk to us about the challenges of getting connective ity and getting material virtual classrooms to those remote areas. >> Yeah, it's really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really at the premiere Remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So we built our citrix environment. Teo encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty, staff and students to use the service. Do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. But we do offer it to everyone, which is I found in the education. You're in a very unique tin Indiana University. Another another thing to have consolidated I t. And then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restricted to specific pockets of the university. With that, we've been able to them extend offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote location. So if you're a student who is working in or go, you know, lives in rule Indiana and you want Teo get in Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We I have a very nice of online program, just a lot of other options that that we've really tried Teo offer for remote access. >> So Citrix has really enabled this. I think you call it the eye. You anywhere. Indiana University anywhere Program. Tell us about opening up this access to everyone over the time that you've been ascetics Customer, how many more people can you estimate have access now, that didn't hurt not too long ago. >> Yeah, I think initially, and Matt was probably no more before me before I Even before I even came on the scene, I believe that the original youth case was really just trying. Teo, extend what we were already doing on premise in what we call just our Indiana University lab supported areas. Right? So just your small, like the old days you would goto your college campus and you go into your computer lab with it. We just really wanted Teo the virtual Isar expand the access to just those specific types of APS and computers. And that was an early design. Since then, over the years, we've really kind of, you know, just really expanded. Really. We used the Citrix platform to redesign and distribute how we deliver the applications and the virtual desktops. So now not only do we service those students who would who would normally come onto the campus just to use your traditional computer lab. Wait do a lot, especially programs for other schools. Like we, we deliver a virtual desktop for our dentistry. Students may actually use that whole platform in the dental clinic to see real patients are third tier. Third year doctors do that way. Also replicated that same thing and do it in our speech and hearing sciences for our future audiologist. We have certain professors that have wanted to take a particular course that they're teaching and extended to different pockets all over the world. So we might host a class from Budapest or Africa somewhere else. You know, wherever that faculty and staff has three sources that they know they need to get to in their content already virtualized. We worked to make that happen all the time. >> That's a lot of what you just said is first of all, initially, maybe before Citrix being able to provide support in the computer labs for your maybe seven core campuses. Now you get your giving 130,000 plus individuals anywhere, anytime. Access that is the ex multiplier on that is massive, but you're also gone global It's not just online, it's you're able to enable professors to teach in other parts of the world where it was before. It was just people that were in Indiana, but master and and >> you're just limited by the network. So that's the only draw back. When you go to the rule areas way out, you're just limited by the network. You know, the initial program was really you really thought of as a cost saving measure way we're goingto put thin clients out. We wouldn't have to do life cycle replacements for desktop machines that were getting more expensive and more expensive, you know, 10 years ago, and now the way that we look at it is I you wants to provide services across the breath of the organization and make those services at no additional cost and open to everybody open access to everybody. The desktop, for example, is one of you know Stephanie is, is the brainchild behind the desktop, took three years of dedicated hard work to create an environment to support the visually impaired. >> Talk to us more about that because that was part of the video and that captured my intention immediately. What is 80 accessibility, technology, accessibility technology is inaccessible to get that. So I'm just, you know, hundreds thousands, and not just those that are sight and hearing. >> So one of the things then I think it's just a wonderful thing about working at a university. We're able to buy software licenses in a big quantity, large quantity, right? Because we have that kind of buying power software that I normally never would see or get access to, even in my private sector. Administer tricks engineer for a long time. But when you come to a university and then you're selling or you're getting licenses for 50 60 70 80,000 you get to see some of these products that you don't normally as a regular consumer. You'd like it, but you know you can't really afford it. So with that, when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity site licence, you know, the way we thought, Oh my goodness, let's virtualized these and make sure everybody gets access to them and the ones that were really attractive to us, where the ones for the visually impaired, sure they're in niche and They're very, very expensive, but we but let's just try it. We'll see how well they perform in a virtual environment. And with that, our Citrix infrastructure underneath they performed quite well. Plus, the apse have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. So we're really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. We had to work really hard to make sure that the speech recognition software was fast enough for them. It turns out that blind people listen to speech really, really, really, really, really fast, and so we had to make sure that we kept our platform while we're working on it to keep it sped an updated so that it's usable to them right since functional to me. But they really need it to be like, 10 times faster. I found that out after even shooting the award video and spending even more time with them, I thought, Why don't you guys tell me it was slow to you? But yeah, it's, uh, it's been an honor, really, Teo to be up for that award. But tow work with those students to learn more about their needs to learn more about the city different applications that people write for people with old disabilities. I hope we can do more in that space. >> So the young man in it and why I don't remember his name. >> Priscilla, Bela, Chris. So >> share just quickly about Chris's story. >> Yeah, and he watches the Cube. I hope he's listening because I >> think I think this whole >> kind of >> really put a little bit icing on the cake because you're taking an environment and urine empowering a student to do what they want to do versus what they are able or not able to do. So Christmas story is pretty cool of where he wants to go with his college career. >> Yeah, I won't say he's a big, you know, proponent, user of the virtual desktop, because he's just so advanced. He's like, way beyond everything We're learning from him. But he is Indiana University's believe. I'm saying this right, very first biomedical chemical engineer who is blind and fourth completely blind, Yes, wow and is quite a brilliant young man, and we were lucky to have him be r. He will test anything for me and and Mary Stores, who was featured in the video Chris Meyer. And he's also featured in the video. Gonna remember their names? I mean, it's a hole. I'm lucky to have a whole community of people that will Yeah, they know where we want to be there for them. We don't always get it right. What? We're gonna listen and keep trying to move forward. So >> But if you kind of think of even what a year or two ago not being able to give any of this virtualized desktop access to this visually impaired and how many people are now using it? >> Um, well, we open it up to everyone. We have hundreds and hundreds of users, but we know not everyone who uses it is blind. People like you can use it if you want it or not way. Don't really understand why some people prefer to use that one over there. The other But it does have some advantages. I mean, there there are different levels of sight impairment, too, as I've just been educated right. There are some people who are just at the very beginning of that journey of just losing their site. So we if if that happens to be, you know, someone that we can extend our environment to. It's probably better t use it now and get really familiar with that issue. Transition to losing your sight later in life. I've been told so >> So you ask a little bit about the scope of of the desktop, so I'll layer on a little bit of the scope of eye you anywhere. Last year, around 65,000 individual unique users over well over 1,000,000 Loggins and 8,000,000 and the average session time was around 41 minutes. That's so our instructors teach with it. Are clinicians treat people with it? We've built it in two. How's Elektronik protected health data? Er hit. The client's gonna be critical, writes the hip a standard because you can't say compliance anymore because you can't be compliant with a standard change. That wording several times way are very familiar with meeting hip. A standard we've been doing that for about 12 years now with where I came from was the high performance computing area of the university. So that's my background, and I >> so one thing we didn't get a chance to talk, uh, touch 12 100,000 devices were a citrus citrus is a Microsoft partner. Typically, when those companies think of 200,000 users, they think for profit. There's, you know, this is a niche use case for 200,000 users. Obviously, you guys have gotten some great pricing as part of being a educational environment. What I love to hear is kind of the research stories, because the ability to shrink the world, so to speak, you know, hi HPC you're giving access to specialized equipment to people who can't get their normally. You know, you don't have to be physically in front of GPU CPUC century. What other cool things have been coming out of the research side of the house because of the situation able? >> So this is cool. I mean, >> I get it. So >> So one of our group's research software solutions stole the idea from Stephanie to provide a research desktop. Barr >> imitation. Highest form of flattery, Stephanie. Absolutely. So what we've >> done is is is we always continually to try to reduce the barriers of entry and access? Uh, you know, supercomputing. Before you had to be this tall to ride this ride. Well, now we're down to here and with the hopes that will get down even farther. So what we've done is we've taken virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers, and now you can be wherever you want to be and have access to HPC. Untie you and that's all the systems. So we have four super computers and we have 40 petabytes of spinning disc ah, 160 petabytes of archival tape library. So we're we're a large shop and, you know, we couldn't have done it without looking at what Stephanie has done and and really looking in that model differently. Right? Because to use HPC before, you'd have to use a terminal and shell in and now, looking at you anywhere that gives you just the different opportunity to catch a different and more broad customer base. And I call on customers because we try to treat him as customers and and helps the diversity of what you're doing. So last year alone, our group research technologies supported a 151 different departments way were on 937 different grants, and we support over 330 different disciplines. Uh, it I you and so it's It's deep, but it's also very broad. First, larger campus we are. And as a large organization as we are, you know, we're fairly nimble. Even a 1,200 people. >> Wow! From what I've heard, it's no wonder that what you've done at Indiana University has garnered you the Innovation Award nominee. I can't imagine what is next. All that you have accomplished. Stephanie. Matt, thank you so much for joining Key to me. We wish you the best of luck and good a citric scott dot com Search Innovation Awards where you can vote for the three finalists. We wish you the very best of luck will be waiting with bated breath tomorrow to see who wins. >> So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Keep >> our pleasure for Keith Townsend. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Citrix. Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching

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

>> 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)

>> Live, from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend coming to you from our second day of coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta. We are very pleased to welcome to theCUBE, the SVP of EMEA for Citrix, Sherif Seddik. Nice to have you on theCUBE. >> Fantastic, thank you very much for having me here. It's great. >> Our pleasure, so we have spoken the last, almost two full days here, on set, with a whole bunch of your executives, customers, analysts. The excitement over, not just the Citrix Workspace intelligent experience, but the announcements of deepening partnerships with Microsoft and Google are so exciting. >> Absolutely, I mean, we are very thrilled with kind of the, I was actually talking to David Henshall, our CEO, earlier today, and I was going, "We just announced so much stuff. I'm not sure everybody grasps everything that we announced." So it's exciting times for us, as you said, from an innovation point of view, from a speed to market point of view, and definitely partnerships. >> Yeah, I would love to hear, I mean. The deepening partnership with Microsoft, the Google announcements, the intelligent experience, and I. Zero-in on this announcement with Microsoft. This is like something that has been pent up demand. The ability to run desktop as a service, Citrix in a cloud, specifically Microsoft's, because there's a lot of overlap in partnership. What have customers been more excited about? Getting this pent up demand and answering for this partnership with Microsoft? Or are they surprised, in that intelligent experience, both very exciting announcements. >> Well I think what we're getting most excitement about is really the intelligent workspace because every customer that I talk to these days has an employee experience project going on. They all call it different things, but it's really focused about that. How can we get our employees to get what they need done as fast as possible? I was talking to customers who are actually starting to measure to the nanosecond, how long does it take an employee to launch app A or app B et cetera? So that's really the thing that customers are more excited about. The fact that they can give their employees such a beautiful, consumer-like experience, that guides them through their work, is really, customers are seeing it as a game changers for what they can do for their employees. >> And that's an enabler, well it's essential, for to have a great employee experience, directly affects your customer experience. >> Absolutely, and actually, what I tell many of our customers is you should look at the employees as your customers because if your employees are happy, they're going to make your customers happy. And the statistics, and the studies recently have been quite staggering about employee experience. You see the Gallup result from a couple of years ago that said, companies with engaged employees have 20% higher sales, 21% higher profitability, but the reverse of that was that only 20% of the employees were really engaged. Nearly 20% were actively disengaged. So the companies that can really flip that dynamic, can achieve growth and business results, and as you said, greater, greater customer experience. >> I'm also really interested in this unique balance, when it comes to customer experience and employee experience. You're in EMEA, so, there's a great, I think, distrust between big companies, especially big American companies, and data. In order to deliver the experience, you need data. What have been the conversations with your customers as you help to ensure them that Citrix definitely respects their data, GDPR and all of that, but the exchange of data for value is definitely there. >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key things is every customer conversation now has a deep analysis of data and the data flows and where do they go. And we've taken great steps. So, we've, one of the first investments that we made in the cloud was creating a control plane in Europe, in that space, in Amsterdam. So that we make sure the data is available in Europe, within the EU, et cetera. But on top of that, we also don't keep a lot of data, in our cloud environments. We just focus on, what do we need to make sure that it's the right employee, the right user, and that they only get access to the things that they get access to. But it's every customer conversation. They want to understand, "Tell us exactly, which pieces of data do they keep? And where do you keep them? And how long do you keep them for?" and all that. So, we've invested a lot of resources into making sure that we comply with all of the different European rules. And as you said, there's GDPR now, that's an umbrella, but in Europe, some countries have some. >> They go deeper? >> Yeah, they go deeper than that. And we make sure that we work with our customers, to make sure that we give them every level of comfort around privacy and data privacy. >> So you talked about the customers being very excited about the intelligent experience. The news that the capabilities that it's really going to bring the actions to the user. So really what we've heard and felt in the last 24 hours is, Citrix really pivoting towards the general user. But I'd love to get your perspective on EMEA customers influence on the development of the intelligent experience. How vocal have they been? How, especially because, if you just even look at compliance and standards alone, there's so many. Talk to us about that feedback loop that your customers in EMEA have had. >> It's been fascinating. A couple of years ago, I was visiting one of the largest French banks, and a big of that conversation, they were actually talking to me about, "How are you thinking about virtual assistance in the workplace?" And kind of, "How are you going to bring that in?" And, "Where does that fit with your whole focus on giving customers choice? Are you giving us choice on that? How will you integrate that?" So, customers, as I said, are very, very focused on how to take advantage of that. And the big difference in EMEA I guess, is always that balance between, okay, how do we make sure that we're continuing to enhance the experience that we provide our users with the capabilities? And at the same time, making sure that we are compliant. However, the other interesting thing is the speed at which some of the customers themselves changed. Again, I met a particular customer two years ago, and they were like, "We are in an unregulated industry. We are never going to do BYOD. We are never going to allow our users to work from home." And I met the same person, you know, 12 months later, and it was "BYOD is our new standard. We've even allowed our traders to do some work from home." So that shift in perceptions and actions that our European customers are taking, has been phenomenal over the last 18 months. >> That's a pretty fast turnaround, from no BYOD, everybody needs to be on site, to we have got to deliver an experience our employees need. What do you think were some of the catalysts for a shift of that magnitude in the course of 12 months? >> I think the biggest thing is probably the war for talent, if you like, among organizations. And everybody's thinking, you know, whatever data you