(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube conversation sponsored by Citrix. This is the third and final installment in the Citrix launchpad series. We're going to be talking about the launchpad series for work. Lisa Martin here with Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at Constellation research. Dion, welcome to the program. >> No, thanks Lisa. Great to be here. >> So we have seen a tremendous amount of change in the last 18, 19 months. You know, we saw this massive scatter to work from home a year and a half ago. Now we're in this sort of distributed environment. That's been persisting for a long time. Talk to me about, we're going to be talking about some of the things that Citrix is seeing and some of the things that they're doing to help individuals and teams, but give me your lens from Constellation's perspective. What are some of the major challenges with this distributed environment that you've seen? >> Sure. Well, so we've gone from this, you know, the world of work, the way that it was now, we're all very decentralized, you know, work from anywhere. Remote work is really dominating, you know, white collar types of activities in the workplace and workplaces that in our homes for most of us even today. But that started to change. Some people are going back. Although I just recently spoke to a panel of CIOs that says they have no plans anytime soon, but they're very aware that they need to have workable plans for when we start sending people back to the office and there's this big divide. How are we going to make sure that we have one common culture? We have a collaborative organization when, you know, a good percentage of our workers are in the office, but also maybe as much as half the organization is at home. And so, how to make processes seamless, how to make people collaborate and make sure there's equity and inclusion so that the people at home aren't left out and then people in the office, maybe you don't have an unfair advantage. So those are all the conversations. And of course, because this is a technology revolution, remote work was enabled by technology. We're literally looking at it again for this hybrid work, this, you know, this divided organization that we're going to have. >> You mentioned culture that's incredibly important, but also challenging to do with this distribution. I was looking at some research that Citrix provided, asking individuals from a productivity perspective, and two thirds said, hey, for our organizations that have given us more tools for collaboration and communication, yes, we are absolutely more productive. But the kicker is, the same amount of people, about two thirds that answered the survey said, we've now got about ten tools. So complexity is more challenging. It's harder to work individually. It's harder to work in teams. And so Citrix is really coming to the table here with the launchpad series for work, saying let's help these individuals and these teams, because as we, we think, and I'm sure you have insight Dion on this as well, this hybrid model that we're starting to see emerge is going to be persistent for a while. >> Yeah. For the foreseeable future. Cause we don't know what the future holds. So we'll have to hold the hybrid model as the primary model. And we may eventually go back to the way that we were. But for the next several years, there's going to be that. And so we're trying to wrap our arms around that. And I think that we're seeing with things like the Citrix announcements, a wave of responses saying, all right, let's really design properly for these changes. You know, we kind of just adapted quickly when everyone went to remote last year and now we're actually adding features to streamline, to reduce the friction, to simplify remote work, which does use, you have to use more applications. You have to switch between different things. You have to, you know, your employee experience in the digital world is just more cluttered and complicated, but it doesn't have to be. And so I, you know, we can look to some of these announcements for last year, I think address some of that. >> Let's break some of that down because to your point, it doesn't have to be complex complicated. It shouldn't be. Initially this scatter was, let's do everything we can to ensure that our teams and our people can be productive, can communicate, can collaborate. And now, since this is going to be persistent for quite some time, to your point, let's design for this distributed environment, this hybrid workforce of the future. Talk to me about the, one of the things that Citrix is doing with Citrix workspace, the app personalization, I can imagine as an individual contributor, but also as a team leader, the ability to customize this to the way that I work best is critical. >> And it really is, especially when you know, you have workers, you know, 18 or 19 months worth of new hires that you've never met. They don't really feel like, you know, this is maybe their organization. But if you allow them to shape it a little bit, make it contextual for them. So they don't just come into this cookie cutter digital experience that actually is kind of more meaningful for them. It makes it easier for them to get their job done and things are the way that they want them and where they want them. I think that makes a lot of sense. And so the app personalization announcements is important for remote workers in particular, but all workers to say, hey, can I start tailoring, you know, parts of my employee experience? So they make more sense for me. And I feel like I belong a little bit more. I think it's significant. >> It is. Let's talk about it from a security perspective though. We've seen massive changes in the security landscape in the last year and a half. We've seen some Citrix data that I was looking at, said between 2019 and 2020, ransomware up 435%, malware up 358%. And of course the weakest link being humans. Talk to me from a Citrix workspace perspective about some of the things