>> 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 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)

(energetic technological 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 in Atlanta, Georgia welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Lee Doyle, Principal Analyst at Doyle Research. Lee, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thanks, for having me. >> So we were chatting away all day yesterday with Citrix execs and analysts. We talked to one of their customers from the Miami Marlins. Excited about day two today. We talked a lot about some of the key tenets that Citrix addressed yesterday: digital workspace, the intelligent experience, analytics, security. We want to talk about networking with you. I was looking at a stat the other day that said over 80% of businesses believe the ability to migrate apps to the cloud is hindered by network infrastructure complexity. Talk to us about that and what Citrix is doing to help reduce that complexity. >> Sure. So we're now in an environment where data is everywhere, employees are everywhere, partners are everywhere, data is flowing. You're going to be using in-house applications. You're using SaaS-based applications. You're using applications on AWS or Azure or Google, and there's no good control of that information, but there also isn't a good way necessarily to deliver the appropriate quality of user experience or quality of service that those applications need. So the network, that's where the network sits. It's handling all the traffic. It sees the traffic. It can help with security. So that's why the network becomes so important here. >> So, Lee, SD-WAN has come so far. I remember back when I managed networks and trying to come up with policy-based routing to send voice traffic one way, send, you know, FTP traffic another way, and now we have a robust market. I thought the market would collapse. It's 20 plus, last time I looked, 20 plus significant SD-WAN solutions out in the market. Where is Citrix and the customer mindsets when it comes to SD-WAN? >> Right. So I'll start with SD-WAN and the broad picture which is, you know, SD-WAN is a great technology at the right place, at the right time. It's the example of SDN, broadly, that's had very good adoption. And it solves a real problem, which is that you need to link the user and the application with each other. And that application can be in a variety of places. So you're not, no longer just simply going from the branch via MPLS to the data center. Great, now you're going to Amazon. Now you're going to Salesforce. Now you're going to Microsoft. And the idea of having a hybrid WAN with internet connections, MPLS, 4G LTE, cable, like, whatever you want. So SD-WAN technology sits at that nexus and providing the intelligence and the management and the ease of use to enable the remote workforce in the remote branches. >> So, can you go on a really interesting combination? Identity, Citrix is really into identity management. SD-WAN. What's possible? Talk to us about the "what's possible" when you can tie identity to your network. >> Right. Yeah, so Citrix is a solid SD-WAN supplier. They're able to identify the traffic. They have partnerships with all the major cloud guys. And, one of the critical aspects of SD-WAN is how you tie in the security aspect. So you have network security and partnerships, maybe with a Palo Alto or Zscaler or some other folks, but then you also have the identity because there is no fixed perimeter anymore, right? >> Right. There is no more four walls. >> So, the bad, the bad guys can get access at any different point. So authentication and understanding, you know, that identity is a critical aspect. And Citrix has some excellent partnerships and programs to help that out. >> Especially, >> So, >> I'm sorry. Go ahead. >> Go ahead. >> Especially when you think of Office 365 and these services where, you know, when I think of Office 365 I think about my consumer version of Office 365. I can share data with anyone in the organization. I can access it from anywhere in the world. Right before we started recording, you know, we talked a little bit about the ability of Citrix, with the partnership with Microsoft and Office 365, to improve access to Office 365. When we think about that from a consumer perspective that kind of, you know, it doesn't, it kind of doesn't register. "Wait, I need to. When I use Office 365 it just works." >> Right. >> What are some of the challenges enterprises are facing as they adopt solutions like O 6, O365 and SaaS in general? >> Right. So, you've got the quality of experience, quality of service issue, right? Making sure that the remote user or remote office is hitting the right path on the internet to the right on-ramp, is sort of one aspect of it, right? >> Right. >> So identify that as 0365, get me to the right on-ramp, but have a nice, you know, seamless, quick experience. The other is, from a security standpoint, understanding that, you know, who the user is. What data are they accessing? What data are they sending around? Is that part of the normal behavior or is that something that looks a little strange and maybe we should flag that. I mean, clearly, people do do a lot of sensitive things on Office 365. >> When you're out in the field, Lee, talking with customers, you have to transform digitally. There's so many steps involved in that. We, you know, we talk about cultural transformation and security transformation. Network transformation. How do you advise, especially like, we'll say, legacy organizations. Maybe like a peer of Citrix's whose been around for decades. How do you advise them to start that network transformation process so that they can deliver, for example, you know, facilitate collaboration via 0365 globally, what is that process like to transform a network? >> Right. It's obviously very complex and highly dependent on where you are and where you're starting, but there's no question that these organization are not going to throw the network that they have today. They've got switches and routers, wifi, and applications over controllers and all sorts of different things. So, one of the reasons why SD-WAN has been successful is it's able to slide into the network relatively seamlessly as an overlay. So you don't have to rip and replace. And then, gradually, as you bring up new sites or small locations or temporary sites, you may find that the actual router isn't as important over time. And then you can start to evolve that to a more simplified branch network operation. Instead of having five different boxes at a given branch you can move to two or three and, you know, ultimately I think we're going to a more unified SD branch type solution, but that might be a few years out still. >> So, and as we talk, you know, kind of the few years out, one of the great benefits, productivity wise, from using the SaaS services, destroying the walls, so to speak, the perimeter, is that we can get frictionless transactions. The, Citrix is, you know, touting the employee experience. If I need to share a document with you that shouldn't there shouldn't be a ton of friction in that. But in that comes the, the scare of employees. We've been talking all week, or both days, about employees are the weak link in security. If I can't trust my employee to not have their post-it note with the password on their, on their monitor then all the security in the world can't, won't help. How is Citrix making security easier and frictionless so that, one, we're ensuring all Dr. Albright talked about, "We need to be able to trust who we're talking to." >> Right. >> So, at the beginning we need to be able to trust who we're talking to is actually who we intend to talk to. How is Citrix going about enabling that? >> Right. So, it goes