look at again, there are employee shortages, there are skill shortages. So, with Generation Y and Generation Z coming into workplace, they are very demanding. It's interesting how many customers are saying now that, one of the questions that employees or potential employees ask when they are coming in is "What are the tools that you're going to give me? Can I choose whatever device I want?" et cetera. So that's the first thing. The second thing has been, things like, pragmatic things, like costs of real estate, and kind of how do we optimize that, and that drives certain things. And if you can get them comfortable around the security and the privacy aspects, then they start focusing on these other business benefits that they can get. But I would say, talent attraction is number one. >> So let's talk about kind of your role, your sales role. As you have AEs, Account Executives, and SEs, Sales Engineers, out in the field, having these conversations. This is very volatile, like, you know, I visit this account three months ago, six months ago, and they said no the the intelligent, they were at Citrix, they said no to the intelligent workspace. They were no to BYOD. How do you prepare your staff to be, for the volatility in conversations? >> I think one of the first things, other than the staff, is I think we have a very unique position around that, enabling the customer choice. So because we are definitely very very much on that, it's going to be hybrid cloud. Customers need get the choice of deploying the technology in the cloud or on premises. Regardless of the customer position, we always have a solution that we can offer. And as long as we are very clear on, okay, if you go this option, these are some of the capabilities you're going to miss about. So that enables a continuous conversation with the customer. However the other thing that we are driving with our teams, is really focus on the business outcomes that the customer is driving for. And as you focus on that, then you can get customers to change their view. But just make sure, the other thing is, we want all of our employees to really understand deeply, the security and privacy concerns that the customers have and be able to respond to these. Because once we, in here actually, yesterday, we had a meeting with one of the large European telcos. And the meeting started with, "Okay, we're not going to do cloud." And once we explained to them, okay, let's walk you through our data flow. Let's walk you through what we keep. And then "Ah, we didn't realize it was like this. Then maybe." They didn't say, yes, we're going to move forward, straight away, but it opened a conversation, and that's the key of what we need our teams and sellers, is focus on the customer. Focus on the business side of things. >> And within those customer conversations, employee experience, we're hearing more and more, is being elevated to a C-suite imperative. Are you starting to see more meetings with CIOs, Chief People Offices, Chief Marketing Officers? Is that opening up opportunities for your sales guys and gals to really educate the executive management team at a company, rather than traditionally, IT? >> Yeah, I think absolutely. It's interesting because, particularly when we start to talk about the intelligent workspace and saying, you know, general purpose and being able to. Many of our CIOs can say "That's great, but this is not a decision that I can take on my own," if that's what we're talking about. "So let's, we have to bring our HR teams into play, we have to bring our business owners into play." And there is now becoming this "Let's go together." So they are now becoming, opening the doors for us to go and talk to the business leaders because that is what is required to make a decision that impacts every employee, not just a small fraction. >> Wow, so that's a huge cultural shift, internally, to your sales team. You know, I'm used to engaging Citrix's sales team and talking about, well this VDI capability is available in this product. This isn't available in this product. Checklist, checklist, checklist. The conversation of shifting to having a business outcome conversation is very different. You know, one day, your team may go in and talk to HR, another day they may go in and talk to marketing. It is a skillset beyond any single team. How are you guys adjusting to that business outcome conversation? And preparing your team, and giving them the tools from an employee experience, to go out and have this multitude of conversations. >> We're doing a number of things. We're doing a lot of training and enablement. So one of the things that we do, (cough) is we're doing training around talking to business people. And what we do is we actually bring business owners from the customer to educate our teams. Sorry, my voice is going. >> No problem. >> What is important for them? What's the priorities? What are the languages that they use? But the other thing that we're actually doing, is we're encouraging our teams to talk to their colleagues, because we have HR professionals in our organization. We have finance professionals in our organization. We have marketing professionals. Go talk to them, and bring them to your customers with you because they will really be talking the business language. So these are a couple of the key initiatives that we are doing, to enable our teams to have these conversations. >> That's brilliant. We had a conversation yesterday with your Chief People Officer, Donna Kimmel, kind of just about that, in terms of looking at the employee experience not just as the applications I'm interacting with to do my job, but starting up the chain to even recruiting. And needing to have the right, I can't even think of it, the right, a job description that's attractive. But like you were saying, and I've been doing this with some of my clients, what kind of tools am I going to have? Can I bring my own tools? So the employee experience kind of starts up the chain, if you will, more so than I thought. I kind of really narrowly focused it on once I'm onboard, and the onboarding process. And then getting to making sure that that's seamless, and me knowing beforehand, as a new employee, these are the tools that you're going to have, and knowing that a company, like with what Citrix is doing with intelligent experience, is going to be able to look at my behavior and my interaction with the different applications and help tailor that experience, is game changing. Because the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. They are inextricably linked. We all know, disgruntled employees can be, especially with social media these days, very vocal and very impactful. And wanting them to be impactful in the best way possible. So, really smart, to hear that you're bringing in more of your line of business leaders, to articulate that value. It just makes perfect sense. >> Yeah, and it's actually broadening the horizon of everybody, because we've told our HR people, you need to be able to talk about our technology and how it enables you to do your best work. And at the same time, through these interactions, our sales teams, who as you said, who come more from a "we understand the technology" background, are learning about all of these different parts of the business, and it's even driving more, closer working relationships within our own organization, as well, so it's benefiting every aspect of what we do. >> I can see that, and also I mean, you know, we talked with so many companies, and I, one of the challenges that they have, that they probably don't even address very often is how many of our people, that work for us, can actually articulate what it is we do? And the impact that we have to customers. The voice of the customer is so potent. We've talked with all three of the Innovation Award finalists, all different industries, but all making huge strides to make that experience for end user employees, and customers, so much better. So even just having those three examples alone. >> Two of them are from Europe, by the way, just to say. >> Yes, yes, Schroders and ZF, we spoke with them, yes. But it's really, I would think a differentiator even from Donna Kimmel's perspective of attracting talent, because people understand and are able to articulate the value, as a Citrix employee, of this is what we do. We use our own stuff, and let me tell you how much more efficient and easy it's made my life. >> And we've also done something else as well, which is now whenever we come up with a new offering in the market, or a new capability in our product, we actually now ask our teams to certify themselves, that they can tell the story. And what we do is we say, you get one of your colleagues to certify. So you go, and you pitch the story to your employee and if they said it's good enough, then you'll get certified and that's becoming a requirement. So we are doing so many things to make sure that everybody in the business is capable of telling, of telling the story. And articulating it from a customer perspective, not from a Citrix out perspective. >> I think we've definitely heard that articulated very well over the last few days. Sherif, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Very cool that two of those three finalists are from EMEA. >> We are very excited about that. >> We'll be excited to hear tomorrow, who the winner is. >> Looking forward to that. Thank you very much for your time. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE PJ Hough, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Citrix. PJ, it's great to have you on theCUBE! >> I'm delighted to be here, thank you. >> Really enjoyed your keynote yesterday morning. The excitement, the energy that you guys kicked off everything with yesterday with intelligent experience. People get it. We're all employees, we all want to have an experience. I would love to have a whole day back in a week. >> Yes. >> By bringing the apps and the actions to me, rather than me having to go and find and interact with all these different apps. What's been the feedback that you've heard over the last 24 hours with intelligent enterprise? >> The intelligent experience features, people are really liking it because I think, as you say, they recognize it. It feels already somewhat familiar. I think sometimes when you introduce new products, I've introduced brand new products in the past, where you really have to explain the use and why it's built that way. We are not having to explain very much about it. We show it to people and they identify with the workflows, the tasks. They recognize the challenges that they face today with getting access to that same information in the systems that they use. I think there is a need right now for us to solve this problem. I think customers are really feeling a sense of pain around the number of applications that they have, and I think I.T. knows that they have actually burdened their users with actually doing a lot of human workflow themselves. >> So since the WinFrame days, Microsoft, Citrix, synonymous with each other, huge partnership, huge and deep partnership over the years. Something that they'll appear to be a video yesterday. To say that Citrix and Microsoft has announced something, it's kind of a big deal, and it got lost, I think, in the excitement of the intelligent experience, which is a lot to say. Can you help explain that partnership, the deepening of that partnership, a little bit better? >> Sure. I think, as you know, and probably most of the audience know, the foundation of the partnership was in virtualization. That really is at the heart of what we do. Application delivery, particularly Windows applications, and Windows delivery, over all types of networks, and to all types of devices. Maybe what's more important about our relationship right now is if you look at the announcements we made yesterday, yes at the heart of it was new announcements around Windows virtual desktop on Azure and our desktop is a service that both run on Azure. That's at the heart of it. But then if you look at the continuing set of announcements we've made, improvements in the delivery of Microsoft Teams. In order to do that work we actually partnered really closely with that Microsoft Teams group at Microsoft. And then the Office 365 Networking initiatives that we have, that of course required partnership with all of the teams at Office 365. And then finally, the Intune partnership we have, which of course is with Brad Anderson, who was on stage with us. Across the whole delivery from cloud-hosted applications to applications themselves, the network over which the applications are delivered, and helping to secure the endpoint devices. We had innovation announcements in all categories, and every single one of them required a pretty deep partnership and co-development in many cases with Microsoft. >> So PJ, Citrix has over 400,000 customers globally. That's a lot! You've got, I think, 98 plus percent of the F100, the F500. As Chief Product Officer, if we look at the Microsoft, the deepening of that partnership, where are customers in terms of influence, maybe shed some light on some of the conversations that you have with customers that help dictate, for example, the deepening of that Microsoft relationship with Citrix. >> I think that's a really important point. It's not like our relationship with Microsoft is just for ourselves. It's actually spurred by many of the things that our customers are trying to do, primarily with their technology, and then with us as an enabler to help really deliver great experiences on that. Windows 10, kind of a big deal in the marketplace. I hear about that from all enterprise customers. And you combine Windows 10 with Office 365. Pretty much every customer I get to speak to has either initiatives around one or both of those technologies as part of their broader digital transformation. So the announcements we made yesterday align very well with these initiatives that Microsoft is driving into the enterprise, and I think customers see the promise of what Microsoft is offering with Windows and with the Office family of products, but they need to put that in everybody's hands, not just those who happen to be in the headquarters and on a great network and running on a top class device, you really have to get that out to your branches, to your mobile workers, and that's really where we come in to play, really helping, really delivered that great experience to all of those employees. >> We were just talking to Dana Garner right before our conversation with you, and he said that Citrix has been pretty modest over the years. You guys are kind of the original cloud. To be frank, a lot of SAAS services are built on Citrix. With that, you're looking into the intelligent experience, you guys are positioning yourselves once again to be at the forefront of innovation when it comes to employee experience. With that comes cultural change. I think you guys have experienced over the past 30 years of kind of saying, you know what, we can do cool stuff, too, and talking to a new audience. Talk to us about that new audience you're going to have to go after with these products because these are not just I.T. products when you're talking about changing processes, now you're getting into the wheelhouses of the PWCs, the EMYs, the big four of the world. >> Yep, yep. I think that's a really important point, and one that's certainly not lost on those of us at Citrix who know that this pivot to broaden our opportunity in the market and broaden our perspective on what we can do to help customers, it requires us to think about our go-to-market in a slightly different way. You mentioned some of those very large companies out there that I now look to for partnership in helping deliver those solutions to customers. I think we have great technology, but we really are going to need people who understand deeply the industries of these customers. If you're in finance, or oil and gas, or healthcare, you want your partner to understand the processes and the structure of your market. While we'll have great technology to help deliver oil and gas solutions, we're going to look to oil and gas solution partners and system integrators to really help build the, I will call it, the customized intelligent experience for those industries. We've always had a very strong partner network, I mean we have over 10,000 partners today at Citrix, and I think we are going to leverage that partner channel again, potentially in new ways, to deliver this intelligent experience to customers. But you do raise a very important point. We do not have, and never have had, a go it alone strategy, either from a technology point of view, with our partnership with Microsoft, and the announcements we made with Google, and in the past we've made with the other clouds, et cetera, but it's also true from a solution delivery perspective. We absolutely rely on really great partnerships in the marketplace. >> You've mentioned, you know, developing potentially customized solutions. If I think of customization, I think of personalization, and you talked a lot about that yesterday. As all of us are consumers, that consumerization, the influence that we're bringing into businesses, we want things personalized. We want experiences to come to us that have enough intelligence to know, show PJ this, not this. >> Yeah. >> So talk to us about how Citrix is distilling apps into what you called yesterday these personalized units of work. >> Yeah, I think that fundamentally, there's a initial set of those units of work that I think everyone recognizes and would say, oh yes, I know how that works. But they would also presume that it works pretty much the same way for all of us. Like the way that we book time off from our companies, or the way that we submit our expenses, other employees are going to do that the same way. I think what's much more interesting is using our analytics and our artificial intelligence to really figure out what's the pattern of work that PJ has and how that differs from the pattern of work that Lisa has. Now, we may both have similar responsibilities, but I expect that over time, and this is sort of one of the acid tests for me, for the workspace, even if we are in the same organization, after several months of use, my feed should look different to yours. Just like on our social feeds. Even if we more or less have the same friends, and we more or less have similar interests, still no two feeds are identical, and they're driven a little bit by our preferences, but they're also driven by our habits, the way we work with the software, and so we're building all of that intelligence into the workspace. >> So we don't get the chance to talk to people who are at the forefront of these products often, so I'm going to try to get a little peak into the future here. When the iPhone was created, what 10 years ago, it was an amazing thing. You give me a 10 year old iPhone today, and we'll have a conversation. (laughter) So you guys are innovating, innovating, employee experience, customer experience, is the output of digital transformation. You look at analytics, what is the output of the employee experience and the customer experience? What is Citrix looking at like, you know customers are not quite ready for this, but we have it in our back pocket? >> It's a really great question. I'm glad you brought up the example like the iPhone because I think the flip-side is that if you were to go back 10 years ago, I don't know that Apple knew what it would look like today. I think they had the broad brush stokes of where they were going, but I don't know they would have known exactly how to navigate the last decade in advance. I feel the same way about the journey that we're on. But that's partly what makes working on those forefront technology projects so exciting. I just did an interview where somebody asked me, "What do you think the future of work looks like?" And I said, well, in some ways, I'm already living it because I'm experiencing these products inside Citrix before they get released to customers. So we already have a little glimpse of what might be