>> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Valante. >> Throughout the pre-vaccine COVID era, IT buyers indicated that budget constraints would constrict 2020 spending by roughly 5 percent relative to 2019 levels. But the forced march to digital, combined with increased cyber threats, created a modernization mandate that powered Q4 spending last year and this momentum has carried through to 2021. However, COVID variants have delayed return to work and business travel plans and as such our current forecast for global IT spending remains strong at 6 to 7 percent but slightly down from previous estimates. Notably, CIOs and IT buyers expect a 7 to 8 percent increase in 2022 spending, reflecting investments in hybrid strategies in a continued belief that technology remains the underpinning of competitive advantage in the coming decade. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we'll share the latest results of ETR's macro spending survey and update you in industry and sector spending patterns. First, let's summarize the key take-aways from ETR's latest demand-side survey. Based on ETR's latest survey. Currently with 869 responses as shown here at the bottom, we expect a slight pull-back in spending expectations from CIOs and IT buyers to roughly 6 to 7 percent, down from 7 to 8 percent earlier this year. This reflects caution over return to office strategies but buyers continue to expect robust spending as we said into next year as they support hybrid models, modernize their HQ infrastructure and continue to move forward on digital transformation initiatives. Cyber security and cloud remain the top 2 priorities with data initiatives overtaking collaboration and productivity on the priority list. Although all of these remain strong. Organizations now expect around 44 percent of employees to be working in a hybrid model over the long-term with 37 percent currently working in a hybrid fashion. Now here's the data behind the revised projections it compares the spending growth expectations from the March, June, and September 21 surveys. This by no means is a radical change as you can see from the downward trajectory of the yellow bar. It reflects the reality of the continued injection of uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Organizations are dealing with the reality and remaining flexible with regard to strategies and spending outlook, but the 2022 bar on the far-right at 7 and a half percent stands out in its telling as buyers expect spending levels in 22 to outpace historical norms by quite a large margin. Now as shown here, the spending compression is an across the board trend. Only Latin America, industrial materials manufacturing, and retail consumer show an uptick from previous surveys. With non-profits, education, energy, and APAC showing the steepest declines. But the longer term spending outlook remains robust across the boards. This chart shows that generally the outlook for 2022 spending is strong with retail consumer and government leading the charge. Only the historically cautious education sector stands out as softer, but even so its spending outlook is comparable to historical norms. Now be careful putting too much emphasis, by the way, on Latin America as the ends are small as ETR noted here. Now let's take a look at the sector analysis. This picture has been amazingly consistent. ETR asks respondents to rate their spending priorities and the chart shows the ratings from highest to lowest priority for the top technology sectors. Now this data only shows the top 7 sectors, so even though for instance RPA appears down the list, it remains one of the highest in the survey. In fact, although we are not showing this data, we went in and looked at this. Machine learning, containers, cloud, and RPA remain the top 4 areas from a net score or spending momentum standpoint. Well above the 40 percent mark we talk about all the time. Back to the priorities we asked the CIOs. Cyber security is noticeably above the rest with cloud migration remaining very strong. The data sector i.e. analytics and data warehousing have overtaken collaboration and productivity as priorities. However, collaboration remains strong as do networking, AI, and RPA. Now when we dig into some of these sectors to see which vendors are showing spending momentum, let's take a look. In addition to the large cloud players, especially AWS and Microsoft, we saw that snowflake continued to hover at around 80 percent net score level. Some others that we haven't cited as much recently are popping up either with spending momentum, or showing a larger presence in the market or both within these sectors. Toughtsbot has popped up now this AI specialist has shown up every now and then in the survey but they seem to be getting traction in the data set and they have an elevated net score. Datadog also stood out as did Cockroach Labs and Databricks is starting to show some strength even though they have shown strength in past surveys, they're starting to show larger presence in the survey. Now Networking Arista who has always had strong momentum shows continued strong momentum. And Maraki which has a large presence in the data set, is also notable. Not as high, but as a much larger share. Monday.com is also hitting the radar in collaboration and Twilio is popping up as well. Let's take a look at the return to office trends and the actions organizations have taken as a result of COVID and see how that's changed over time. This data shows the time series going back to the June 2020 survey. Let's start with the percent of organizations with employees working from home and you'll note that has ticked up since June and is now back up to 75 percent. And