back to, you know, identity and end-point management. Is that the device that we expect it to be? Is it the person that we expect it to be? Are they doing the things that they normally do, right? And then, you have the network can analyze, "Well, is that a strange traffic? Is there something being inserted? Is there malware? Is there an attack?" So you have, security can not only degrade the performance of the network, but it also can be used to take out data that you don't want to have leaving the premises as it were. So, >> Or even if the data hasn't been opened and peeked at. >> Right. >> So, you know, the SSL security keys that when it left the premises the same as the when it was received on the other end. Are those things still in tact? >> Right. Very complex, though. But, it's not a, >> Yeah. >> Now, we haven't solved the security problem yet. But, Citrix is certainly making some good headway. >> I wanted to get your opinion, speaking of Citrix and headway. As I mentioned, 30-year-old company, maybe they consider themselves 30-years-young. I noticed last year at Synergy 2018 rebranding, messaging changes, positioning. One of the first things David Henshall showed the audience yesterday in his keynote was a big, great eye chart that just showed how much they've been focused on delivering. And they've delivered new solutions faster than they ever have before. We're hearing now about, they've really elevated their technologies to not be for power users, but for the general user which is most of us. I'd love to get your, your perspective on, not just the last year of Citrix's evolution, but over the last few years and how you think their, where they are now, is a competitive advantage to their business. >> Right. So, I focus mostly on the networking side of what Citrix is doing. And they've rebranded the networking. They've made some very significant enhancements both in SD-WAN and the ADC and intelligent traffic management. And I think the next evolution for Citrix is really integrating these solutions together and, you know, moving even to, to easier to consume bundles. They, what they've done in the last, in this cycle of announcement is given a lot of different options in terms of ways to consume. You can consume it on the major cloud platforms. You can consume it as a box. You can consume it as a license or as a usage-based. Over time I'm interested to see how Citrix migrates to more network-as-a-service offerings which would make it even easier to consume. And, you know, as a workspace user you, that, those tools might be in the background. You might not even know that they exist. And in some cases that's already here today, but there's a lot more that the industry and Citrix can do there. >> Do they have the foundation to eventually get to network-as-a-service? Maybe the right ecosystem of partners to do that, in your opinion? >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's the, that's where they're headed and I think they have some good technology, and good partners, and obviously always more work to do. But, >> So as you talk to combine Citrix and your own customers, I would like to get some insights. That, we, we've heard several times over the past couple days, me and Lisa, that there's five generations of workforce in the workforce. Which also means there's five generations of leadership. So when I saw the stat in yesterday's show, when all the changes that happened in a year at Citrix, one part of me was like, "Oh, that's great. That's the consumerization of IT, enterprise IT." Then another part of me was like, "Whoa, that's a lot of change." You know, if I set up a, if I spent a year and a half, two years deploying a network, I want that network to be very stable for the next five to seven years. How have customers embraced the consumerization, or the pace of change inside of Citrix and in the industry as well? >> Sure. So, I think the network issue a little bit separate because it's not at really consumerization of the network, right? >> Right. >> And so that's still, you know, you still need network professionals and, that being said, you know, Citrix SD-WAN is very easy to install and, you know, has good operational tools and, you know, improved management. So you're network management is now back in vogue and making it, you know, making life easier for IT administrators. You know, the whole consumerization, I mean, that's just like there's so many tools and so many channels. And, you know, the the issue of being overwhelmed by the seven different ways that we might communicate with each other is a very real, you know, challenge. And I'm glad to see Citrix, you know, addressing that because each generation or types of will have their own favorite, you know, ways to go about it. >> Oh, yes. Even, you can think about it in your family. Somebody might be an email person. Somebody might be a text person. Somebody might be a WhatsApp person. It's hard enough to manage, to try to meet everybody. So somebody might be a phone person? >> I know, like, real-time >> Who talks on the phone? Voicemail? >> Real-time communication. >> Right. Creepy. But in terms of, you're saying you know that we talked about consumerization, and not consumerization of the network. But those network expert that you talked about are influenced as consumers at home. And we all as consumers have these expectations of everything on-demand. I want to be able to use the tools that I'm most familiar with to become the most productive. So, how are the network engineers and their own consent of consumerization potentially going to impact consumerization of the network? >> Right. I mean I really look at the, you know, the two things of, you know, is the network, is my application available and is it responsive, right? Obviously the first one's a deal breaker. The second one is incredibly frustrating. And then of course the third area from an IT or SecOps standpoint is, you know, is it secure? Right? And then, you know, from an IT or network professional I need to enable those things so give me more tools. So, I mean I think that the buzzwords of, you know, machine learning and artificial intelligence as applied to networking are still a little early for that. But there are, you know, Citrix is using, you know, its vast intelligence that it gathers through its traffic management system to to look at, you know, where where to best route the traffic. It's deploying new tools to make things easier to deploy and easier to troubleshoot. So anything that the industry and Citrix can do there makes the life easier for the network guy and the IT guys. >> Making life easier. I think that's what we all want, right? >> Right. >> Well, Lee, thank you so much for coming back to theCUBE and talking with Keith and me at Citrix Synergy. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Atlanta, Georgia, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (energetic technological 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)

(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)