next. I think some of the biggest opportunities for us are really to take the assistance and the learning capabilities of the workspace in a different direction. Yes, we will add more applications, yes, the micro-applications will get richer, yes, the user interface might change a little bit, but really what's the fundamental technology shift that's going to drive innovation for the next decade, and I think it's analytics and machine learning. We're already, I think, at the very early stages of seeing some of the ways that impacts the work experience, but my hope for the decade is that all of the workspaces that we work in and all of the tools that we have get a little smarter about me, and some of the things that we've come to trust with regard to software in other environments and other places, that we get to trust our work tools to the same extent, which I don't think we're there yet. >> In terms of the messaging to customers, we've talked to your three innovation award finalists from different industries: financial services, education, global technology, all really helping to make big impacts to their employees, their customers. Those two things I see as absolutely tantamount. They're inextricably linked. You have to have a great employee experience to deliver a great customer experience. If there's a problem with employee experience, it's going to manifest. In some form or fashion as employees, we all in some way are interacting with customers and have the opportunity to influence their loyalty or churn. >> Yeah. >> So we've heard a lot about how these customers are really leveraging what Citrix is enabling. This modern workforce, let me do what I need to where it helps me be most productive, but also drive these big outcomes. When it comes to A.I. and machine learning, we talk about them at every event that we go to. Where are your customers in terms of being receptive to understanding it's not Big Brother looking in at PJ's productivity, it's really working to understand, like you said before, how differently you and I might be using the exact same software application to make our jobs far more productive. Where is that appetite for A.I. machine learning for that kind of productivity? >> Well I think a concern that all customers have, set aside our technology and just talk about the industry in general, I think as an industry, we have to really continue to earn the trust of customers, both in the consumer lives as well as in the professional lives with regard to the governance that we put around information that they share with us and how we treat that for their benefit, not just for ours. I think those same concerns exist, broadly speaking, whether it's a Microsoft, or a Google, or a Facebook, or a Citrix, maybe to some extent less to us because I think customers have historically not entrusted a lot of that type of information to us. They have entrusted that to our customers, who are delivering solutions, whether it's a financial solution or a healthcare solution, et cetera. So that's one thing for us to continue to improve is that we are good custodians of that information and that we're using it, I will say, for good and for the purposes of improving experiences that matter. I think in general our customers understand that there is a value exchange. That our ability to deliver new value to them requires them to exchange insight with us so that we can turn that into value for them. That I think is pretty clear to most customers right now. In some ways, we're at the forefront of what we're trying to do for intelligence in a workspace, but many of the core technologies have been proven in other fields, and we're certainly trying to leverage that and the comfort that customers already have achieved with some of those technologies. >> Excellent, alright. We have had just a great couple of days here. The excitement is palpable. The impact that you guys are having on a wide variety of customers in every industry is palpable, and I also really liked the fact that as an individual contributor you guys showed this is how Citrix workspace can impact your lives in a way that is really going to be a driving force of the workforce of the future. So, PJ, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon >> Thank you. I enjoyed being here on theCUBE and thank you for your coverage of the event. It's been really great. >> We've had a great time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, It's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day two of our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Lisa Martin with my cohost Keith Townsend, and we've got another CUBE alumni joining us, Dana Gardner, President and Principle Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. >> Sorry, my language skills are declining on day two. >> It's been a long day. >> It has been a long day. We've had, speaking of, had a lot of great conversations with Citrix Execs, customers, analysts over the last day and a half. People are very excited about what Citrix is doing with intelligence, experience, and really helping businesses to transform their workforces. But you have been following Citrix for a long time. >> Yes. >> So, talk to us about some of the early days back in the 90's. I'd love to get your perspectives on what you saw back then and what your thoughts are about some of the things that they're announcing at this event. >> Sure, well back in 1995-1996, the internet was still the new kid on the block, and browsers were kind of cool but, how would they ever help a business? And then, along comes this company that says, "Oh, we're not going to deliver things through a browser, we're going to deliver the whole app experience, apps that you're familiar with, your Windows-based apps over the wire. Over the internet protocol." Wow, so I remember at Internet Expo in New York at the Javits Center, Ed Iacobucci, The co-founder of Citrix got up there and explained how, yeah, we're going to deliver apps. And basically what they were describing is cloud computing as we know it today. Wow, it was very interesting, but we all kind of look at him like he was a little crazy. (host laughing) Yes. >> And, that's been a long time, man. Citrix has made a name for itself since then. You know, the day I was talking to David Hansel, yesterday and I said, "You know what, Citrix is a verb. I'm going to Citrix in an application. They established something for themselves." And, ironically, on stage yesterday he said, "85 percent of the IT budget goes to keeping the lights on." And I would firmly, as pre-kenote yesterday I'd say, you know what Citrix is firmly in that 85 percent of, they are rock, fast, hard technology partner, but they're in that 85 percent. But this intelligent experience I think kind of pushes them into that 15 percent of innovation. What did you think about yesterday's announcement? >> Well, based on my memory from 1996, I think it's consistent. That they're looking for something that's two or three years, maybe more out that will mature then. But they're not afraid of tackling it now. They had some really strong established businesses, but they're not resting on their laurels. They're looking at, I think a problem that almost everybody can identify with. In the past, their problems were people they could identify with in IT. The end user wasn't aware that anybody was Citrixing behind the scenes. Now, they're identifying issues that people have with work. The fact they were taking apps and services from multiple clouds, multiple data centers some of them our own company, some of our partners, some across an ecosystem or a supply chain, and it's becoming rather crowded. Disenfranchised. Fragmented. And people, I think are struggling to keep up with that amount of diversity. So, we're dealing with, yet again a heterogeneity problem, a reoccurring problem in technology. And Citrix is identifying with something that's a higher elevation than they had in the past. So, they're not addressing just IT although, that's where the actions going to take place to solve some of these problems. But they're focused on just about all of us. Whether we're working in a small, two or three person mom and pop shop or a 30,000 seat enterprise. >> And they've also done this pivot in the last, what we've heard in the last 24 hours, of really being positioned to the general user. Something that I didn't know until yesterday was that the majority of enterprise software has been designed for power users, which is one percent of the users. And so, they've really made that positioning pivot yesterday to, this is for the Marketing Managers, somebody in supply chain who has a day that is bombarded with seven to ten apps. They're losing hours and hours of productivity a week. You can look at that in terms of the amount of dollars that's being spent or wasted. But really making this, bringing those tasks to the user, those actions to the user. Rather than forcing the users to go out to all the different apps, put those pieces together. Oh, and then trying to get back to our actual day-to-day function. >> Right, we wouldn't have to talk about user experience if these things had been designed properly in the first place. It's a bit myopic on behalf of the IT power designer, that they often craft the product for themselves. That, this is still the dark arts behind the curtain thinking. It's very difficult for a highly efficient, productive IT group to create something for a non-IT audience. And I don't blame them, but it has to happen. It's going to happen one way or the other. So, we've seen companies that have taken extraordinary steps on usability, Apple computer is probably the poster child for this. Look at where it got them. There were lots of mobile phones around ten years ago, before the iPhone. Why did the iPhone become so popular, so dominant? Because of the usability. So, Citrix is I think, perhaps doing IT a favor by getting out in front of this. But still, if we're going to get IT in the hands of all people for productivity, what I look to is a fit-for-purpose mentality. No more, no less. You can't design it as if it's your own baby and your own special design, I don't know, once in a lifetime opportunity to strut your stuff. It has to be fit-for-purpose and it can't just be monolithic, where we're looking at little bits and pieces. So, the software's recent acquisition that Citrix made is going to be able to start picking out productivity units, for lack of a better term, from different applications, assimilate those in an environment, the workspace, where the productivity, the work flow, the goal of accomplishing business outcomes comes first and foremost. >> So Dana, let's talk a little bit about, you know the next level. Because it's broken. Even when you look at modern applications, one of the applications they showed on stage yesterday, was a cloud application. Salesforce. I mean, we know a people who make a good deal of money simplifying Salesforce, which is a born in the cloud application. This isn't just about cloud versus legacy, this is about end-user experiences, and end-users using applications in a way that makes them productive. One of the things that caught me as soon as Citrix said that they want to be the future of work, I tweeted out, "Well, you can't be the future of work unless you start to automate processes," and boom, intelligent experience. And the first thing that came to my mind was when we attended an event a couple weeks ago for RPA, Robotic Process Automation tool, that was very user-centric, but used the term "bots". Robots, sulfer robots that did the job. Citrix only used the term, "bots" once yesterday. What's your sense, is this a competitive solution to those partners? Or is this more of a complementary solution? >> I think Citrix is correctly trying to keep the horse in front of the cart and not the other way around. We have to look at work as flows of productivity first, and not conforming to the app second. But to get out in front and say, "Oh, it's all going to be animated and the robot will tell you what to do," I think does a disservice. So, let's take first things first. But let's not also lose track of the fact that by elevating work to a process and not just being locked into one platform, one cloud, one set of microservices on one framework, that we have the opportunity to integrate in analytics along the whole path. From beginning to end. And that we can even have the context of what you're doing feed back into how the analytics come at you. And reinforce one another. So, we need to get the process stuff set first. we need to recognize that people need to rethink getting off a desktop, getting out of email, looking at the full process. Looking at working across organizational boundaries. So, extra enterprise, supply-chain interactions, contingent workforce. Then, bring in analytics. So, first things first but it's going to be a very interesting mash-up when we can elevate process, get out of sort of silos, manage that heterogeneity and inject intelligence and context along the way. That changes the game. >> So, you've seen the workforce dramatically transform throughout your career. There are five generations of people in the workforce today. Madeleine Albright, there she was on stage this morning, 82 years old. I thought that was, what an inspiration? But companies have different generations, different experiences, different experiences with technology, differing expectations. What, in your opinion, did you hear yesterday from Citrix that is going to help businesses enable five different generations to be as productive as they want to be. >> Right, it's an extension of what Citrix has been doing for decades, and it's allowing more flexibility into where you are is accommodated. What device you're using can be accommodated. The fact that you want to be outside your home office but secure can be accommodated. So, what I heard was instead of locking in an application mentality, where everybody has to learn to use the same app, we need to have flexibility. And it's not just ages and generations. It's geographics, it's language, it's culture. People do business and they do work differently around the world. And they should be very well entitled to continue to do that. So, we need to create the systems that adjust to the people and read the people's work habits. And then reinforce them rather than force them into, let's say a monolithic ERP type of affair. And we've know that a large percentage of ERP projects over the years have failed. And it's not that the technology doesn't work, it's that sometimes, you can put a round peg in a square hole. >> Wow, speaking of round peg, square hole, IT, you know, they're preaching to the choir I think on this piece. You know, we want thing to be simpler. We want to get engaged. We want to solve this problem. But, is Citrix talking to the wrong audience when it comes to process automation? To your point, you have to have the large view of it, and a lot of timeS, especially folks at this conference, may not have the large view. How does Citrix get to the CMO's the COO's, the process people versus the technology folks. >> I think that's a significant challenge. Keith and I recorded a podcast with David Henchel earlier today and it'll be out in a few weeks on Briefings Direct, and I asked him that, I said, "You're well-known in the IT department. They use a verb, they're Citrixing. The end user, not so much. But if you're going to impact work as you intend to and as you've laid out here at Synergy, you do need to become more of a household word, and you need to brand and you need to impact." And we know one of the hardest things to do is to get people to change their behavior. You don't do that behind the scenes. In some ways, Citrix has been very modest. They haven't been the Citrix inside, they haven't branded and gone to market with. They've usually let their partners like Microsoft and now even Google Cloud be on the front page, even as they're behind the scenes. But I think they need to think a little bit differently. If they're going to impact people, people need to understand the value that Citrix is bringing. But identifying themselves as they have at this show with work and productivity issues, usability and intelligence will start that process. But I do think they can go further on their go-to-market and not just bring this message to their sales accounts, but to a larger work productivity, human capital management enterprise architect type of base. >> And they are making those impacts. Keith and I today have already spoken with their three innovation award nominees. There were over a thousand nominations. And we spoke with Schroders, which is a wealth management company based out of the UK and how they have been able, a 200 year old company, to really transform their culture with Citrix's workspace was, it was done so strategically, so methodically. But how they enabled that and a seamless integration in terms of their customer experience and engagement with their wealth managers was really compelling. Not only are they able to retain their probably longstanding wealth management clients, but they have the ability now, and the technology capabilities to allow their people to work remote three days a week if they want to or from wherever, and actually work on getting new clients. So, the business impact is really clear. We also spoke with Indiana University. They have gone from just enabling the students on the seven campuses to 130,000 plus across campuses online. They're enabling sight impaired people to also, by virtualization, have access to computer technology. So, you're talking about going from tens of thousands to a ten X at a minimum multiplier, and enabling professors to have conversations and hold classes with people in Budapest. Big impact. >> So Lisa, you're bringing up the point that user experience isn't just employing experience, it's end user and-- >> Absolutely >> Consumer experience. If you're going to do this and do it right, don't consider it just for your employees. It's for reaching out to the very edge of the markets, and that includes consumers and students and mom and pop shops and everything in-between. So when you do this right, and not only will you be delivering intelligence and context to your employees, you'll be able to start to better serve your customers. And that's what digital transformation is really about. >> It is, and the cultural transformation that Citrix is undergoing and that they're enabling their businesses to achieve, like the two we just talked about, are critical catalysts for digital transformation. But to me, employee experience and customer experiences are hand in hand because every employee, whatever function you're in, in some way you're a touchpoint to the customer. If you're in retail, you're presenting a shop-able moment as often as you can. But you also are dealing with customers who have choice to turn and go to another provider of that product or service. So, having those employees not only be satisfied, but have the tools that they need and the intelligence to deliver the content. >> So, I'd be happy to go to a brick and mortor shop. I'll walk in there physically if they can help me in the shopping experience be smarter, but if I can do it online in my bedroom on my browser, then I'll do it there. So it's no so much the interface or even the place anymore, it's who's going to give me the information to make the right decision and make me feel confident that I'm spending my money the most productively. Whether I'm a consumer or a business. So B-to-B. That's what's going to be the killer app, is the smart decision making, and the experience of bringing the right information, right place, right time. That's key. And that's what Citrix has repositioned itself for. I think it's really quite a dramatic shift for the company but they've done it before. >> Well, Dana it's been great having you back on theCUBE unpacking this. It's been an exciting day and a half for us and we look forward to having you back on theCUBE sometime soon. >> My pleasure. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.