that they've done to ensure that those security policies can be applied. >> Well, and the part that I really liked about the launchpad announcements around work in terms of security was this much more intelligent analysis. You know, one of the most frustrating things is you're trying to get work done remotely and maybe you're you're in crunch mode and all of a sudden the security system clamps down because they think you're doing something that, you know, you might be sharing information you shouldn't be and now you can't, get your deadline met. I really liked how the analytics inside the new security features really try to make sure they're applying intelligent analysis of behavior. And only when it's clear that a bad actor is in there doing something, then they can restrict access, protect information. And so I have no doubt they'll continue to evolve the product so that it's even even more effective in terms of how it can include or exclude bad actors from doing things inside your system. And so this is the kind of intelligence security increasingly based on AI type technologies that I think that will keep our workers productive, but clamp down on the much higher rate of that activity we see out there. Because we do have so many more endpoints there's a thousand or more times more endpoints in today's organizations because of remote work. >> Right. And one of the things that we've seen with ransomware, I mentioned those numbers that Citrix was sharing. It's gotten so much more personalized, so it's harder and harder to catch these things. One of the things that I found interesting, Dion, that from a secure collaboration perspective, that Citrix is saying is that, you know, we need to go, security needs to go beyond the devices and the endpoints and the apps that an employee is using, which of which we said, there are at least 10 apps that are being used today and it needs to actually be applied at a content level, the content creation level. Talk to me about your thoughts about that. >> I think that's exactly right. So if you know the profile of that worker and the types of things they normally do, and you see unusual behavior that is uncharacteristic to that worker, because you know their patterns, the types of content, the locations of that content that they might normally have access to. And if they're just accessing things, you know, periodically, that's usually not a problem. When they suddenly access a large volume of information and appear to be downloading it, those are the types of issues and especially of content they don't normally use for their work. Then you can intervene and take more intelligent actions as opposed to just trying to limit all content for example. So that knowledge workers can actually get access to all that great information in your IT systems. You can now give them access to it, but when clearly something, something bad is happening, the system automatically does it and steps in. >> I was looking at some of the data with respect to updates to Citrix analytics that it can now auto change permissions on shared files to read only, I think you alluded to this earlier, when it detects that excess sharing is going on. >> And, inappropriate access sharing. So sometimes it's okay for a worker to access, you know, documents. But the big fear is that a bad actor gets access. They get a USB key and they download a bunch of files and they get a whole bunch of IP or important knowledge. Well, when you have a system that's continually monitoring and you know, the unblinking gaze of Citrix security capabilities are looking at the patterns, not just the content alone or just the device alone, but at the, at the usage patterns and saying, I can make this read only because that's clearly the, you know, we don't want them to be able to download this because this activity is completely out of bounds or very unusual. >> Right. One of the things also that Citrix is doing is integrating with Microsoft teams. I was listening to a fun quiz show the other day that said, what were the top two apps downloaded in 2020? And I guessed one of them correctly, Tiktok though. I still don't know how to use it. And the second one was Zoom, and I'm sure Microsoft teams is way up there. I was looking at some stats that said, I think as of the spring of 2020, there were 145 million daily users of Microsoft teams. So that, from a collaboration perspective, something that a lot of folks are dependent on during the pandemic. And now within Teams, I can access Microsoft workspace? Citrix workspace. >> Yes. Well, and it's more significant than it sounds because there's a real hunger to find a center of gravity for the employee experience. What do I put that? Where should they be spending most of their time? Where should I be training them to focus most of their attention? And obviously workers collaborate a lot and Teams as part of Office 365, is a juggernaut? You know, the rise of it during the pandemic has been incredible. And just to show this, I have a digital workplace advisory board. Its companies who are heading, are the farthest along in designing digital employee experiences, and 31% of them said, this January, they're planning on centralizing the employee experience in Teams. Now, if you're a Citrix customer, you have workspace you go, how do I, I don't want to be left out. This announcement allows you to say, you can have the goodness of teams and its capabilities and the power of Citrix workspace, and you have them in one place and really creating a true center of gravity and simplifying and streamlining the employee experience. You don't have this fragmented pieces. Everything's right there in one place, in one pane of glass. And so I like this announcement. It brings Citrix up to parody with a lot of their competitors and actually eclipses several of them as well. So I really like to see this. >> So then from within teams, I can access Citrix workspace. I can share documents with team members and collaborate as well as that kind of