(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)