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

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's The Cube, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to The Cube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, continuing The Cube's two day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We are very excited to be speaking with one of the Citrix innovation award nominees, ZF Group. We've got Walter Scherer, senior manager of IT workplace foundation. Hi Walter. >> Hello, nice to be here. >> And Greg Lehofer, manager of client virtualization. Greg, great to have you on The Cube. >> Thank you very much. >> So, first congratulations to ZF Group for the Innovation Award nomination. We hear there were over one thousand nominees. Pretty exciting to get to the top three, one of the top three finalists. So Walter let's start with you, tell our audience who ZF is and what you're doing with Citrix. >> So ZF is a global system provider, we enable next generation of mobility. So for us it's very important to invest in technology fields like integrated safety, electricity, like automated driving, that's very important for us so we see the future, the world will change so we see it every day and therefore it's very very important for us that we push innovation, that we push internet of things, and we push the digitalization. That's a must for us. >> So you guys are supplying a company that supplies systems for IC, your passenger cars, commercial vehicles and industrial technology. >> Yeah. >> Across Germany or is this to cross Europe? >> That's globally so we have around 40 confidants where we have locations. Where we have well organized globally and therefore it's very important for us to bring the right product for the future, for our customer. >> Wow so Greg tell us about the landscape, that's 40 countries, tell us how big is the infrastructure to support all of them? >> It's very big, so the transformation of IT is very important for us as Walter mentioned before, so yeah we start to build up a bigger infrastructure now, a virtual infrastructure because in the past we have a lot of water in place and so it's all from from ZF and now we are able that the external service providers and we have a lot of external service provider in place around the globe so that they can bring their own devices now in ZF and can use virtual desktops and so yeah for us the effort is not too big because the infrastructure is more central at the moment and so yeah, we are searching for new ways how we can make that more efficient for us and more easier and manage them and yeah we are looking at cloud infrastructures at the moment and yeah we are working very close together with Citrix and that technology and yeah, for us we are very proud that we are now nominated for the prize and yeah. >> So again about scale, how many partners worldwide do you have? So number of devices connecting to your infrastructure, how big is your customer base? >> So we have a lot of customers there so for our project because of course you mentioned, so we have off-road vehicles, we have product concerning the automotive areas, we have commercial areas so that's a lot of individual customers that we all have there. So and therefore we have to bring the right outcome so with Microsoft or with Citrix technologies and of course with the partnership with Microsoft that's very important too for us and so we have to bring the right infrastructure in place, especially in the user centric experience approach that's very important too for us and therefore we have the good partnership with Citrix so and with Citrix we have a really big and powerful systems in place, product to portfolio, so that will help us in this journey. >> Let's talk about that journey Greg, when you started working with Citrix to virtualize the environment, talk to us about how you went about that from a mobility perspective and what is that enabling your business to achieve for your customers? >> For our customers you have global graphic we have customers all over the world, they are always on airports and traveling around the world and so it's very important for us that we are transformate the IT in that way that the customer is able to work all over the world, anytime anywhere with any device. It's very important for the customers and for a new generation X to work with every device and yeah there is big transformation at the moment in place so yeah we with Citrix it's make it easier for us that we can provide all customers with every device a workplace or an application, that application the customers need or our employees need to work to collaborate all over the world with other engineers and so on on collaborate topics and on tasks and on projects and yeah with that technology, with private cloud and now with public clouds they are able to work with all kinds of devices everywhere in a secure way, and that is important for us because security is one of the important factors for us because when you are traveling all around the world and connecting from every place, security in our perspective yeah, it's very important and so with that technology-- >> And if you are looking for the flexible platforms that's very important, the solutions that Citrix have embized with The Cloud system so that brings us in the situation that we could manage all the platforms that we have in place locally today and if you connected to The Cloud. So therefore we have a common plan so to administrate and manage all the Citrix environments. >> So I imagine there's a large range of applications that you're deploying, you guys seem to provide a lot of services, what type of application data and tasks are happening remotely with your users? Like what's a typical transaction that a user will conduct while they're sitting at a airport? >> So that's what Gregor said so that's very important with the device strategy to treat the promote it with any device anywhere and to each time so and therefore we could provide a virtual desktop so that's independent from the device so we have maybe for collaboration that's a very similar topic, so we have solutions for our third parties, for the contractors and so it could give them a small solution, the Citrix mobile desktop, the mobile app so they have the possibility to connect to ZF and the infrastructure and so we are very flexible about that. So the only what they need, they need a device, they need a browser that's it. So that's the solution from Citrix. >> In terms of the operational efficiencies that you have presumably gained from working with Citrix, sounds like your users as well as your end-user customers are benefiting from the virtualized infrastructure that you've put in place, but talk to us about from an operational perspective, how much more efficient is your organization now? >> From our perspective, it's more efficient because as I mentioned before in the past they we have to give all our external service providers as an example hardware from ZF, and so it's a very big benefit, a lot of doings for our IT to prepare the desktop to make them secure the hardware and so on and now we are not longer responsible for that order because the external bring their own hardware and we only provide them a VDI on a secure way, a NetScaler gateway in that case and though they can connect and we only take care about our workplace and they take care of their hardware and so yeah for us it's much better because our effort is not so big and that is very good and yeah, and so as an example the workplace from Citrix, the new, it's very, very good for our customers because the users intrecities is very high because a lot of tools or applications they need has put the time SAP and read the emails, have a look at the chat, have a look at teams and so on, it's all in one platform and saves a lot of time. And time, everybody knows is very important for us and yeah when we can save time it's very perfect for us. >> Let's dive into that time savings, how long does it take you to onboard a new partner now versus before you had Citrix? >> Now-- >> For the deposit there was a lot of processes and they need I would say days, so in the meantime we have to push a party so internal SATA should automatically create an image, a VDI for example for the the customer, that's it. So and of course in the background we have to set the right direction, the right access, what systems they have in use, (mumbles) and that's it. >> So it sounds like it takes the business processes longer to onboard a customer like, so you have to sign a deal, get involved with a partner and IT it sounds like it's moving way faster than the actual business itself. >> Yeah as I mentioned it's a very fast process in the mean time so you have a portal you could go there so that to request what they need and then there's automatic behind that and so we could create automatically this request for him. >> So it used to take days to onboard a partner, now with Citrix workspace, it's hours, minutes to onboard a partner, how much time can you quantify that time savings? >> I would say if you consider the whole process, it needs some hours so because it's not only the Citrix onboarding, the Citrix onboarding goes very fast. So then the you have to create the operating system and so on, the imaging, so to bring the applications to the client, what they need I would say that needs hours. >> Or days to hours, so big time savings and also what you were talking about Greg I couldn't help but think that now that you don't have to provide all of this hardware to your partners, there's probably a massive cost savings as well that ZF has achieved, can you talk about that? >> Absolutely, from the cost perspective we save a lot of money and the other benefit is that the external can bring the hardware we'll work with. So normally we have one device and the external have to work with that and now he can bring his-- >> Whatever they choose. >> Right right, yeah right. Any device and that is very benefit for them because they can work with smart phones, they can work with tablet or they can work with a notebook as they like and from our perspective, yeah as you mention before you save a lot of money because it's yeah we only have to provide the virtual desktop and yeah we can provide them in a very quick way and we have workflows for that and yeah it's great for us. >> What feedback have they given you now that the process is so much faster for them but also they're able to use whatever device they're already familiar with, I imagine from a customer satisfaction perspective this new experience that you're enabling has really probably driven up your customer loyalty. The customers happier, more satisfied? >> The customers more happier of course so and the important topic for us is the customer is happy, they have a fast solution, it is mobile so and we have the access under control, that's very interesting for us. >> Well making your customers happy is always a top priority and we hear that you're doing that very well, we want to congratulate ZF on your nomination. >> Thank you very much. >> For the Innovation Award, we know that the voting goes through till tomorrow when the winner will be announced, we wish you the best of luck and thank you both for joining Keith and me on The Cube this afternoon. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, for Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, live from Citrix Synergy 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the event is Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to talk to one of the Citrix Innovation Award nominees, Indiana University. We have a couple of folks from Indiana University joining us, Stephanie Cox, Manager of Virtual Platform Services and Matt Link, Associate Vice President of Research Technologies. Guys, thanks so much for joining Keith and me. >> Thank you Lisa. >> Thank you. >> And thank you Keith. >> It's an honor to be here, yeah. >> And congratulations on Indiana University being nominated for an innovation award. I was talking with Tim Minahan, their CMO yesterday saying there was over a thousand nominations, so to even get down to being in the top three is pretty exciting stuff. >> Yeah. >> Awesome. >> So talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. You guys, this is a big, big big organization lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Matt, let's start with you, give us that picture of what's going on there. >> Yeah, so IU is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is, we're a consolidated IT shop. So, there are 1200 of us at IU that support the entire university and all the campuses. And at any one point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services. >> Big, that's big. >> Big. >> Wow, that is big. Stephanie talk, talk to us about your virtual imp, footprint and how big is the location. How many data centers? What's the footprint? >> Well we have two data centers, one of them is in Indianapolis which is my home. It's one of our larger campuses, we call it Indiana University Purdue University, affectionately IUPUI. There is a data center there but our larger data center is at the flagship campus which is in, Bloomington, Indiana. >> And, to support 100,000 plus people and, you said at any given second, 200,000 devices. How have you designed that Virtual Integral Structure to enable access to students, faculty, et cetera and employees? >> So from the network perspective we have several network master plans that have rolled and we're in our second 10 year network master plan. And, the network master plan is designed to continually upgrade the network, both the physical network, the infrastructure, and the wireless network. In our last 10 year budget for that was around $170 million of investment just to support the network infrastructure. And then, Stephanie rides on top of that as the Virtual Platform with Citrix to deliver the images anywhere on campus, whether it's wirelessly or whether it's connected via network connection. >> Yep. >> So seven campuses is already a bit. If you ever look at a map, Indiana sits right smack dab in the middle of the country. It's a big space, right before we hit record, we were just talking about that drive up I-65 from Indianapolis to Chicago is just, a lot of rural area and, I'm sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is accessible to everyone in Indiana. Talk to us about the challenges of getting connectivity and getting material, virtual classrooms to those remote areas. >> Yeah, that's really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really the premier remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So, we built our Citrix environment to encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty, staff, and students to use the service. Now do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. >> Thankfully. >> But we do offer it to everyone which is, I found, in the education arena, very unique to Indiana University. Another thing to have the consolidated IT and then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restrict it to separate pockets of the university. With that, we've been able to then extend, offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote locations. So, if you're a student who is working in or lives in rural Indiana and you want to get an Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We have a very nice online program and just a lot of other options that we've really tried to offer for remote access. >> So Citrix has really enabled this, I think you call it the IUanyWare, Indiana University Anywhere Program. >> Yeah. >> Tell us about opening up this access to everyone over the time that you've been a Citrix customer how many more people can you guesstimate have access now that didn't not too long ago? >> Yeah, I think initially, and Matt would probably know more before me, before I even came on the scene, I believe that the original use case was really just trying to extend what we were already doing on premise in what we call just our Indiana University lab supported areas. Right, so just your small, like the old days when you would go to your college campus and you go into your computer lab, we just really wanted to virtualize, or expand, the access to just those specific types of apps and computers. And that was an early design, since then over the years we've really kind of, just really expanded. Really use the Citrix platform to redesign and distribute how we deliver the applications and the virtual desktops. So, now not only do we service those students who would normally come onto the campus just to use your traditional computer lab, we do a lot of specialty programs for other schools. Like we deliver a virtual desktop for our dentistry students, they actually use that whole platform in the dental clinic to see real patients our, third tier, third year doctors do that. We also replicated that same thing and do it in our speech and hearing sciences for our future audiologists. We have certain professors that have wanted to take the particular course that they're teaching and extend it to different pockets all over the world so we might host a class from Budapest or Africa somewhere else, wherever that faculty and staff has resources that they know they need to get to and their content already virtualized. We work to make that happen all the time. >> That's, a lot of what you just said is first of all, initially, maybe before Citrix being able to provide support in the computer labs for your maybe seven core campuses, now you're giving 130,000 plus individuals anywhere, anytime access. That is, the X multiplier on that is massive. But you're also gone global, it's not just online, you're able to enable professors to teach in other parts of the world, where it was before it was just people that were in Indiana. >> Right. >> That's massive. >> And you're just limited by the network. So that's the only drawback when you go to the rural areas way out, you're just limited by the network. The initial program was really, really thought of as a cost saving measure. We were going to put thin clients out, we wouldn't have to do life cycle replacements for desktop machines that were getting more expensive and more expensive 10 years ago, and now the way that we look at it is IU wants to provide services across the breadth of the organization, and make those services at no additional cost. And open to everybody. Open access to everybody, the AT desktop, for example is one of, Stephanie is, the brainchild behind the AT desktop. Took three years of dedicated hard work to create an environment to support the visually impaired. >> Talk to us more about that, because that was part of the video and that captured my attention immediately. What is AT? >> Accessibility. >> Technology. >> Technology. >> Accessibility Technology. >> Accessible, is it Accessible Technology? >> Accessible Technology. >> Yeah, I always get that wrong. (laughs) >> So, hundreds, thousands, and not just those that are sight and hearing. >> Right. >> Yeah, so one of the things that I think was, it's just a wonderful thing about working at a university, we're able to buy software licenses in a big quantity, large quantity right, because we have that kind of buying power. Software that I normally never would see or get access to even in my private sector, I've been a Citrix engineer for a long time, but when you come to a university and then you're selling or you're getting licenses for 50, 60, 70, 80,000, you get to see some of these products that you don't normally, as a regular consumer, (laughs) you like it but you know you can't really afford it. So, with that when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity site license way we thought oh my goodness, let's virtualize these and make sure everybody gets access to them. And the ones that were really attractive to us were the ones for the visually impaired. Sure they're a niche and they're very, very expensive but we thought let's just try it. We'll see how well they perform in a virtual environment and with our Citrix infrastructure underneath they performed quite well, plus the apps have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. So, we were really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. We had to work really hard to make sure that the speech recognition software was fast enough for them. It turns out that blind people listen to speech really, really, really, really, really, fast and so we had to make sure that we kept our platformer working on it, to keep it sped and updated so that it's usable to them, right. Seems functional to me, but they, it really needed to be like, 10 times faster. After I found that out, after even shooting the award