>> Announcer: 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 live from day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy in Atlanta, Georgia. We're very pleased to welcome Citrix's Chief People Officer, Donna Kimmel, EVP-- >> Yeah. >> And Chief People Officer. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> My pleasure. It's great to be here, Lisa and Keith. Thank you. >> I was telling you before we went live, Donna, this has been a great event. This is our first day of coverage, but the keynote really kicked things off very, in a way that's so relatable, just showing workforce, and some of the stats you guys gave were staggering. The fact that power users are who enterprise software is designed for. But that's 1% of the users. >> Donna: Exactly. >> Or things like $7 trillion is wasted a year, and Keith's brought this up on a number of our interviews, of wasted productivity. There's a huge need for employee experience to become a C-level business imperative. >> Donna: Yeah. >> Talk to us about that from Citrix's point of view. >> Absolutely. Employee experience is incredibly important. When I think about the concept, it is really about people and technology together. And we can't do great things in the workplace if we don't have the right tools at our fingertips, and technology really supports that. But employee experience is also very broad. It's all encompassing. When we think about employee experience, it's everything from when somebody starts or applies to a company, what kind of experience are they having with that company? What is their interview process like? What is their pre-hire process like? What happens when they come for their onboarding? Are they experiencing the company the way that they should, and then it's about their career journey. So employee experience is incredibly important, and it's incredibly pervasive. But I think it also starts with understanding why it matters to companies. And I think when you look at why it matters to companies, companies can't be successful without people. It's people that are the one's that are driving results. It's people that are the ones that are collaborating and bringing the culture of that company to life, and it's people that are driving new product design and thinking about what customers need and putting customers first. And companies are successful because of the people within it, so we need to create experiences that make a difference. >> So as we talk about those experiences, when I think of Citrix, I think of Citrix in a traditional sense. You front end a work day. You front end HRM from SAP, those solutions. So as Citrix starts to engage more with HR directly, talk me about that value conversation Citrix is having with HR and how Citrix adds value versus a company that's specific focus is in creating HR software. >> Exactly. So we're creating software that enables employees and people in an organization, talent in an organization, to be successful to do their best work on a daily basis. So though we are not creating HR software per se, what we are creating is employee experience, and it's employee experience through the technology. So when employees have the right tools at their fingertips in a way that cuts out the continual searching, as one of the things that we talked about this morning in the keynote, was all about how much time is wasted. At least 25% of an employee's time is wasted searching or context switching between applications, not being able to use the applications to their fullest. And we recognize there's a fair amount that employees need to do that are very task-oriented. And if you can automate those and bring them to the employee in a very intelligent way, using the analytics. You also heard about that this morning as well. The analytics get to know the employee. So it's more personal. So you get what you need to at your fingertips, you can do it more quickly, more easily, and then really focus on some of the more critical things that are going to help you be successful as an employee. >> You bring up the personal aspect, and I think personalization is becoming more and more a critical element of... because as consumers we expect that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So we're starting to see the influences of the consumerization of IT, and it really is something that can be a big differentiator to attract talent and retain talent-- >> Yeah. >> Which is also a business imperative. I'm glad, though, that you brought up, hey, employee experience isn't just, okay, this intelligent experience, and I can have access to all my apps. It starts with the hiring process. >> Absolutely. >> The interviewing, the recruiting. We were talking about our different onboarding experiences, Keith and I were at lunch and how that really can set the tone-- >> Donna: Exactly. >> Of an employee with their employer, and you're right. It's not just about the technology needs to be an enabler, but it's got to start from even the recruitment. >> Exactly. >> When I step back, and I think about employee experience, it brings me back to the concepts that we've been talking about for a while now regarding the future of work. It's really about a company having the right culture, creating the right physical space and digital space, and then also, the technology that's used. And again, culture can be a real differentiator for an organization, just like we know that the talent is a differentiator for companies. But when you think about the culture, it really speaks to what's important to human beings, what's important to employees? Are they socially involved? Is their product meaningful? Is what their doing meaningful to the community, to the customers that they're serving? So are we tapping into what's meaningful to people? Are employees being given opportunities for flexibility and collaboration? Are they being given opportunities for choice? And that also brings me back to what you were talking about in terms of personalization. If we think about the workforce, right now, at least at Citrix, we have about five different generations in our workforce. And you might be able to look across all those different generations and look for trends and different ways that generations might work, but the reality is it's about the individual. It's truly about understanding that individual's choice for working anywhere, anyhow, anyway, on any device. That's what's really going to drive a difference. That becomes part of the culture. If you have the right, again, grounded values, you have the right environment that you're creating, that is part of the appeal to employees. And then you try to create the right space, and you want to create the right physical space because when employees are in the workforce, and when they come into the office, you want it to feel like a place where they can collaborate, where they can change and move, and move into private space if they need it, or quiet space if they need it, or opportunities for, as we say, collisions at the coffee machine where all of a sudden new ideas come out because you're generating thoughts and conversation. So space, physical space, and all of that movement also mimics our personal worlds, right? We get up and we move around to different kind of spaces throughout the day. We want our workspace to feel the same way. And then the other piece to that is technology. And are we creating the right technological tools that enable employees to have that freedom and that choice around the kinds of devices they're using and the spaces where they're working in to really be able to bring their best selves to the workplace and contribute because ultimately, we want to be part of successful organizations. So it's a combination of all of those for me in terms of the question that you were just asking. >> So you're a EVP of a nice size software company. And some of these things you've had to put into practice. Citrix is a 30-year-old company. I think I'm aging myself because I've done a few Citrix deployments early in my own career. >> Yeah. >> As you start to pivot, you're part of these executive-level conversations saying, "We're going to invest in AI, machine learning," and you look at this job market for AI, ML data scientists, it's a tight market. It's really hard to attract the talent. While Florida is lovely, it may not be the place for ML or AI talent, but more specifically, this type of talent might be spread across the world. >> Donna: That's right. >> What types of changes have you had to oversee inside of Citrix