the idea. >> Yes. That is the idea, and of course, they'll continue to evolve that, but now you can do your work in Citrix workspace and when documents are involved and you want to bring your team in, they're already right there inside that experience. >> That ability to streamline things, so critical, given the fact that we're still in this distributed environment, I'm sure families are still dealing with some, some amount of remote learning, or there's still distractions from the, do I live at work, do I work from home environment? One of the grips I really felt for when this happened, Dion, was the contact center. I thought these poor people, more people now with shorter and shorter fuses trying to get updates on whatever it was that they were, if they had something ordered and of course all the shipping delays. And the contact center of course went (blowing sound) scattered as well. And we've got people working from home, trying to do their jobs. Talk to me about some of those things that Citrix is doing to enable with Google, those contact center workers to have a good experience so that ultimately the employee experience is good, so is the customer experience? >> The contact center worker has the toughest of all of the different employee profiles I've seen, they have the most they have to learn, the most number of applications. They're typically not highly skilled workers. So they might only just have a, you know, high school education. Yet, they're being asked to cram all of these technologies, each one with a different employee experience, and they don't stay very long as a result of that. You might train them for two months before they're effective and they only stay for six months on average. And so, both businesses really want to be able to streamline onboarding and provisioning a and getting them set up and effective. And they want it too, if you want happy contact center workers making your customers happy and staying around. And so this announcements really allows you to deploy pre-configured Citrix workspaces on, on Chrome OS so that, you know, if you need to field a whole bunch of workers or you have a big dose say you're a relief company and you have a lot of disaster care workers. You can certainly this issue that these devices very easily, they're ready to go with their employee experience and all the right things in place so they can be effective with the least amount of effort. So I guess, it's a big step forward for a worker that is often neglected and underserved. >> Right. Definitely often neglected. And you, you brought up a good point there. And one of the things that, that peaked in my mind, as you talked about, you know, the onboarding experience, the retention, well, these contact center folks are the front lines to the customer. So from a brand reputation perspective, that's on the line, for companies in every industry where people with short fuses are dealing with contact center folks. So the ability to onboard them to give them a much more seamless experience is critical for the brand reputation, customer retention for every industry, I would imagine. >> Absolutely. Especially when you're setting up a contact center or you have a new product launching and you want, you know, you've got to bring, onboard all these new workers, you can do it, and they are going to have the least challenges. They're going to be ready to go right out of the box, be able to receive their package, with their device and their Citrix employee experience, ready to go. You know, just turn the machine on and they're off to the races. And that's the vision and that's the right one. So I was glad to see that as well. >> Yeah. Fantastic. One of the things also that Citrix did, the Citrix workspace app builder, so that Citrix workspace can now be a system of record for certain things like collaboration, surveys, maybe even COVID-19 information, that system of record. Talk to me about why that's so critical for the distributed worker. >> So we've had this, this longstanding challenge in that we've had our systems of record, you know, these are CRM systems, ERP, things like that, which we use to run our business. And then we've had our collaboration tools and they're separate, even though we're collaborating on sales deals and we're collaborating on our supply chain. And so like, the team's announcement was in the same game. We can say, let's close that gap between our systems of record and our collaboration tools. Well, this announcement says, all right, well, we still have these isolated systems of record. How can we streamline them to build and start connecting together a little bit so that we have processes that might cross all of those things, right? It's still going to order comes in from the CRM system. Then you can complete it in the, in the ERP system, you know, ordering that product for them. So they actually get it. You know, and that's probably overkill, that scenario for this particular example. But for example, collecting data from workers saying, let's build some forms and collect some data and then feed it to this process, or this system record. You can do it much more easily than before, before you would have to hire a development team or a contractor to develop another system that would integrate, you know, CRM or ERP or whatever. Now you can do it very quickly inside that builder. First simple, basic applications, and get a lot of the low hanging fruit off your plate and more automated inside of your Citrix workspace. >> And automation has been one of the keys that we've seen to streamlining worker productivity in the last 18 months. Another thing that I was looking at is, you know, the fact that we have so many different apps and we're constantly switching apps, context is constantly changing. Is this sort of system of record going to allow or reduce the amount of context switching that employees have to do? >> Yep. Almost all of these announcements have some flavor to that saying, can we start bringing more systems