you can see the noticeable drop in the percentage of companies that have employees fully returning to the office. Also, more organizations are canceling business trips. So these are some of the factors that contribute to the slightly more cautious spending outlook that we're reporting here. Now continuing on the chart even though layoffs are trending downward, it's no surprise given the skill shortage you see a slight uptick in hiring freezes and a downtick in new hiring. New IT deployment freezes they remain low but there is a slight down tick in accelerating new IT deployments. So look, these are not radical changes, but they do reflect the on-going day-by-day, month-by-month, quarter-by-quarter adjustments that we've seen companies make throughout the COVID era. And it underscores the need for organizations to be more agile, flexible, resilient, and responsive to change. What does that mean? It means modernizing infrastructure and apps, better leveraging data, applying AI, and taking care of governance, compliance, and security. And CIOs expect these spending priorities to continue for the foreseeable future, at least for the next 15 months. Now as we've declared in previous episodes, every CEO, CXO, corner office, boards of directors, they're trying to get hybrid right. Interestingly, we see some companies mandating a return to work. We've seen this with some of the Wall Street firms, for example, but tech is a leading example of advocating for remote or hybrid work. To it, Michael Dell's public posture that he's wide-open for remote and, or hybrid work and Frank Slootman has moved Snowflakes' executive offices to Bozeman, Montana reflecting his sentiment that the days of big corporate towers are over. And why not? Productivity is through the roof, and the cost savings from working remotely can be enormous. This chart shows data back to the December 2020 survey. And we've seen a steady decline in remote work, but it's still the dominant model of 53 percent of the work force. In other words, people are starting to come back to office but still very, very high remote. Now jump to the third set of bars. And organizations expect a 39 percent of employees to be working remotely in 6 months. Now jump back to the second set of bars, 37 percent of employees are currently working in a hybrid model and that's up from 33 percent in June. Now jump to the fourth set of bars and the expectation is around 44 percent will be working in a hybrid model within the next 6 months. Organizations expect remote workers to settle in and level around 30 percent. Now that's down from previous highs of 35 percent last December but it's up significantly from the historical average of 15 to 16 percent. And the expectation as you can see in the last set of bars is that more than 40 percent of employees will be working in a hybrid model, on a permanent basis. So look, the world is going hybrid. It's the future and that requires technology investments to support new ways to work. And that's one main reason why we see the spending momentum continuing into 2022. So let's drill a little bit into what this means. In order words, how are organizations thinking about their hybrid models. This chart shows the responses from the June and September surveys when ETR began asking organizations to describe their hybrid approaches in more detail. The dominant model, around 50 percent of organizations say time will be split between remote and required on-site days. This is where leaders will ask employees to come to the office at designated times for whiteboard sessions, or planning meetings, et cetera. So hybrid is the dominant model. Then we see a big drop to primarily on-site with exceptions as needed and a low single digit number of organizations with no hybrid option. So the message is clear: Hybrid is the way forward and IT infrastructure will evolve to support these models and this bodes well for tech spending in our view. It speaks to continued cyber investments, leverage the cloud for flexible capacity shoring up on-prem infrastructure as we now see more vendors offering flexible capacity on-prem. Modernizing applications, building layers with micro-services and kubernetes that can actually connect to the cloud or assist in moving workloads, evolving the network architecture, flattening that out we hear a lot of talk about the edge, driving automation, and new ways to work and putting data at the core of digital business strategies. These are the technology approaches that organizations are tapping to deal with the changing dynamics of the pandemic, and adapting to new business models. Across the board, technology has become one of the most important enablers for competitiveness ain the coming decade and we expect that momentum to continue until some exogenous factors derail the spending trend. At the moment, that risk doesn't appear to be a slow-down in an economic recovery, although we continue to watch uncertainties around interest rates, inflation, tax policy, and global economic tensions, especially with China. And as always, we'll be here to update you as the data changes. Okay we're going to leave it there for now, remember these episodes are all available as podcasts you just got to search "breaking analysis podcasts" and we publish each week on wikibon.com and silliconeggle.com. You can connect with me on twitter @Devalante or email me at david.valante@silliconeggle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Valante for the Cube insights powered by ETR, be well, and we'll see you next time. (music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (dramatic music) >> Hi, everyone, welcome to this week's Breaking Analysis. It's Friday, October 18th, and