to attract and retain that talent? >> Absolutely. I think it's a great point because I think not only are we at Citrix doing it, but many other companies are looking at the same kind of question, which is where do we find the best talent, and how do we enable that talent anywhere around the world to successfully contribute to our company? And because it is so challenging to find talent, we do need to be more flexible as organizations. We need to look at distributed office locations. We need to look at opportunities for people to be able to work from their homes. We look at a total labor force, like gig workers, in addition to contractors and employee base. So our technology enables that. And I think that's one of the great selling points of having people join Citrix is you are part of the movement of helping organizations be flexible. You're part of helping to drive that kind of employee experience so you can hire anyone from anywhere around the world in order to help you achieve the business results that you're looking for. >> In the four years that you've been EVP and Chief People Officer, how have you helped this culture to evolve? As Keith mentioned, this is a 30-year-young company, and cultural change is challenging, again, but we think about it in our personal lives, change is hard. >> Donna: Yeah. >> What are some of the key strategies that you've employed to help facilitate that cultural change? >> It's a great question. When I joined about three and a half years ago, we were embarking on a transformation at the company and part of that transformation was taking a look at where we needed to evolve from a product strategy perspective and from meeting our customer needs in a very different way. And the more we got out there and listened to our customers, it helped solidify what we needed to do from a strategy perspective. What we also realized is you'll never be able to accomplish your strategy without the right people. And you need the right culture and the right set of values that are going to underpin everything you do as a company. So we took some very strong values that were already part of Citrix and kind of modernized them, brought them into words that had meaning for our employees. So we did quite a few feedback sessions, surveys, and things, and gathered. And we really focus, from a strong values perspective, on integrity, respect, curiosity, courage, and unity. And those words have incredible meaning for us in terms of what we're doing to not only transform the products and the markets that we're in, but how do we transform our own workplace to continue to drive an employee experience that lives out those values and that culture? So it underpins everything that we do. >> So let's talk about lessons that can be applied from Citrix, a big company, to smaller companies, because Citrix has customers across the spectrum from the small shop with less than 10 people, to companies with tens of thousands of people. Is employee experience something that only large companies should consider, or is this something that as entrepreneurs like myself only have a couple of employees, should I be thinking about employee experience in a specific way? >> Yeah, that's a great question. When I think about, again, why employee experience is so important, I think, first, it's because it's about people and it's about humanity, and why it matters to any business regardless of your size, is that it's about people first, and people first are going to help any business be able to achieve its goals and its results. The technology that we're creating also is what we call general purpose. It is for individuals to enable individuals to be successful in their workplace. So I do believe strongly it is for any size organization. And the principles ring true, whether you're a small business or whether you're a large business. I know my sister also has a small business, and the team members that work with her, very small business, the team members that work with her need to feel that same vibrancy of what she's trying to create for her clients. And so I think it's the same for any size business. Culture, values, grounding, experience that you can create to enable those employees to feel like they're part of what you're doing and they're part of your success. >> We talked with Simon Bray earlier, and I learned a new acronym, TOMO. >> Yeah. >> I love that. >> Yeah, it's great. >> Total Motivation. >> Exactly. >> How do you measure cultural transformation within Citrix? What are some of those key, is there an internal NPS survey, or other things that you guys do to go, we're going in the right direction here? >> We do, absolutely. It's no doubt challenging to measure. We do an employee net promoter score, and we do an engagement score. So the net promoter score that we do on a quarterly basis, and our full engagement survey, we do on an annual basis. And since we started our transformation, three and a half years ago, our net promoter score has gone up dramatically. And we are nearing the 50% mark, which is very high for employee net promoter scores. So we feel really proud about the constant movement in the right direction around that score, and the same thing with our engagement scores. And we've become certified two years in a row through Great Places To Work. So again, that movement in the right direction is telling us that our employees do feel connected to who we are, what we're doing, and that they feel part of driving those solutions and those results. >> So I was looking at some of the Citrix revenue numbers over the weekend. Looks like a lot of things are up. Subscription revenues, SAS revenue, workspace revenue, and employee satisfaction is up as well. >> Absolutely, and we're proud of all of it. We talk in a very positive way. David, our CEO, always talks about up and to the right. And we are, all of our measures have been up and to the right on a consistent basis, from an employee perspective and from a business results perspective. And it takes every single employee to be able to do that. >> What are you most excited about as we wrap up here. I know we're so early in Synergy 2019, but like I was saying, we've had such an exciting start to our time here. What are you excited about when this is all done in terms of feedback that you're hoping and expecting to hear from the employees? >> I think probably one of the most exciting things for me is to be in the field that I'm in, Human Resources, focusing on people, and focusing on talent, and recognizing that the product that we are putting out there is making a difference from an employee experience perspective. So being part of that vision, that mission I think is incredibly exciting. So we can live it internally as well as help our customers live it within their own environment. And that connection, I think, is incredibly powerful and really meaningful to be a part of. >> It can be such a differentiator as well if your customers see, ah, there's a Citrix on Citrix story. >> Donna: Absolutely. >> And you're transforming using your own technology, that's one of the best brand validations that you can get, right? >> Absolutely, it helps us tell the story with our customers, and it's a great selling point for new employees that are attracted to coming to work for us, become part of the movement and the change of really driving employee experience and driving that partnership through technology. >> Donna, it's been so great to have you on theCUBE with Keith and me-- >> Thank you. >> Helping to expand, at least my perspective of employee experience. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: Oh, likewise. For Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from our day one coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. Keith, it's so great to see you. >> Lisa, good to be on the show with you again. >> So we're going to geek out the next two days. >> Oh isn't it so good? >> We've been geeking out already just coming from the keynote. This is ... >> Yeah This is, it was really good there was meat, there was announcements, there was news, partnerships. Citrix is a 30 year old company, who's done a lot in the last 12/18 months, to transform. From rebranding, product names, et cetera, lots of launches and announcements. And something that really peaked my interest as a marketer this morning, is hearing the influence of consumerization. Them talking about leveraging Citrix Workspace, and the things that they have done to beef it up which we'll talk about, to deliver a stellar employee experience, to delight the users. And those are words that we hear often in the marketing space, like customer lifetime value, they talked about the employee lifetime value because employee attraction, talent attraction and retention, is critical for every business. Really meaty stuff. What was some of your take on some of the announcements on Workspace? >> So I was really interested because as I'm coming off of SAP SAPPHIRE, where I'm accustomed to hearing terms like customer experience, employee experience, you know, the kind of X-data versus O-data conversation. We heard a lot of that here today. And it's weird coming from an infrastructure company. Citrix in the past I like to put into a box, it's about VDI, application virtualization and networking, and that's pretty much the conversation, it stayed at the IT infrastructure leader perspective. Today we heard a lot that broke out of that, and it was going into the C-Suite and delivering not just technology results, but business results. There was a lot about making transformation real. >> You're right it was about making it real, and if you think at the end of the day, I think I heard a stat the other day, that by 2020, which is literally around the corner, 50% of workers are going to be remote. You and I are great examples of that, we're on the road all the time, we have multiple devices we need to have connectivity that ... to all the apps, SAS apps, mobile apps, web, that allow us to be productive from wherever we are, done in a way that our employers, are confident there is security behind this. But delivering that exceptional employee experience is absolutely business critical. They gave some stats today about the trillions of dollars that are spent, or rather work that's lost, with employees that have so many apps each day that they're working with that really distract from their actual day to day function. >> Yeah I think one of the stats that they gave from an ambitious perspective, they want to give one day back to every employee, 20% of their time, back, I think the stat you referred to some seven trillion dollars of productivity is lost from just hunting and pecking inside of applications. Both of us work remotely, you work from your tablet, I work from a tablet or my phone a lot. Because I just, you know, it's low power to, it lasts the day, but yeah I still need to edit video, I need to sign invoices, I need to create statements that worked. I need to be just as creative on the road as I am at home. It helps me to compete against larger competitors, but more importantly, offer a different customer experience and this is what Citrix was talking about today, was more than just VDIs, about picking up any device asking basic logical questions like what is the status of the latest deal, the big deal, and getting that status from Salesforce without again hunting and pecking, from whatever device you're on. >> Which is critical, especially to have that seamless experience going from desktop to mobile. I think they also said ... there was a lot of stats this morning, which I really geek out on. But that the average person is using seven to 10 apps a day and I loved the video that they showed this morning that really brought that to life. Looking at a senior marketing manager for some enterprise company, who, as she starts her day, there's 10 minutes that goes by which is lie, oh, I forgot I got to log into Workday and request my PTO, oh, one of my employees needs me to approve an expense report, and oh, my boss wants to know about this big deal that's closed. And the time that is spent logging into different applications is really as you mentioned that number seven trillion dollars lost, what they're doing with Citrix, with the intelligent, the workspace intelligence experience is bringing all of that to the end user. So it's much more an activities focus rather than an app focus experience. And I loved what you said that they're very ambitiously aiming to give each person back one day a week, yes please. I will take that. In any organization. >> So I was at a government conference a few weeks ago and they talked very much about this CFO of GSA presented to a crowd of fellow government workers, and they were talking about eliminating waste, they were talking about automating processes, taking the PDF, taking a document and scanning it into a system, and then kicking off a real workflow. And this is done, the industry's been working on this problem for the past 10 years, it's called RPA, Robotic Process Automation. One of Citrix's partners and I guess now competitors in that space just received $560,000,000 in funding, in a single round, to enable artificial intelligence to do this. What I thought was interesting, is that Citrix didn't use the term bots, I think other than one time ... >> Lisa: That's right. ... on the stage. But these are essentially bots, that take redundant processes, automates them, to ultimately add value. I'm anxious to dive in and talk about how Citrix is taking stuff like, they mentioned Mainframe, AS/400 applications, integrating that in Salesforce without having this huge multi-million dollar project to re-write these core business applications and processes. So, you know it's a really exciting time in the industry Citrix has really stepped up in saying, you know what, we won't settle for just having a good business, and this application virtualization and network space, we're going to go all in. >> So one of the things I saw in Twitter this morning, is you and I are both tweeting during the keynote, which we just came from is you talked about PRA right away on Twitter and it's something that you heard instinctively with what they were saying. What are your thoughts as to why RPA as a term wasn't discussed? Did you think it's the type of audience that's here? Is it just not a term that resonates as well as AI and machine learning, which are buzz words at every event we go to? >> And I think a good portion of that is a mix. We're at a conference that's very IT-centric. Citrix is a you know, one of the core IT infrastructure vendors. So when you throw out a term like Robotic Process Automation you constantly, you instantly think, you know, gain of productivity from me or your level maybe, but from an IT infrastructure practitioner perspective, Robotic Processing Automation has a resonance with being equal to eliminating jobs. If, you know, you're going to automate the integration between VMware VSphere and Citrix desktop virtualization and that administration piece, which these solutions definitely can do that, what's left for me to do the work on. If you're going to automate the provisioning of DNS and IP addressing and all these mundane tasks that administrators probably spend 50-60% of their day doing, you know what, that's threatening. To say that you know what, we're going to give you the same tools that we give to make the workspace available today from an application perspective and to tackle that from the concept of this is just extending that ideal and you're a what, your job