video and spending even more time with them I thought, why did you guys tell me it was slow to you? But yeah it's been an honor, really, to be up for that award but to work with those students, to learn more about their needs, to learn more about the different applications that people write for people with all disabilities. I hope we can do more in that space. >> So the young man, in, at IUPUI. >> Yes. >> I don't remember his name. >> Chris Lavilla. >> Chris. >> Yes. >> So share, just quickly about Chris' story. >> If, he watches theCUBE I hope he's listening 'cause I think he's kind of remarkable. >> I think this'll really put some, a little bit of icing on that cake because you're taking an environment and you're empowering a student to do what they want to do, versus what they are able or not able to do, so Chris' story is pretty cool of where he wants to go with his college career. >> Yeah, now I won't say he a big proponent user of the virtual desktop because he's just so advanced, he's like way beyond everything. We're learning from him, but he is Indiana University's I believe I'm saying this right, very first biomedical chemical engineer who is blind since birth, completely blind, yes. >> Wow. >> He is, and he's quite a brilliant young man and we're lucky to have him be our, he will test anything for me, and Mary Stores, who's featured in the video Chris Mire, he's also featured in the video I got to remember their names, I mean, it's a whole, I'm lucky to have a whole community of people that will. Yeah, they know, we want to be there for them, we don't always get it right, but we're going to listen and keep trying to move forward, so. >> But, if you kind of think of, even a what, a year or two ago, not being able to give any of this virtualized desktop access to the visually impaired and how many people are now using it? >> Well we open it up to everyone. We have hundreds and hundreds of users but we know not everyone who uses it is blind. People can, you can use it if you want it or not. We don't really understand why some people prefer to use that one over any other but it does have some advantages, there are different levels of sight impairment too, as I've just been educated right. There are some people who are just at the very beginning of that journey of just losing their sight so, if that happens to be someone that we can extend our environment to it's probably better to use it now and get really familiar with that as you transition to losing your sight later in life, I've been told so. >> So you asked a little bit about the scope of the AT desktop, so I'll layer on a little bit of the scope of IUanyWare. Last year around 65,000 individual unique users over, well over a million logins and-- >> 1.4 million. >> 1.4 million. And the average session time was around 41 minutes. >> That's long. >> So. >> Yeah. >> Our instructors teach with it, our clinicians treat people with it, we've built it to house electronic protected health data. >> So HIPA compliance, got to be critical, right? >> It meets the HIPA standard. >> Right. >> Because you can't say compliance anymore because you can't be compliant with a standard. (Stephanie laughing) They've changed that wording several times in the course of the year. >> We know this. >> So, and we are very familiar with meeting the HIPA standard, we've been doing that for about 12 years now, with, where I came from was the high performance computing area of the university so that's my background that I. >> So, one thing we didn't get a chance touch on, 200,000 devices. We're at Citrix, Citrix is a Microsoft partner. Typically when those companies think of 200,000 users they think for profit, this is a niche use case for 200,000 users. Obviously you guys have gotten some great pricing as part of being an education environment. What I would love to hear is, kind of the research stories because the ability to shrink the world, so to speak high HPC, you're giving access to specialized equipment to people who can't get there normally, you have to be physically in front of GPUs, CPUs, et cetera. What other cool things have been coming out of the research side of the house because of the Citrix enablement? >> So, this is cool I mean. >> You got to, got to. (laughs) >> Right, so one of our groups, Researched Software and Solutions stole the idea from Stephanie to provide a research desktop. >> Borrowed. >> Borrowed. >> Imitation, highest form of flattery, Stephanie. >> That's right, absolutely. So what we've done is we always continually to try to reduce the barriers of entry and access. Supercomputing before, you had to be this tall to ride this ride, well now we're down to here. And, with the hopes that we'll go down even farther. So what we've done is we've taken a virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers, and now you can be wherever you want to be, and have access to HPC at IU. And that's all the systems, so we have four supercomputers And we have 40 petabytes of spinning disc, 160 petabytes of archival tape library so, we're a large shop. And, we couldn't have done it without looking at what Stephanie has done and really looking at that model differently, right? Because to use HPC before you'd have to use a terminal and shell in. And now, looking at IUanyWare, that gives you just the different opportunity to catch a different and more broad customer base. And I call them customers because we try treat them as customers >> Right. >> And it helps the diversity of what you're doing so last year alone our group, Research Technologies supported 151 different departments. We were on 937 different grants. And we support over 330 different disciplines at IU and so it's deep, but it's also very broad, for as large a campus we are and as large an organization as we are, we're fairly nimble even at 1200 people. >> Wow, from what I've heard it's no wonder that what you've done at Indiana University has garnered you the Innovation Award nominee. I can't imagine what is next with all that you have accomplished. Stephanie, Matt, thank you so much for joining Keith and me, we wish you the best of luck. You can go to Citrix.com, search Innovation Awards where you can vote for the three finalists. We wish you the very best of luck. We'll be waiting with bated breath tomorrow to see who wins. >> So will we, thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you Keith. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> 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 back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. Day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. One of the cool things that Citrix does is recognize some of their most outstanding customers and we're very pleased to welcome one of their Innovation Award nominees, from Schroders, Paul Baird, Global Head of Communications IT. Paul, welcome to theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you very much. Thank you for having me today. >> So, you and I were talking off-camera and I was mentioning this to Tim Minahan yesterday, their CMO, that the way that Citrix is doing their Innovation Awards program is a bit like Britain's Got Talent, American Idol, where they narrow down finalists and then the public gets to vote and they've created a very cool video that describes a little bit about just the tip of the iceberg about what you guys are doing. But tell our audience a little bit about Schroders and what it is that you're doing with Citrix to re-transform the employee experience. >> Okay, so Schroders are a financial services company. We're based in London although we've got offices in 27 countries globally. We deal with asset and wealth management, and we've been around for over 200 years. Over the past couple of years, we've started collapsing our London office footprint from multiple, multiple little small disparate offices into two large buildings within London. What we tried to do was really put technology on the forefront of everything that we did for that, whether or not it was IOT right the way through to our end user desktop experience and just creating the best digital experience for our users that we possibly could. >> Excellent. >> Hey, can you talk to us about how Citrix has helped empower that move to the future of work there? >> So, Citrix's VDI solution was key to everything. It was the fundamental building block where our desktop came into play and then we layered the top of our applications and our access to data and one of the fantastic things as well was our solution is called S3, which is sort of just any type, any place and from any device. And it really empowered us to be able to fulfill that. It wasn't an empty messenger statement. It really was what we believed, so people can access their desktop from iPads, from their computers they have in the house. Whether or not they're in one of our offices globally, you can access Windows desktop from your iPhone, although my eyesight tends not to be good enough for that, but it really did form that real linchpin of what we were doing. >> So, you mentioned that Schroders has been around for a couple of hundred years, so when I hear that, I think, wow, there's a lot of history. There's a lot of culture. Cultural transformation is hard to do, but it's also a catalyst. It's really essential for a business like Schroders to digitally transform. As consumers, we have these devices, multiple devices, I think yesterday, they mentioned in some stats that were really kind of staggering, that in the next few years, there will be 65 billion connected devices and each person's going to have around eight connected devices, so we have this experience with devices, we have our expectations, but you also have a culture that's pretty steeped in history at Schroders. How has Citrix been an enabler of evolving that culture as the workforce now is so distributed, but also so sort of demanding of these, let's have the same experience that I have in my personal life that I can have at work. >> I think one of the, the big pushes that we tried to do was to enable collaboration for absolutely everyone in the company. Citrix again helped us with that because we have an actual desk environment. We have flexible working and fundamentally, what we needed to do is not impinge on anyone's ability to work and to collaborate. Everyone needed to be able to access their data, their applications, their services, from wherever they were in order to properly digitally collaborate with each and every one of their colleagues. Otherwise, we'd just have done our users a disservice. It was a big change. We took the decision as well to roll out our actual desktop environment to our existing users in our old offices prior to moving in, which proved to be an absolute godsend because moving from an office for some people who'd been there for years and years, moving into new offices is a sea change. It's a difference to people's working environment, and what we endeavored to do was to give them the new technology solutions that we came up with prior to the move so that all that actually changed was the desk and the furniture and the view-- >> Smart. >> Was a lot better, but ultimately, they'd been used to the technology. We had ironed out an awful lot of problems, here and there just with the scale of deployment and things, and these people were in and working and ready to roll within minutes of actually walking in the new building. >> So, talk to us about the competitive landscape. 200 years of wealth management, you have established clients, but you're always looking to expand and get into, let's call it new money. Talk to us about the customer experience, how Citrix has enabled you to become hopefully a little bit more agile in meeting the demands of wealth management clients. They have high expectations. They have traditions they like to follow. I'm a little old school. I still like to go physically into the bank, see a person whereas my wife, you know what, if she can just do all her banking and wealth management mobile, she doesn't have to see a person at all. So, talk about kind of that range of clients that you serve. >> So, we have a variety of clients. We have a variety of clients globally. Really, with this solution that we put forward, being able to meet those client demands almost instantly in terms of accessing their data, accessing CRM tools, accessing whatever systems we needed to do, was essential with that. The issue, not the issue, the real advantage that Citrix gave us in terms of the solution as well, was that we were able to fulfill those client's needs from wherever our dealers were, wherever our fund managers were, wherever our sales force were, if that answers the question. >> Yeah, and you know, in any industry, as consumers of anything, we have choice, right? Whether it's your ISP or a retailer. If you don't, if you're not having a good experience as a consumer of that product or service, you can easily turn. I'm going to find somewhere else that's going to meet that need and I imagine that was part of the concern for Schroders was that yes, we may have, as he said, some very longstanding clients, but if we're not able to meet a range of their expectations, then they have choice to go to one of your competitors. Talk to us about how enabling the employee experience that you have done, employees can access their desktops seamlessly from switching devices if they're going from their desk into a conference room, their desktop essentially virtually follows them. How has that been an enabler of retaining clients and maybe even attracting new clients? >> I think having the ability to collaborate with our clients is key to everything that we do. Having to have that almost seamless workflow of I can sit at a desk, I can come and sit beside you at your desk, I can log in to my machine, I can show you what I'm working on, I can have an ad hoc meeting. We can pool together because fundamentally, our biggest strength as a company is our people, and actually pushing that forward and making those people work better and in a more collaborative way together, whether it's in a meeting room with clients on a video conference call and people still having access to their desktop without all the messy meetings that everyone's been in where people are trying to find cables and leads and presentations, right down to extending the solution across so that people on their mobile devices could still access that data and service, the needs of the customer and ultimately, our staff working better together gave us a better user experience and a better customer experience. >> So essentially, were you able to create an experience for the employees that was transparent to your customers? >> Yes, I believe so. I don't think our customers noticed anything, but benefit coming through. I think the new head office building has over 112 meeting rooms and they're booked morning, noon, and night and people are on client calls. People are interacting with our customers, interacting with other companies that we've acquired. They're accessing other customers' data, and they're able to fulfill all the needs of the job. >> So Paul, talk to us about the legacy of combining legacy IT, traditional services with, and systems with this new frontward-facing capabilities. You have mobile apps, but then as a 200-year-old company, I'm sure you guys have some legacy technology sitting around. Citrix has, and other companies such as SAP, have talked about what comes after digital transformation, so we've given employees mobile devices. We're giving them new applications, ways to access accounts on the go. The next level is the employee experience, the customer experience. From yesterday's keynote, when they talked about automation, the ability to use Citrix to automate workflows and make the marketer's job easier, what do you see potential advantages in your industry to being able to automate things that eat up that 1/5 of your work week? What do you think some of the innovations that will come out of your business as a result? >> That's a very good question. I think yesterday's keynote was fascinating, definitely resonated, the idea of everyone having almost archeological IT, and just layers and layers and everyone has slightly older systems. Everyone has systems that are essential to their business. I think moving forward, having some essential tier that people access so that all their day-to-day repetitive tasks just become simpler and it just becomes a whole list of text boxes to run through is an absolute godsend. As a manager myself, I spend a significant amount of time going through HR approvals and going through purchase requests and doing this and that. That constant jump from system to system to system, anything that can actually be done to improve that flow is beneficial to all of us. >> They talked about their aim yesterday, Citrix did, about being able to streamline this employee experience with intelligence. That they're aiming to give back users one whole day a week which Keith and I were saying, that's two months a year, absolutely I would sign up for that. They also talked yesterday about historically, enterprise software being designed for power users, which only makes up 1% of the user base. How have, you mentioned, I like how you talked about that, in terms of the cultural shift, not just to a brand new facility in London, but we started them on this new software powered by Citrix first, so that by the time they got to this new location, from a change perspective, it was a lot more manageable, but as it relates to software being designed now by Citrix for the general users, what was adoption like across Schroders once you rolled out this new solution? Was it something that just went, oh, okay, I get it. >> So the adoption was very carefully managed. We're big believers in having user change champions. They were consulted all the way through it. We did a whole piece of work to determine which departments went first and move forward with them. We tried to move at pace because as we talked about before, one of the big benefits that we had with the solution was actually being able to deploy the solution to our users before we move into the new office, so that we could actually make this a more seamless transition for something that's a big thing for a lot of people, you know, but moving geography is you know, people don't like change, you know. And being able to do that and roll that across with a constant feedback loop that we were getting from our users and those change champions was really essential to the success. >> So talking about change champions, you're in the business of IT communications. Getting out kind of the message for change, making sure that users understand the changes that are taking place whether systems, environment, et cetera and that they adopt it, so getting early champions on board. One of the challenges I found when I managed IT communications is that getting people to read past the first line of a email, saying that there's change coming, people don't like change and you send a email about change, they're not going to read it. So, what have been some of the effective ways that you've been able to communicate and prepare people for change? >> It's really important because I agree entirely. That whole email delivery of information really doesn't work. >> Right. >> And people put it just down a spam and you know, they-- >> Like, they could put corporate email in the spam folder. They put IT communications there. >> And what we did is we did everything from poster campaigns, there was leaflet campaigns, and it wasn't just global technology. We worked with all areas of the program who were pushing forward to get our staff in our new head office, so there was road shows in our old canteen. They could come in for a whole week at one point and log in to the new technology and we had exact mock ups of what the new desks were going to look like and that had really, really positive benefits. We had videos behind our Genius bars that we had set up so that people, almost wherever they went, were actually seeing what that new technology generally was going to look like for them as well, and that really gave us a lot of benefits as well because people became more engaged, they understood where we were going, it wasn't just, we're going to send an email and you're going to come into work on a Monday morning and everything's changed in front of me and what just happened, you know, so. >> Very methodical, very strategic rollout, what you did, which is really impressive, but it also sounds like from your perspective as the head of Global IT Communications, that you were liaising with the other heads of other functions. This was a business imperative. This wasn't just being driven by IT. That's what it sounds like, is that correct? >> Yeah, and we have become very, very collaborative. My role in terms of communications, I actually run networks and communications. It's not traditional communications and marketing, but everyone pooled together. Everyone worked together, both from right the way across global technology. We tried to remove as many silos as we found you know, and we really did succeed in that. And we really engaged with our user communities as well, which I think was pivotal to the success as well. And even I'm sure you've seen in the video that Citrix did with us, it's not just technology people that are involved in our video. We've got our global head of human resources, who is a huge, big champion of the solution that we've actually deployed and I think that really sets us apart as well. >> I think so too. I think what you guys are doing for the employee experience is very differentiating, the strategic approach within the organization, not just to get the right decision makers together, but also how you've really thoughtfully rolled this out for users, for adoption, is pretty unique. So we congratulate Schroders on being an Innovation Award nominee. You can vote, I think it's just go to citrix.com or the Synergy website. You can vote and we wish you the best of luck as the winner is revealed tomorrow. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for your time, Paul. We appreciate it. >> No worries at all, thank you. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (techno beat)