together in one place? So you're not switching between applications. You don't have different and disconnected sets of data that if you need to, and if they are disconnected, you can connect them, right. That's what the app builder announcement again is about saying, all right, if you're already, always using these three applications to do something, and you're switching between them, maybe you can just build something that connect them into one experience and, you know, maybe a low level of IT person, or even a business user can do that. That's the big trend right now. >> That's so important for that continued productivity, as things will continue to be a little bit unstable, I guess, for awhile. One more thing that I saw that Citrix is announcing is integrations with, Wrike I've been a Wrike user myself. I like to have program project management tools that I can utilize to keep track of projects, but they've done a number of integrations, one of them with Wrike Signature, which I thought was really cool. So for, to secure e-signature within Wrike, based on a program or a project that you're working on. Talk to me about some of the boosts to Wrike that they've done and how you think that's going to be influential in the employee experience. >> Well, first let's just say that the Wrike acquisition was a really important one for Citrix to go above just the basic digital workplace and simple systems of record. This is a really a mass collaboration tool for managing work itself. And so they're, this is taking Citrix up the stack in the more sophisticated work scenarios. And, and when you, we are in more sophisticated work scenarios, you want to be able to pull in different data sets. So, you know, they have the Citrix ShareFile support. You want to be able to bring in really important things like, you know, signing contracts or signing sales deals or mortgage applications, or all sorts of exciting things that actually run in your business. And so, Wrike Signatures, support's really important so that when you have key processes that involve people putting signatures on documents, you can just build collaborative work management flows that, that take all that into account without having to leave the experience. Everything's in one place as much as possible. And this is the big push and we need to have all these different systems. We don't have too many apps. What we have is too many touchpoints, so lets start combining some of these. And so the Wrike integrations, really help you do that. >> Well, and ultimately it seems like what Citrix is doing with the work launchpad series. All the announcements here is really helping workers to work how and where they want to work. Which is very similar to what we say when we're talking about the end user customer experience. When tech companies like Citrix say, we have to meet our customers where they are, it sounds like that's the same thing that's happening here. >> It is. And I would just add on top of that and to make it all safe. So you can bring all these systems together, work from anywhere, and you can feel confident that you're going to do so securely and safely. And it's that whole package I think that's really critical here. >> You're right, I'm glad you brought up that security. All right, Dion take out your crystal ball for me. As we wrap things up, you're saying, you know, going into the future, we're going to be moving from this distributed workforce to this hybrid. What are some of the things that you see as really critical happening in the next six to nine months? >> Well, there's a real push to say, we need to bring in all the workers that we've hired over the last year. Maybe not bringing them in, in person, but can we use these collaborative tools and technologies to bring them, hold them closer so they get to know us. And so, you know, things like, having Microsoft teams integrated right into your Citrix workspace makes it easier for you to collaborate with remote workers and inside any process wherever you are. So whether you're in the office or not, it should bring workers closer, especially those remote ones that are at risk of being left out as they move to hybrid work. And then it's really important. And so the things like the app builder are going to also allow building those connections. And I think that workers and businesses are really going to try and build those bridges, because the number one thing I'm hearing from business leaders and IT leaders is, is it, you know, we're worried about splitting into two different organizations, the ones that are remote and the ones that are in the office and any way that we can bring all of them together in an easy way, in a natural way, situate the digital employee experience so that we really back or back to one company, one common culture, everybody has equal access and equity to the employee experience. That's going to be really important. And I think that Citrix launchpad announcements around work really are a step, a major step in the right direction for that. There's still more things that have to be done and all, all vendors are working on that. But it's nice to see. I really liked what Citrix is doing here to move the ball forward towards where we're all going. >> It is nice to see, and those connections are critically important. I happen to be at an in-person event last week, and several folks had just had been hired during the pandemic and just got to meet some of their teams. So in terms of, of getting that cultural alignment, once again, this is a great step towards that. Dion thank you for joining me on the program, talking about the Citrix launchpad series for work, all the great new things that they're announcing and sharing with us as some of the things that you see coming down the pike. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks Lisa, for having me. >> For Dion Hinchcliffe. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube conversation. (upbeat music)

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