and what you do today to adding true business value, I think it was smart on their part to kind of avoid the bot conversation. >> Okay, I'm glad that you shared that insight, that makes perfect sense. So, PJ Hough was up there, the Chief Product Officer, who's going to be on tomorrow, talking about what Citrix is doing to distill apps and make this experience much more personalized. And of course he was joined on stage with a big Microsoft announcement today. I think I've been to so many shows this year I've lost count but I think Satya Nadella has either been on stage, he was at Dell Technologies World with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger, or in a video like he was today. So the partnership with Microsoft expanding here a little bit of a teaser at Microsoft Ignite a couple of months ago. Gimme your thoughts on what Microsoft, I should say what Citrix is doing to facilitate their users being much more proficient at using Microsoft Team, which I believe the gentleman from Microsoft said there's over 300,000 active users already. Fastest growing product in Microsoft's history. >> So when you talk about collaboration, you can't collaborate without these tools, whether Teams, Slack, whatever, it's become an integral part of how we communicate, how we interact, I know a lot of friends that I have are moving from Slack to Teams, just because of the integration with Office365 they can collaborate around, and I think here on theCUBE we talk about data as being the key. You have to talk about data. One of the things that was prepared to go kind of head on with Citrix today, and tomorrow about, was about data. You know it's great to present applications, but how are you helping to help users collaborate and use and access data and the combination of RPA with the intelligent experi- intelligent, it's going to take us some time to used to this ... >> I keep wanting to say enterprise. >> Yeah enterprise >> Intelligent experience >> Experience product, with Teams, with the Azure announcement, integration with Azure and full support of the Citrix platform inside Azure will just make the employee experience at least potentially seamless, a lot more seamless, I'm super excited about, you can't tell in my voice, I haven't gotten excited about Citrix in a long time. And this is the first time they've had theCUBE at Synergy since 2011, I think it was a great time to reignite that partnership, and this coverage is going to be an interesting two days. >> It is. So we talked about digital workspace, the other two areas of Citrix's business that you touched on a little bit, security and analytics. Let's talk about the security piece first as it relates to Microsoft Teams and Azure. SD-WAN is becoming more and more absolutely critical to ensure that because as people we are the number one threat vector in any organization. Not that we're all bad actors. >> Keith: Right. >> But because we need to get things done, as frictionless or seamless, as you said, as possible, and efficiently as possible. What did you hear today with respect to security, that might really make some of those IT folks take notice? >> Well, we want to work from any device. Like, I want to be able to, ideally if I say, you know what, I want to pick up a new Surface tablet, when I go to Atlanta I don't want to pack my iPad. I want to be able to pick that up, and work. If I go to a kiosk, I want to be able to, even if it's running Windows XP, I want to be able to do my work, I want to be able to do my work from any device. This is a nightmare for system administrators to say how do I control security, while making the experience frictionless? Those two things don't seem to go together. So Citrix, whether it's with this new announcement with Microsoft with Teams, it's traditional applications around SD-WAN, enabling access from remote locations, and Citrix is kind ... this is their bread and butter, offering remote access to applications securely and fast, this is you know, Citrix is starting to formulate a really great end to end story about making applications, data and more importantly, business answers and capability available anywhere securely, so it's a great story. >> It really is. So if you're excited, you already know how excited I am. I think we're going to have a fantastic day today, and tomorrow. We've got a whole bunch of the C-Suite from Citrix on, we're also going to be talking with some partners and customers, and interestingly as a marketer this peaked my interest as well, they have the innovation awards. There are three finalists, we will be talking with all three over the next two days, and this is a customer awards program, that anybody can vote on. So I haven't seen that before, so I'm excited to understand how Citrix is enabling them to have this great employee experience which is more and more critical as the shortages and the gaps are becoming more and more prevalence. And also, how these customers are reacting to just some of the news announced today, with Microsoft, the intelligent enterprise, and how they see their employees, and attracting and retaining top talent as actually really mission critical. So we're going to have fun Keith. >> I agree. >> All right, you're watching Keith Townsend and Lisa Martin live from theCUBE, we are on the show floor at Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Stick around, Keith and I will be right back with our first guest after a short break. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE, our first day of covering Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the next two days is Keith Townsend. And fresh from the keynote stage we're pleased to welcome David Henshall President and CEO of Citrix. David welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, Keith and I were both saying in our intro how excited we are to be here. The keynote was fantastic this morning, a lot of news. One of the things that I really liked that you started off acknowledging in the last year, since Synergy 2018, you've never delivered products faster. You guys are delivering across workspace, networking, analytics, this is a different Citrix. Tell us about this. >> It's very different, in fact, we've transformed the whole company, in a number of different dimensions, to make this possible. I mean, we've reorganized from a number of business units into a functional team. We brought in leadership to really drive end-to-end engineering products and many functions because the idea was moving from building individual point products to building really complete, integrated solutions for our customers. The benefit of that is that it's allowed us to go a lot faster. So, we're developing products today at a pace that's probably two or 3X what it was just a couple of years ago and we're doing it with higher quality, higher integration and overall just an eye from working backwards from what the customers need. So, I'm really happy with the pace we've seen in the company. >> Well David, you threw out a big number out there, $7,000,000,000,000 in wasted time. If you look at a $1,000,000,000 problem, that's a big problem. You look at a $7,000,000,000,000 problem as you guys did your research and looked at the data what was the logical reaction? Was it, you know what, we can play in our little space of network, security and presentation or dive into this deep business challenge of solving problems. How did you guys get there? >> The first step, actually, was nobody believed that it was a $7,000,000,000,000 problem. So, once we really understood the research and started to look at, what are the factors contributing to this broad, let's call it, disengagement, epidemic that's going on around the world, look at some of the factors that are really driving this. We've talked earlier today