>> 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.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni to the program today, Marybel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Maribel, great to have you back! >> I'm excited to be here, excited to be at Synergy! >> This has been a great day, the keynotes kicked off this morning, with really strong messaging around digital workspace, they gave so many stats that I think all of us can understand and digest. One of the things they talked about was, by 2020, which is a few months away, as frightening as that is, 50% of the work force is going to be mobile, we also know that this modern work force has five different generations of varying technology expertise, but one of the things that Keith and I, really struck us this morning was that, I think it was David Henshall that shared a number of seven trillion dollars is wasted every year on lack of output because the employee experiences are challenging and, if employees aren't satisfied and happy, talent attraction retention, out the window. So the future of work really is dramatically changing. Your thoughts on that. You did a lot of research on that, and the employee experience as a catalyst for digital transformation. >> Well I think if we step back and look at where technology's gone, we spend a lot of time just deploying technology, trying to digitize the business, right? That was the digital transformation, and you have to ask yourself what's next, and I think what we've seen is that, on the consumer side, we've seen this whole consumerization of technology, and when you're at home, you've great services. David Henshall actually talked about what you could do as a consumer versus what you can do as an employee. You know, my personal perspective is employees are people too, there's no reason why you need to go to the office, and you shouldn't have a good quality experience. But I think we've spent so much of our journey looking backward, like, okay, we have to take these things we had before and replicate them in the new world, and now I think we're moving with digital workspaces forward, what does it look like to work in 2020 and beyond? So I'm excited about that, 'cause I think it changes how we view it, to being about what should the process be? >> I'm always surprised, whenever I talk to a security professional, and I walk to them and I say, you know what, this customer wants to transfer data from one research institute to another one, what hoops do we have to jump through? >> Right, yeah. >> I'm surprised when they say, none, just have them do it. That is a very forward-thinking organization that's thought through this process. But not every organization has done it. What did you hear, either today on stage, or during your experience working with Citrix, that is reducing that friction between kind of the need for security and the need for frictionless work? If I need to share a file with a community group that I'm working on I just jump on Google or whatever and do it. What is Citrix doing that you've seen to enable that type of frictionless employee experience? >> Okay, so I'd say the first thing that's happened is that technology used to be in these really discrete silos, and you as an organization had to be a systems integrator to make that happen, to make it so you could seamlessly share the files, you had to figure out their identity service, your identity service, permissioning inducts, you had to have similar technologies. I think what companies like Citrix are trying to do is take all that process out, do all that systems integration for you and to actually wrap a layer of security around it at the outset, as opposed to trying to retrofit the security at the back end of it, which is typically what we've done. And so now, you're not trying to figure out how do I macgyver five tools together to make this happen with duct tape and sticky glue, you're basically doing things like saying, I already have a security framework in it, I have to select how much or how little security I want, but all the rest of it, it's baked in, I can just roll it out and have it happen. >> The people element though, when we talk about security, we know that people are the number one biggest threat >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Where security is concerned. >> They'll go around the process. >> Or just take my password. >> Yeah. >> Exactly! >> Or it's written down on that sticky note that MacGyver is going to use to engineer the software. Where do you think Citrix is, in what they talked about today, what digital workspace, security, analytics, in enabling the employee experience to be done in a secure fashion, especially as there's so much distribution of workloads, people, businesses, applications? >> So security has always been a multilayered problem, but the problem that's been the weakest link has been the end user, because you decided that you needed to have a 13-character alphanumeric special characters only these five kind of password environment that changes every 90 days or for different different things, right? Where I think we're moving now, the whole Citrix story around this federated identity, whatever identity tools you're using, you can use those, we'll make that happen, you can get to a point where it's single sign on, you can get to a point where it's multi-factor authentication, where it's a thumb print or a passcode or, you know, choose your own adventure as an organization around how many of these you want. But it means that I as Maribel don't have to memorize 15 different things, which doesn't happen, I write them down, I put them on sticky notes, it's in my desk drawer, right? So, rather than do that, we get to a much more unified environment of I remember one thing, and it allows me access to say, the 500 apps I might have in the organization, 'cause you've found a way to authenticate me in a way that is seamless but also meaningful and secure. >> So, when I'm onsite with another employee I can simply take these devices I can flip that over, grab a pianist, start collaborating with my coworker, that's how ideas are formed. Talk to us about the importance of the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft with the team solution. We are taking this DM-IM tool, marrying it with Office three 65 products and then putting collaboration around that. Where's the value Citrix is bringing to that collaboration? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple of pieces of value that Citrix brings to the collaboration. One is this concept of contact switching, like how many tools do you want to go to, to figure out what's going on, right? Some people are in this type of messaging, some people are in teams, some people are in emails, some people are in some other social network, right, there's about eight or nine different places any given person could be, or be doing work with somebody because we all have preferences, right, so the question is, if you're someone like Citrix, how do you help somebody unify that, in a way that they can see all of their different touch points, and teams has becoming and increasingly growing part of that touch point community, right, people like that instant on access to other individuals, right, it's become part of our nature in consumers, it's now part Of our nature in business. But that doesn't mean that you might also not want to be looking at your Outlook email. It doesn't mean that there might be something that's in Sales Force that you also need to be cognizant of. So what you look at someone like Citrix is doing, is helping you unify that with the tools you already have, so you can leverage the best of all of them, but they are not so disparate that you can't figure out what's going on. >> When you're having conversations with customers in different industries, where is the employee experience and the intelligence needed to drive a really solid employee experience, where is that in terms of a C Suite imperative? >> So if you asked me that a year ago, I would say it wasn't as high on the list as it is today. I think what's happened in the past year is that, we did a survey actually, and 78% of the C Suite put it in the top three for their list of imperatives. Security actually being obviously one of the key issues of our generation it seems. But in addition to that, people really get now that talent is the competitive differentiation, so employee experience is related to talent, and employee experience is actually many things. You can define it extremely broadly, from the time that you are engaging with a prospect all the way though the time that they become an alumni of the corporation. So employee experience isn't this one-and-done bounded thing, it's not just when you're an employee, it's not just when you're in recruiting, but in general, corporations really get this, and now they're looking for a way to make this happen. And I think there's lots of ways we can make this happen. One of the biggest things that I think is happening is the concept of not just redoing our old experiences, but looking at what work should look like today, and that's what are the devices that they're using, are they owned devices or not, what their physical workspaces look like, how you integrate technology and buildings, what does your digital workspace look like. And not just for employees, but we also have this new gig economy that we're looking at as well, so if you really want talent, part of the employee experience might be that they are only going to be an employee for three month, how do you make sure you get them on board day one? That they can do their job effectively with all the tools that they need? And then when it's time for them to leave, you can turn them off so they can secure your data and content, and be really confident that they didn't take the keys to the kingdom with them, right? So I think that employee experience is a critical board-level topic and I think the biggest challenge now is figuring out how do we define that and what tools do we need in the organization to make that happen. >> So, as I look at this alumni network, married with the gig economy, I'm a former PWC guy, they constantly send me opportunities, like, sure, you don't want to come back and get burnt out again, but there's always opportunities to come back and do... >> Maribel: Project day >> Projects, as talent gets, in my opinion, more and more scarce, especially specialized talent around AI, machine learning, application development, process automation, et cetera, there's going to be a need to go out and extend your search for folks around the globe to do that work. When you think about partnerships and whether it's technology partnerships, partnerships with staffing companies, partnerships with social media, what are some of the trends that are kind of arranging or emerging as companies look to globalize their work force? >> Well I think that you picked up on one of them. Well if I step back for a second, I'd say we have to think of location independence. So a huge trend, particularly in large metros, where talent is very competitive, as people start to think more broadly about are there new locations that we want to create new offices in? If there aren't new locations, are there just easier ways to create a remote work environment where people can work at home? And there's two types of remote work. There's remote work like, I want to work at home maybe two days a week because the commute is terrible, or there's remote work like, I never go to an office, and both of those have to be first-class citizens, and both of them also have to foster a sense of community, because part of the challenge around that is what we call the water cooler problem. How do you give people enough technology that they feel like they're almost in the room with people, that they have the right access to people and information, wherever they are, and that they are part of an environment and a culture, because I think that's really important. So we're seeing location independence being one of the huge trends we're looking at. We're also seeing that trend of they can come and they can go, they might be what I call the part-time employee trend. We're also seeing a trend of use the tool you want. There are many ways you can get a job done. You might be a PC, a Mac, a Surface person. You might want to use big phones, small phones. All these things don't necessarily need be company-owned as well, so how do you get people the tools they want? People are very specific about what collaboration suites they want, what document storage they want, what SAS applications they want, and teams will pick these types of things. So it's really important when people are building the next generation of technology that they allow enough flexibility for choice, so that you can actually say, okay, you want to to use these devices, you want to use these SAS apps, we can find a way to manage and secure that and let you work the way you want to work, because that's attractive to you and that will keep you employed with us. >> When you're having those conversations with businesses about the location independence, which I fully support, I've been doing it for a long time, there's a cultural impact there, whether it's a start-up that has been around for five years, or a legacy corporation like Citrix that's been around for 30. How often does that cultural transformation come up in your customer conversations? And, similar to my question about where employee experience is within the C Suite, are you seeing cultural transformation also elevate to, hey, in order to be really competitive and really successful we've got to modify our culture, maybe to embrace, not just for technologies, but these different ways of working? >> So I've been talking to a lot of organizations about what does the concept of diversity mean, and diversity means a lot of different things. Diversity means diversity of geography, diversity means diversity of opinions, diversity means diversity of technology. It is changing the way you think about culture from being everybody has to be in the building. It's also diversity in terms of how you evaluate an employee's worth. So one of the big cultural changes that people have been talking about is, they felt it was easier when you were sitting in a building from nine to five to know that you were working and now people are working many different hours and many different geographies, and I think the big rethink for organizations is what is the value that you're bringing, and what are the metrics that you're impacting, and how do I focus on that, as opposed to you worked 3.2 hours today because your VPN connection said so. That thinking has to go away. It has to be moved into a meritocracy, but it also has to be very much structured of like we really need to know what we're trying to do and trying to accomplish, so we can create the right goals for our employees, and I think that that concept of going from I saw you therefore you must be working, to you impacted our net promoter score, you impacted sales, something that you can say, this was the business value of employees, so that they feel that they have worth and you understand their worth, is actually a real big change in the future work that's not about the technology, technology can enable you to get there, but it's really about a rethink of how we do business. >> Oh, exciting, I wish we had more time but Maribel thank you for joining Keith and me and sharing your insights and educating us, even on the different ways of looking at diversity, so interesting, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy day one from Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat theme music plays) >> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCube. Covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019, brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are live in Atlanta, Georgia for Citrix Synergy, 2019. We are pleased to welcome Jack Gold to The Cube, President and founder of Jack Gold & Associates. Jack, it's great to have you join Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, we had a great day. We've talked to eight or nine folks or so, lot's of really relevant exciting news from Citrix this morning. Talking about the employee experience as, and how I kind of interpreted it, as a catalyst for digital transformation, cultural transformation. You've been working with Citrix for a long time. I'd love to get your perspective on not just what you heard today from Citrix, and with Google and Microsoft, but in the last year or so since they've really kind of done a re-brand effort. What're your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, it's interesting from a Citrix perspective. Citrix, the old Citrix I guess I would put in quotes right, was always known as the VDI company. I've got, you know, the screen that will talk to the server, that will talk to whatever other apps I need it to talk to, and I can have a nice thin client sitting on my desktop and I don't have to spend a lot of money. And I also don't have to worry about if I'm going to bank people stealing stuff off the hard drive, or whatever. They've made a pretty significant transition that was the old work space, if you will. The modern work spaces which is where Citrix is really moving is one where, look we've all grown up with smart phones for the last ten or fifteen years, our kids don't know anything different. They're not going to deal with anything that's complex, anything where I have to log in and out of applications, anything where I have to switch between screens, this just doesn't make any sense for them. And so, what we're seeing Citrix do is move into an environment where, as I said, it's about the modern workspace, it's about being able to help me do my job not getting in my way of me doing my job, and that's really the transition. It's not just Citrix, the industry is moving in that direction as well, but Citrix is really at the forefront of making a lot of that work now. >> So, Jack, talk to us about the new promise of the new Citrix. The, if you remember me, it had to have be about seven years ago, I did a blog post of running Windows XP on your iPad. It was taking, you know, the then desktop solution and running it on your iPad. >> (Jack) Sure. >> And it was a cool trick. But we talked about, today, we would hope by today, that mobile technology would of forced companies to rewrite applications, for a mobile first experience. But that simply hasn't happened. So, presenting a bad application on to a mobile dot, to a mobile work station, or a mobile device, doesn't work. We end up packing in, trying it, and squeezing, and trying to get our work done, how is Citrix promising to change that experience, even versus their competitors? >> Sure. Well, first of all so two bad's don't make a good. Right. Having a bad app on a bad device doesn't make it good. >> (Keith) Right. >> Doesn't make it easy to use, doesn't help me get my job done. What we really are talking about, now, is the ability to build a workspace. Something where I sit and look at, that helps me get my job done, as opposed to getting in the way. Which means that, instead of having to punch fourteen different holes, or you know, icons and sit at my keyboard and type forty-eight different commands and do thirty-eight different log-ins as each one is different, and by the way I couldn't remember them so I just called the help desk in-between, and that's another half an hour of my time that I didn't want to, that I wasted. >> (laughs) Give me my word perfect templates. >> (Lisa laughs) >> (Jack) There you go, there you go, word perfect I remember that no so well. I remember it well not so nicely. What we're really trying to focus on now is user experience, right. What we're really trying to focus on is if, if you wanted to get your work done, I want to make it easy. Think about it as going to a grocery store. If you can't, if you've got a list of groceries and you can't find what you want in five minutes, you leave, you go somewhere else. You go to another grocery store where things are much easier to find. It's the same at work, or it should be the same at work. Now, that said, a lot of apps and organizations, especially big enterprises where they have, some can have literally thousands of apps, are not going away. The notion that everything is going to go into the modern workspace, where everything looks like a phone, it's a nice idea, it's properly not going to happen. Legacy apps will be legacy apps for a very long time, it's like mainframes are dead, guess what, they're still around. That said, that doesn't mean that you can't take some of those legacy apps and make them easier to use with the proper front-end. And that's really what Citrix is trying to do with the workspaces, and other's again, it's not just Citrix in this, we have to be fair there are lots people working in this space. But, if you can make the front-end workspace more attractive, easier to use, easier to navigate, even if I've got old, clunky stuff in the background. For me as a user, you can give me back fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes a day, an hour a day, that's really productivity. Look, if you're paying me a hundred dollars an hour, and you save me an hour a day you just made a hundred dollars every day that I'm working at that company, that sounds like a lot, but there are people who make that kind of money. Or even a fifty or twenty-five dollars, it all adds up. And so, what we're really doing is trying to move into an environment where if I can make you more productive but making things more easier for you to navigate, and getting in and our of applications more quickly, getting more information to me more quickly, which makes the overall organization more productive because I'm sharing more information with you, then that's a real win-win, and that's where I think Citrix is really trying to position itself, and doing a fairly good job at doing that. Clearly they don't have all of the components yet, but then no one does. This is an ongoing process. >> So, employee experience is table-stakes for any business, as we look at the modern workforce it's highly disrupted. >> (Jack) Yes. >> It's composed of five different generations. >> (Jack) Yes. >> Who have varying expertise with technology. It is also demanding because we're all consumers. >> (Jack) Yes. >> And so we have this expectation, or this, yeah I'd say expectation that I want to be able to go in and have this personalized experience. I don't want to have to become an expert in sales-force because I might need to understand, can I talk to that costumer and ask them to be a reference? How much time are you going to take? But this personalization is becoming more and more critical as we see this influence from the consumer side. >> Right. >> Were some of the things that you heard today from Citrix, what are your thoughts on how their going to be able to improve that more personalized employee experience? >> So people think of personalization, I think sometimes, too narrowly. For some people personalization is, you know, I've got my phone out, and I have the apps that I want on my phone and that's personalization. I think of it a little bit differently. We need to extend personalization. When I'm at work, what I want is not just the apps I want, clearly I want those, right, but also the ability, to get help with those apps as I need it, right. And so where Citrix is going is trying to put intelligence into the system, so that when I'm interacting with back-end solutions or my neighbors, or with teams collaboration, I get the assistance I need to make it easier for me to do that work. It's not just the apps, it's also help with the apps. And if we can do that, that's really what we want. We go, you know, if I have a problem with my laptop I'm going to come to you and say, hey, you did this yesterday what was the result, can you help me for five minutes? Five minutes is never five minutes, it's usually an hour and a half, but still. I'll come to you. Why can't I have an app on my desk that does the same thing? I'm having trouble. Help me. Fix it. Let me know what I'm doing wrong, or let me know how I can do it better. And that's where Citrix is trying to go with the analytics that they've got in place. Which is huge, I think they're underplaying that, because I think that the whole analytic space in making things easier for people to use, because in understanding where my problems are is huge, and that's going to pick up. The notion of having a nice pretty, pretty may not be the right word, but attractive at least, workspace for me to go in that doesn't get frustrated, frustration is a killer in productivity, as everyone knows. There are examples I've heard multiple people tell me now that they go out and hire, especially with millennials, that go out an hire twenty or thirty new employees, and half of them quit within a week because their systems are so bad that they get so frustrated that they're not going to work there. So, the notion of having a modern workspace where I get the applications that I need, I get the assistance I need, because of the analytics of that backend telling the systems what I need, and making it easier for me to do it. And then allowing me to be productive not just for myself, but for the organization, is where we all need to go and I think that Citrix is making some real progress going that way. >> (Keith) Well Jack, we're talking about products that haven't quite been released yet, so I'm trying to get a sense or, worth's the right built versus buy stage, in complexity Citrix should be? You know, I can make it apple pie by going out and picking the apple. >> (Jack laughs) Right. >> And making my own crust or, I can go buy filling, or I can just go buy any mince pie, stick it in the oven and warm it up. Three very different experiences. Three different layers of investment, and outcomes frankly. In this world, I can go hire application developers to write these many apps, to write these customizations, to write these integrations, but that's, I think that's akin to picking the apple and that just simply doesn't scale. But, also while any mince pie is okay every now and again, I want, you know, something of higher quality. Where do you think Citrix is on the kind of range of built versus buy with this intelligent experience? >> So built versus buy is a very interesting phenomenon. And it's interesting because a lot of it has to do with where you think you are right now in the world, right. You know you mention going out and getting developers and building your own, that's all well and good, it doesn't scale, and by the way in today's market you can't find them to begin with. So you often don't even have a choice. So that's number one. Number two is that there are companies out there that still think for competitive advantage that they have to do everything from scratch, like building your pie. Yes, you probably make the best pie in the world, but guess what, sometimes a good enough pie is good enough. Right, and if you're in business sometimes good enough is the only way you survive. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect, ninety percent's okay too. People can deal with that. So that's the other piece. The third piece of it is, from an end-user perspective, right, if end-users are accustom to having an interaction in a certain way and the you go out and get developers that come in and do it, something completely different, which they're apt to do because each will have their own kind of flavor to it, then you just force them to learn one, two, three, four, five different interface interactions I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get frustrated as heck, and I'm going to go call the help desk or I'm going to go get my app and say go do this for me. Both of which are counterproductive to the company and to me. So, it really depends on where you are in the stage of where your company is, I would say built versus buy it's not a one or a zero. There's lots of shades of gray in between, it's also not all or nothing. So, some applications might be built internally, some you may want to buy externally, some you may have a hybrid, and the nice thing about where workspaces is going now is that you plug all of those into the same environment. That's really the ultimate goal, is to make it as easy and transparent for the organization as possible, and also for the user because the user ultimately is the end consumer. And if it's not good for the end consumer, it's not good for the company either. >> (Lisa) So delivering this great game-changing customer experience for this, as we talked about before this distributed modern work force that wants to be able to access mobile apps, Sass apps. >> (Jack) Right. >> Web apps from tablets, PC, phone, desktop. >> (Jack) Your car, your refrigerator >> Exactly. >> (Jack) Anything with a screen on it. >> Oh yeah, the refrigerators. Wherever you are, I think, okay people >> (Jack) Sure. >> We're people, and we are the biggest single security threat there is. >> (Jack laughs) >> So in your perspective, how is what Citrix is talking about balancing security as an essential component of this employee experience? >> So there are a few things, number one is a lot of companies think that if they limit the end user experience they're more secure. The truth of the matter is, yes, I mean if you don't let me get in to an app I can't steal application or information, or lose it somehow. But I also can't get my work done. So there's a balance between security and privacy which many companies don't talk about which is not exactly the same thing, there are two unique things, more and more privacy is becoming as big or bigger an issue than security, but you know we can get at that in a minute. But, the notion of security really relates to what I was talking about earlier which is analytics. If I know what you're suppose to be doing, you're here at Synergy. If someone just got your credentials and logged in from Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or Denver or wherever, I know it's not you. I can shut that thing down very quickly and not have to worry about them stealing information, also if you're, if I know you're not suppose to be in a certain version of SAP, you're not suppose to be doing some ERP system and you're in it, then again the analytics tells me that there's something going on, there's something anomalous going on that I need to investigate. So, having a system that protects because there's a kind of a front end to everything that's going on in the back end, and a realization of what's going on behind that screen gives me a much higher sense of security from a corporate perspective, it's not perfect there is no such thing as perfect security, but it's a lot better than just letting us kind of do our own thing, and loading, you know, semantic or McAfee or whatever on your PC. And that's where the industry ultimately has to go. That becomes part of the new modern workspace. It's not just about more productive it's about more secure. It's about more private. It's about not letting information escape that shouldn't be there to begin with. >> (Keith) So last question on data grabbing. Because we haven't talked about data and data is, you know, probably the most important thing in this topic. The importance of the (unintelligible) and Google announcement. You know, we, the yottabyte, the first time I've heard that term, yottabye of data that data's going to be spread across the world and this, this ideal of centralized compute and us being able to present, compute into data centers, no longer going to work, that we're going to have to, applications are going to be spread across the world. Where do you Citrix advancing that discipline of providing apps where they need to be with these relationships? >> So, it's an interesting phenomenon what we're going through right now, if you look back a couple of decades ago everything was centralized, people were centralized, they all work in one building, computing was centralized it was all in the data center, IT was centralized, it was all, you know, working around the servers. The Cloud is the opposite direction, although I would argue The Cloud isn't new, The Cloud is just time-share in a different environment, for us old people who remember the old IBM time-share computers. But everything is becoming distributed, data is distributed, people are distributed, applications are distributed, networks are distributed, you name it. The key critical factor for companies in keeping their productivity, keeping up the productivity is to make sure that the distributed environment doesn't get in the way of doing work. So you've got things like latency, if it takes me, if I'm in. (crowd cheers) >> They're having a party behind us. >> No, they agree with you! >> (Jack laughs) Yes, apparently. I, you know, if I'm here at Synergy but I have to work back at my offices near Boston, I can't wait five minutes for information to come back and forth, it's like the old days. Latency now has to be within five microseconds or people get frustrated, so that becomes a network issue, applications, same way, if I have to go to a data center, the data isn't local to my server here, it has to go to London, I'm not going to wait three minutes for it to come back like we use to, or ten minutes or an hour and a half. Or come back the next morning. You know, you want to book a flight on an airline, are you going to wait thirty minutes for them to find you a seat? You're going to go to another airline. So the whole notion of distributed means that it's very different now, even though it's distributed, everything is local. And by local, keeping it local means that you have to have latency below a certain point (crowd cheers) so that I don't realize that it's distributed, or I don't care that it's distributed. Yottabyte's of data means that we're going to have data everywhere, accessible all the time, and we're going to produce data like crazy. You know, a typical car, an autonomous car will produce a gigabyte of data every minute. Hundreds every, you know, hour. So, the amount of data is going to be fantastic that we have to deal with. Then, the big question becomes, okay so, I can't personally deal with all this data, it's impossible, I have to have the assistance, the intelligence within the system to go off and make something of that data so that I can actually interact with it in a meaningful fashion. That's where Citrix would like to go, that's where other's would like to go. They can't do it alone, because the problem is just too darn big. But, it will, we will get there, companies will get there eventually, not all of them perhaps, only the ones that are going to be successful long term are going to get there. >> Well, Jack, I wish we had more time to chat with you. This has, I just feel like going dot, dot, dot, to be continued. And I want to say, coincidence, I don't know, there were two rounds of applause when you talked about latency. (Keith laughs) >> There we go. They're just waiting for the bar to open, it's taking too long. >> (Lisa laughs) You think that's what it is? >> (Jack) Properly. >> All right well we'll get you over there, and thank-you again for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank-you very much. >> (Lisa) Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube live from Citrix Synergy, 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat theme music plays)

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here, at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, with Keith Townsend, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE, Kevin Jackson, the founder of GovCloud. Kevin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for the opportunity. >> So this has been an exciting day. Keith and I have been geeking out all day, starting with the keynote this morning. Talking about employee experience is so relevant, theCUBE covers a ton of technology events, we don't often hear about employee experience as a catalyst to digital transformation, but it is. >> No, absolutely. Citrix, the keynote today was just very impressive. Not because of technology, and not that it wasn't impressive, but it was the focus. Today's world has really been focused around digital transformation. What processes in your organization are the right ones? And Citrix has developed and is delivering tools to help organizations understand those processes which should be digitized, and it's really about the employee experience because companies in the commercial world, in the consumer space, have really focused on consumer experience and customer experience. Those that have been successful in doing that have seen their market share grow. Well, this is all about looking at your employee experience. Instead of looking outside, look inside. If you're able to improve your employee experience, you get more efficiency, you get better employees, and you get better products and services. >> So Kevin, talk to us about the importance of examining your processes prior to automating. I was visiting my parents the other day and they're remodeling their home, and I said, you know, I made a joke about how we automate in ITS, I said you know what, you guys are moving much too slow, I'm going to buy you two more saws, so you can go faster. And a lot of times I feel like that's the way we tackle automation and process improvement. What have you seen out in the field, and where should companies start versus where they do start? >> So one of the biggest problems companies have is their history. They have a process that they've done for years, in their eyes it's been very successful, and I'm not saying it wasn't successful, but it was successful in a different era, successful in a different environment. Today's environment moves much faster. It's much broader. It's not regionalized. It's international. So organizations need to understand what their processes are, and which of their old processes can actually be effective in the new environment. Many of them can be, but they need to be tweaked. They need to be updated. They may need to be entirely changed. When those processes were designed, you didn't have customers with smart phones that can access your products and services. We're going from a physical world to a virtual world. So the first thing is to understand which processes need to be digitized. Maybe the saws were a good thing, but maybe they weren't. Maybe they need a level to go faster and to go better, to improve the quality of the output, not necessarily cutting more wood. >> So these changes are subtle. How does Citrix help kind of break down the processes and help you determine? You know, one of the things that we learnt, early cloud. It's not wise to put everything in the cloud up front, it's what makes a difference and moves the ball. David talked a lot this morning about employees want to move the ball forward. How does Citrix help move the ball forward in determining what processes should be automated? >> Yeah, great question. One of the biggest problems with cloud computing is sort of the adoption of the cloud-first policy. People misunderstood that policy and many companies misunderstand the implementation of that today. Cloud-first doesn't mean put everything in the cloud and get rid of all your legacy, it means evaluate cloud first and make a decision as to what data should go in the cloud and what processes should go in the cloud. Any organization of any significant size is still going to need legacy data centers. They still may need managed services, and cloud computing would be part of that hybrid mix. So what Citrix is doing is providing the tools so that you can get the data about the processes and understand which data should go in the cloud, which data should stay in your legacy data center, and which