about most people, when they think about employee engagement and employee experience, they tend to look at traditional management factors. Things like their workplace environment, their manager, their hours and they forget to look at technology. The fact that technology, as rapidly as it's advanced around the world, has not made people's lives better in certain cases. In companies, you know, businesses assume that everybody's a power user and so you know the ins and outs of every single application. They assume that you understand the workflows of working through all of these moving parts, versus what are you really trying to get done. So, we're working backwards from understanding the steps that people need to just get their jobs done. The whole idea, frankly, is that people want to do great work. Across any industry, in any discipline. You got to give them the tools and the services to do that, because if not, it's just frustrating, it's work. And that's what's leading to this broad disengagement challenge that we've seen around the world. We think we can be part of solving that. >> One of the stats you mentioned this morning that really caught my eye, was you mentioned power users. You said, enterprise software is really designed for power users, which is 1% of the folks that are engaging with software. You also said, employees and I think we're all in this bucket, we're, on average, using seven to 10 apps per day. There's so much distraction. I loved a video that you showed this morning looking at Maria. the Senior Marketing Manager, just giving a glimpse into an enterprise day in, the life of. And going, wow, for the first 10 minutes of their day this person who wants to design and deliver killer marketing campaigns is bogged down with all these other distractions. I got to go check this app, oh, and this one, oh, and this one, oh, and this one. And, wait a minute, probably, you know, 10 minutes. How many times a day does that happen? And that productivity starts to go way down as does, probably, frustration. It's exciting to hear how Citrix is going to help your customers, really, tackle that problem. Because, at the end of the day, there are a ton of devices, what 65 billion interconnected devices in the next few years alone. And there are worker shortages. But, one of the things that can drive attrition is having a workflow that is really suboptimal. >> Absolutely, I mean, we look across all of these big challenges, there's just not enough people with the right skills in the right locations. There's a global war for talent. Really, just trying to attract the best and the brightest. When companies find these great people what do you do to make them productive? What do you do to make them engaged? And that's what drives retention. Our idea here is basically, remove and abstract away a lot of the complexity that is getting in the way of that engagement, just like Maria that you mentioned. She wants to build awesome marketing programs but the company has given her tools and systems where she's basically become a repetitive task worker over and over again. And that's what's leading to a lot of this disengagement problem that we talked about. So, we think that there's ways to eliminate that. Too much app usage, you know, too little functionality that's being deployed. And frankly, this context switching. My favorite stat on context switching is, you think about today, we're interrupted every two minutes. With like, a tweet, a notification, an email a phone call, you name it, every two minutes. And yet, it takes the average person 20 minutes to get back to what they were doing in the first place. Because the human mind just isn't wired for multitasking. People think it is, but the research shows that it's really not. So, I think we can make a huge difference by simplifying a lot of that and just making it in our words, easier for people to do great work on their terms. >> So, David, when we think of these digital transformations we think of huge SIs, management consultant companies that come in, help to re-platform applications. You guys gave some pretty, I think ambitious, concepts of taking data from an AS/400, extracting that and combined it, particularly, with Salesforce data. And then answering a simple question of did the deal close? When I think of these type of transformations I think of years of work, years of investment. I think of these other SIs. What is the future of work, when it comes to Citrix as a verb? Today, Citrix as a verb means, I can get to my applications remotely. When it comes to this type of transformation how do you view the definition of Citrix as a verb changing? >> It's an interesting question. I think that today, as you said, Citrix is about how do I remote into my applications. We've been doing that for 30 years now. I'd argue we do it better than anybody in the world. And we've pioneered new markets like app virtualization and BDI and app delivery to make that possible. Next generation of the Citrix workspace is about creating that platform for how work gets done. And do it in a way that can help guide people through their day and simplify and automate a lot of those common tasks. I think, hopefully, there's an opportunity to use Citrix as the word for how work gets done. It's like, did you take care of that yet? Yep, I Citrix'd it., We've just become very synonymous with a better way to drive work, therefore, higher productivity, higher engagement, better user experience. And we absolutely believe that's possible. That's what we're delivering inside the Citrix workspace. >> A couple things that jumped out at me, as a marketer, that we hear a lot. I've done a lot of customer marketing programs and so we talk about driving customer lifetime value. We talk about delighting customers. You guys talk about that with respect to the employee, the employee experience, delighting the employees. You did some things today with Citrix Workspace, intelligent enterprise. New capabilities like micro apps and virtual assistant. How are those capabilities, one, helping to differentiate Citrix and two, helping to increase the employee lifetime value and deliver awesome employee experiences. >> No, it's it's a great question. In fact, a lot of people in our industry talk about the end-user as a user, versus a human being that's really trying to accomplish something. I've said before that people are not workloads. People are humans that are really just trying to make a difference day in and day out. So when we think about the customer, every customer wants to deliver amazing experiences for their teams because that's how they make them more productive. That's how they drive their own business results forward. I looked at, actually talked about, in the keynote some really cool results of looking at those companies that had the most advanced either, digital transformation projects or most advanced digital workspace projects and the results are staggering. It's like, 20% higher productivity, higher customer sat, higher growth, higher profitability, just across the board. It shows that the outcomes for those that really embrace these concepts can dramatically transform their businesses. I think that's what we're trying to drive forward. Make it easier for these companies to make that happen. >> We always say that you never get rid of complexity, you move it. Citrix is renowned for their CTP community. Super dedicated evangelists around making the technology consumable. As you continue to forge partnerships with cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, you reduce the complexity of the backend products. Tell us about the role of, I think a good majority of the attendees here, the administrators the systems engineers, the architects, how do you see those roles morphing so that