data could be managed by manage service providers. So customers, Citrix customers that actually leverage this intelligent workspace have the required tool to do digital transformation. >> When you're out talking with customers in different industries, public sector, government, where are they in understanding how critical the employee experience is, from recruiting and onboarding, to actually those employees interfacing with their customers? I mean, it's such a critical function. >> Oh, absolutely, and digital transformation is really not about the technology as much as it's about the culture. Organizations that undergo this journey oftentimes forget about the cultural transformation that needs to occur within the organization. And that means training, that means education, and it also means redefining the roles within the organization. Citrix provides many of the tools for helping employees understand their role, redefining their role, educating employees. So all of this is critical to digital transformation. >> And that's not easy to do, as well. I think this morning, and I've heard this recently from a number of events I've covered, is there are five generations active in the workforce today. So you've got my parents, the baby boomers, you've got the generation younger, too, younger than I am, who were born on smart devices, and there's different expectations, there's different levels of technology expertise, so companies like Citrix have to really balance that employee experience across five generations with very different expectations. >> Yeah, absolutely. I was talking to a colleague of mine and he was relaying a story to me when an employee was working an application, right? And he finished the task, went home, came back the next day and all the work was gone, and the employee was saying, "What happened? "I worked hard on it, it took me hours." And the manager said, "Well did you save it?" And he said, "Well what's that?" (laughs) Because if you're born in the cloud you don't press a button to save, it's automatic. This was a millennial that was born with technology and actually didn't understand the concept of having to save something, because it was always in the cloud. This is cultural, and you need to address this culture when you are improving and modifying your business processes. >> So when you're an organization of any size you can look at this employee experience journey and be overwhelmed, and think, wow. You know what, you could hear a story like that and say, "Where do I start to change?" Like my SAP app, you're still going to have to hit save, that's not going to change tomorrow. So where's the starting point? >> Really, the starting point is data. Collecting data, understanding the data, interpreting the data, because then you can make the appropriate decisions within the context of what your organization or industry is doing. Although I do a lot of public sector, most of my work today is in commercial industry, and employees are in an environment that's forever changing, where their context changes from second to second. They're doing one application then doing another application. They're responding to a client or customer, then responding to a colleague, and then immediately responding to the manager. This context switching is normal for computers but it's not normal for people, so this is important as you move forward in the world. >> So what I'm hearing is a term, an SAP coin, X-data, experience data. The idea that you need to collect, as much pressure as we're under to transform digitally, the first step is to collect and analyze the data. One of the questions I put towards another analyst was where is this data coming from? I know the data is because people are doing stuff, and there's a trail somewhere, but where do I go first to start as the indicator to collect this data to analyze? >> Well the old school method of doing that would be a survey, or you would observe a worker. Now the actual act of conducting a survey or observing work changes the work process. All right, so the data that you get from that can also be colored or flawed based upon the observer. Citrix experience, their desktop has artificial intelligence built into it. The worker can actually do their task, unbeknownst to them that they are being observed, that the data is being collected with respect to that process. Don't get scared, this is not George Orwell in 1984, though that's been a while, I guess. It's not Big Brother looking at you. The data is anonymized, right? It's not about you, it's about the task that you're completing. So you now have a tool to collect real data and you can continue to collect that data because processes have a life, they change. So you can monitor that, and update and tweak it. >> And an important outcome of that data collection and analysis is delivery, using it to deliver a personalized experience to the user, regardless of generation, how born in the cloud they were or not. >> Absolutely. And now, you're heading back to that cultural aspect. The digital transformation is really cultural transformation. >> Then another aspect, no, output of that, is that you could correlate this X-data with operational data and see where there's human error. So your processes analysis, you champion process analysis, you can say, okay, where are we making the most mistakes, because we're having a human translate something from one screen to another, while we see where this error rate is coming up and now we can automate or modernize this process to improve the overall not only employee experience but customer experience as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's important to understand not just the investment that you're making in any process, but the return you're getting from that process. By collecting data, you can determine if value is being delivered not just to the organization, but to your customers. So this ROI, return on investment, is often not just about money. It's about the value of the employee, and you can actually measure that value. Measure what they're doing, measure the return, and drive better environments, better employees, better outcomes based on the data. >> And that's got to elevate up to the C-suite as a business imperative, to understand that ROI, because those are employees that in many facets are involved and connected with those customers who are paying for products and services. So those employees, whether they're in sales or marketing, or finance, or legal, or a contact center, they're critical touchpoints to your customers. If their experience isn't great and they decide to leave, that customer experience, that's a possible brand reputation challenge. >> No, absolutely. And you touched upon touchpoints, right? In the past, you basically knew how your client was going to interact with you. Dissimilarly, you need to understand how your employee interacts with the organization. They're not going to just be in a cube interacting with the IT every day. They may be at home. They may, in the very near future, not today, they may be interacting with Alexa to get your information, or through Alexa with one of your clients and one of your customers. How do you manage that touchpoint? Well, with tools like Citrix, they are actually giving you the ability to normalize data across multiple channels, across multiple touchpoints, so you can make sure you have the same experience, the preferred experience with your clients and customers as well as with your employees. >> Serious impact. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> It was very enjoyable, thank you. >> Good, our pleasure. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (percussive music)

>> Male Voiceover: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're coming to you live from the show floor of Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. And we're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Adam Jones, the chief revenue officer of the Miami Marlins. Adam, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to join you both today. >> So, baseball fans, White Sox, San Francisco Giants, Miami Marlins. Always cool to talk sports and technology when we can bring those two things together. I think the San Francisco Giants and the Miami Marlins might have something in common right now, but regardless of the standings, everybody wants to go to a game. You have to deliver, as chief revenue officer, a great a fan experience. You got to make sure all the vendors are there to deliver what those fans want, regardless of the standings. People still want to go to the games. Talk to us a little bit about your role as the CRO of the Miami Marlins, how long you've been doing it, and then we'll get into what you're doing with Citrix. >> Sure. So, joined the Marlins 18 months ago as part of new ownership and the new leadership team brought in to reset the standard for what the Miami Marlins organization could be. We want to be a world class sport entertainment enterprise. That means we're going to evolve beyond a traditional baseball team and ballpark. 26 years into the history of the franchise, eight years into the operating rights of a ballpark, and there's a lot of work to be done around those two assets but as we take the organization forward, we want to continue to broaden that enterprise to focus on more sport and entertainment offerings. >> So, chief revenue officer. We don't get many chief revenue officers at a technology conference. Help make the connection. You're a busy person. What made you take time out of your schedule to come to Citrix Synergy? >> Well, I think it's indicative of the culture we're building within our organization that we're putting data at the very center of our culture. We're going to make informed and timely decisions and we need our technology to enable that culture. And so, when it came to where we were going to align our IT group and it's a group that has built out a very robust, on-prem infrastructure over the past seven years following the opening of Marlins Park, the alignment under strategy, which was my initial title coming in, and now chief revenue officer as I took on more responsibility for the business side of the organization, was a strategic decision to make sure that the infrastructure was meeting the requirements of the organization as we rapidly evolve what our priorities are and what we need in order to deliver on their very aggressive and lofty expectations for their organization. >> So this morning during the keynote, we heard a lot about the digital workplace, the employee experience being really critical for any type of organization's digital transformation, and I just thought it was a really interesting viewpoint because we go to a lot of tech shows here at theCUBE, all over the world, and we don't often talk about employee experience or even culture, as a leading edge indicator of how successful a digital transformation is going to be, but employee experience is really critical to any business because whether those employees are interacting with seven to 10 apps a day based on their job, or they're interacting with your other users, in your case, Marlins fans, making sure those employees are productive, have what they need, in a personalized way, is critical. Talk to us about what the employee experience means for the Marlins, and also, as an indicator on the revenue side. >> Absolutely, so we have an evolving workforce. It's very young across a very diverse enterprise of activities. What we've been able to do in partnership with Citrix since day one of the ballpark, where we went from an organization of roughly 100-150 employees around the team to 300 plus across the team and the ballpark, is build out an infrastructure that was very light in terms of hardware, focused very much on the digital workspace keeps us very nimble, allows us to deploy capital in areas that we see tremendous value back in terms of application and utility. So, as we continue to make our workforce more mobile, I ask them to deliver and work at a higher rate of speed. We need to arm them with the tools that allow them to perform those roles in the office, out of the office, engage beyond more just than a 81 day transactional relationship across Marlins baseball, but how across 12 months out of the year, creating that 365 day touchpoint. They still have tools and access in order to create those memories, those engagements that we want with the market. >> So, talking about customer experience, Marlin baseball is more than just the 300 employees. It is your partners, it's all of your contractors. When I go to a ballpark, I don't see Mark the hot dog vendor I see Mark, the guy that works for the Marlins. My user experience, my customer experience needs to be excellent across that. As CRO, that's part of your responsibility, assuring that the whole Marlin family is presented as one unity. Talk to us about from not just a user experience perspective but also, security expectations of how you need to make that real for your customers. >> Sure, on the experience side, what we are doing is resetting the standard, not only for Marlins and for South Florida, but the industry as a whole. We've brought on a lot of great talent to the organization from across the industry that knows what's worked, what hasn't across our peers. We're applying that. We're challenging conventional practice trying to get out in front of the curve as to what is going to be the future of a game day experience, what is a sport entertainment enterprise more holistically. And so, as a result, we have to arm our employees with those tools that will allow them to engage consistently across all the touchpoints with our fans, with our partners. Try not to centralize data to the point where only a select few have and feel informed and empowered to make decisions and take action, but disseminate that information and empower everyone to deliver consistently across all of those touchpoints. On the security side, being a public interest entity, we're vulnerable. We're a target. There's plenty of precedent around the type of activity that these types of organizations can be prone to try to address, and so, security is a number one priority of ours to make sure that the IP we're creating maintains and stays ours, as well as the information we are collecting around our customers, around our players, stays within that secure environment as well. >> So if I think about going to a baseball game, which I love, there are so many sellable moments there. Whether I'm in the stands and I want to go buy food and beverage, or I want a new hat, or some sort of merchandise for my nephew or something. You have, as CRO, you've got all these different sellable moments, not just in the ballpark, in the physical experience, but even online. So having this kind of cohesive opportunity to sell not just tickets, but food and beverage, merchandise, in person, on mobile, on a tablet, on a desktop, it's got to be a critical part of your strategy Talk about the alignment with yourself and you said a lot of your IT guys have FOMO cause you're here, but I imagine that those experiences are essential that you have the right foundation and technological foundation to deliver sellable moments that deliver. >> That's right. So the ecosystem of a sport is a fairly diverse one from the ticketing transaction to all of the ballpark touchpoints. What we're trying to create is that 12 month relationship with a fan, so that goes into creating a lot of content and how we distribute that content, in order to continue to earn that engagement well beyond 81 plus dates of baseball. And the technology behind there, in terms of our storage and our accessibility, is what allows us to begin to personalize and tailor not only those core, traditional transactions and touchpoints of sport, but how we've begun to transition into more of that broader entertainment enterprise in making sure that we can deliver those as personalized and tailored as we can. >> So there was another Chicago team that showed the age of baseball. It was over 100 years before they won a-- >> Another Chicago team-- >> Yeah, another Chicago team that won a championship. So baseball has a lot of tradition. You're in a unique opportunity that you're coming into a new ownership, but still, baseball has traditions that are hard to compete against. So let's talk about what are some of the cultural changes and opportunities that you see that baseball needs to engage in where technology can help. >> Why I think an interesting thought around baseball and where it's been scrutinized as whether we pace a play or number of games, of not keeping up with the times, not being as snackable, short-form consumption as other sporting content. As everything tracks that way, baseball starts to differentiate itself in terms of the ability to create a very distinct and differentiated experience to a millennial, to a family, to an older consumer who has grown up with the traditions of baseball. And so while baseball needs to continue to innovate and modernize, there's actually this interesting equilibrium as to how much it continues to challenge those traditions that differentiate it from many of other points of contact and where it should continue to preserve those elements to hold what has been generational-type engagement. >> You know a great example of that is mlb.com and being able to watch a game anywhere. Baseball does an amazing job of embracing digital transformation, at least in baseball. One of the things that we talked about, or that David talked about onstage today, is the seven trillion dollar opportunity. That's big, even in baseball numbers. There's no bigger sporting numbers than baseball, but seven trillion dollars is opportunity. What are you excited about coming out of this show when you look at some of the potential game efficiencies from some of the automation announcements that were made today? >> For our organization, while there has been significant investment in infrastructure, great collaboration with Citrix up until this point. The exciting transformation for us is our migration into more of a hybrid cloud environment, which is going to allow us to onboard a number of new applications, tools, for our sales team, our service team, our game presentation groups, to continue to innovate and challenge how they've gone to market in the past. And having Citrix as a partner that has that environment for us to step into, one, gives us a ton of assurance in taking that next step and having someone that continues to bring us new tools within that environment, as well. So our ability to collaborate across the organization, I'd say we've only just skimmed the surface as to the true capability and power of a lot of the tools we've had in place, and very excited about unlocking the true power and potential of that environment moving forward. >> So this is your second season with the Marlins. You spent 15 years at PWC and before we went live, I thought, wow, that must have been a pretty big change going from PWC to major league baseball. But you actually have quite a history in sports. Tell us a little about that and maybe some of the similarities between major league baseball as an industry to other industries that kind of surprised you. >> Sure. Organizations couldn't be different, more different, in terms of profile and in set-up. What I did day-to-day, advising across sport and entertainment leading the sports practice at PWC positioned me for this incredible opportunity or challenge that is the Miami Marlins and what we're building in this aggressive vision that we've set as to how we're going to reset the standard and become world class as an enterprise. PWC and the history with the firm and professional services gave me a unique perspective as to how to take on many of the challenges that we have. Had the opportunity working across sport to really understand what works, what doesn't, so that we can avoid some of those missteps that others who have taken on this roadmap ahead of us have encountered. The breadth of infrastructure that a firm of PWC's size, also gives me a little more of a lens as to what the power and scale of a large organization can deliver in more of a small, mid-size business form, and not accept size or employee base as a constraint as to the types of tools and sophistication of our technology that we can deploy within a sports organization. >> Well, Adam, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon, talking about how you are helping to make big positive impacts for the Miami Marlins. We appreciate your time. >> I enjoyed it. Thank you. >> Go MLB. All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from our first day of coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)