companies can achieve these outcomes? >> The idea is really, giving back to the administrator in a lot of ways, so that they can focus on the projects that they really want to drive. I mean, everybody wants to drive digital transformation. They want their business to go be more effective, be more nimble, more profitable. They're bogged down. I mean, it's the old story about run versus grow. If the typical IT budget today is about 90% spent on just maintaining the core infrastructure that's just a tiny, little bit left over for innovation. If we can help simplify that, we'll give them more let's call it more time, more money, more flexibility, to go drive change for their own businesses. And that's really what they want to do. Great partners, like our Citrix CTPs that you mentioned, spent time with those guys yesterday. It's awesome because they can be on the front lines of leading this change. Helping customers understand the realm of the possible. What they can drive going forward and carry that message out there. Because this is truly applicable in every industry, every geography and really, every size business today. >> Connecting people, making the work, the employee experience, just so much more seamless. Taking out a lot of friction, boosting productivity, giving people back a day a week, all of it. Yes, yes, yes. Of course, people are the biggest security threat. Just by nature of, we need to get things done as quickly as possible. What is Citrix doing to help the IT folks ensure that all of these connected conversations are done securely? >> The great thing about Citrix for all these years is that most of our customers look at us as an integral part of their overall security story. One of the most secure ways to deliver an application is to virtualize it. So what we've done is leverage those 30 years of learnings to really deliver, now a platform, for all users, all application types and really all scenarios. So, we can add a lot of the same benefits to non-virtualized use cases, that we've done for all of these years. Providing much more insight into how and when people use technologies. Conditional access and conditional security policies to be able to layer on top. So that as people move through their day, different scenarios, different devices, different networks, we can contextually apply those policies to help people just have a much more secure experience overall. One tailored to what they want to drive for their business. So, I think it's just one example of what we're doing to make security just integral to the overall story. >> Well David, when you tackle a $7,000,000,000,000 problem the audience changes. You're not just talking to system administrators. Citrix is getting to take a seat at the table with the CIO, because you're driving direct value. When I think of automation and now we're bringing in security into the conversation. The first thing I think about is, man, I can move faster but I can move faster doing the wrong thing. Talk to me about how Citrix is going to help customers do things faster, but do them things faster in a secure manner and tackling the right things. I can spend a lot of time automating a process that really shouldn't be automated yet. >> Absolutely. One of the big investments we've been making over the last couple of years is, in both pre-sales teams, as well as teams around customer success. We want to make sure that we can provide as much architectural guidance and know-how about the best way and maybe the best prioritization to tackle a lot of these problems. We're doing that both inside Citrix and we're extending that out to our partner community to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to take that knowledge and help customers, pretty much across every industry and every geo. And that's going to be one of the big things. As we continue to transform from, what I think of as a transactional business which is the way most enterprise software companies have been over the year, to really a service-oriented model. Where it's a continuous engagement and you're proving your value every single day. That changes the entire company. And that means the way we build products, support customers and deliver new capabilities over time. That's part of the journey we're on inside of the company. We talk about it every, pretty much, every day. I expect us to be on this journey for several years. I'm just really happy with the progress we've made up to this point. >> So David, last question, speaking of partners. One of the things that you also started off your keynote with is talking about how Citrix has really invested in this great ecosystem of partners over the last 12 months. We saw some exciting news announced with Microsoft and what you guys are doing with Office 365, Microsoft Teams, tell us a little bit about that. >> Well, in general, I mean we've always been about partnering. People have talked about Citrix is almost a Switzerland approach over these. Because we can help bridge a lot of these ecosystems. Because customers, in general, they really just want choice in the infrastructure. And they recognize that their environment may have major portfolios of Microsoft technologies, Google technologies, Amazon technologies. And then a whole host of other service providers along the way. We can sit, uniquely, at the middle of all this, really helping bridge those different ecosystems. Because, at the end of the day, the idea is about how do we create choice in the way you manage and run your infrastructure. Recognizing the fact that it does change over time. And then, choice on the endpoints. So you can use the device of of your choice to get your work done. And that idea really permeates everything that we're doing right now. A lot of great examples today. Innovation with both Microsoft and Google, having them both on stage talking about all the work we're doing collectively. Those partnerships go back many, many, many years and so we're just going to keep pushing it forward. >> I'm going to squeeze one more question in. Because you've been at Citrix, you said this is your 17th Synergy. Digital transformation, critical, but cultural transformation is essential to that. Just, in the last few seconds or so, your perspectives on the cultural innovation and change that Citrix that has delivered. >> Citrix has always been a company that has a wonderful culture, I didn't invent the culture. My job is to nurture it and carry it forward and help train people on why culture matters. Culture, in our mind, is not just about the traditional factors of how we operate internally. But, really, more about how we think about empathy from a customer point of view. You walk a day in somebody else's shoes and work backwards and it gives you a lot more insight into the types of problems we're trying to solve, the types of software we build and then, of course, how we service and support downstream. Culture is one of the things that I think really sets us apart in the industry. There's a lot of people that are joining us here at this event. We had a record audience this year and I think a lot of that is because we're the kind of kind of company that they want to partner with. We'll be there as their environments change and as their technologies change, that's culture in my mind. >> Awesome. Well David, thank you so much again, for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this morning. Having theCUBE at Synergy for the first time in eight years, we are so excited for uncovering some great things for the next few days and seeing how your customers are Citrixing it. >> Welcome back, it's great to have you guys. >> It's our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Atlanta, Georgia Citrix Synergy 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)