this is theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Today, ETR had its conference call, its webcast. It was in a quiet period, and it dropped this tome. I have spent the last several hours going through this dataset. It's just unbelievable. It's the fresh data from the October survey, and I'm going to share just some highlights with you. I wish I had a couple hours to go through all this stuff, but I'm going to just pull out some of the key points. Spending is flattening. We've talked about this in previous discussions with you. But, things are still healthy. We're just reverting back to pre 2018 levels and, obviously, keeping a very close eye on the spending data and the sectors. There is some uncertainty heading into Q four. It's not only tariffs, you know. 2020's an election year, so that causes some uncertainty and some concerns for people. But, the big theme from ETR is there's less experimentation going on. The last several years have been ones where we're pushing out digital initiatives, and there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of redundancy. So, I'm going to talk more about that. I'm going to focus on a couple of sectors. I'm going to share with you there's the overall sector analysis. Then, I'm going to focus in on Microsoft and AWS and talk a little bit about the cloud. Then, I'm going to give some other highlights and, particularly, around enterprise software. The other thing I'll say is that the folks from ETR are going to be in the Bay Area on October 28th through the 30th, and I would encourage you to spend some time with them. If you want to meet them, just, you know, contact me @dvellante on Twitter or David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. I have no dog in this fight. I get no money from these guys. We're just partners and friends, but I love their data. And, they've given me access to it, and it's great because I can share it with you, our community. So, let's get right into it. Alex, if you just bring up the first slide, what I want to show is the ETR pulse check survey demographics, so every quarter, ETR does these surveys. They've got a dataset comprising 4500 members, panelists if you will, that they survey each quarter. In this survey, 1336 responded, representing 457 billion in spending power, and you can see from this slide, you know, it's got a nice mix of large companies. Very heavily weighted toward North America, but you're talking about, you know, 12% AMIA out of 1300. Certainly substantial and statistically significant to get some trends overseas. You can see across all industries. And then, job titles, a lot of C level executives, VPs, architects, people who know what the spending climate looks like, so I really like the mix of data. Let me make some overall comments, and, Alex, the next slide sort of gives some snapshot here. The big theme is that there's a compression in tech spending, as they say. It's very tough to compare to compare to 2018, which was just a phenomenal year. I mentioned the tariffs. It was an election year. Election years bring uncertainty. Uncertainty brings conservatism, so that's something, obviously, that's weighing, I think, on buyers' minds. And, I'll give you some anecdotal comments in a moment that will underscore that. There's less redundancy in spending. This has been a theme of ETR's for quite some time now. The last few years have been a try everything type of mode. Digital initiatives were launched, let's say, starting in 2016. ETR called this, I love this, Tom DelVecchio, the CEO of ETR, called it a giant IT bake off where you were looking at, okay, cloud versus on prem or SaaS versus conventional models, new databases versus legacy databases, legacy storage versus sort of modern storage stacks. So, you had this big bake off going on. And, what's happening now is you're seeing less experimentation so less adoption of new technologies, and replacements are on the rise. So, people are making their bets. They're saying, "Okay, these technologies "are the ones we're going to bet on, "these emerging disruptive technologies." So, they're narrowing their scope of emerging technologies, and they're saying, "Okay, now, "we're going to replace the legacy stuff." So, you're seeing these new stacks emerging. I mentioned some others before, but things like cloud native versus legacy waterfall approaches. And, these new stacks are hitting both legacy and disruptive companies for the reasons that I mentioned before because we're replacing legacy, but at the same time, we're narrowing the scope of the new stuff. This is not necessarily good for the disruptors. Downturns, sometimes, are good for legacy because they're perceived as a safer bet. So, what I want to do, right now, is share with you some of the anecdotals from the survey, and I'll just, you know, call out some things. By the way, the first thing I would note is, you know, ETR did sort of an analysis of frequency of terms. Cloud, cost, replacing, change, moving, consolidation, migration, and contract were the big ones that stood out. But, let me just call a couple of the anecdotals. When they do these surveys, they'll ask open ended questions, and so these kind of give you a good idea as to how people are thinking. "We're projecting a hold based on impacts from tariffs. "Situation could change if tariff relief is reached. "We're really concerned about EU." Another one, "Shift to SaaS is accelerating "and driving TCO down. "Investing in 2019, we're implementing "and retiring old technologies in 2020. "There's an active effort to consolidate "the number of security vendor solutions. "We're doing more Microsoft." Let's see, "We have moved "to a completely outsourced infrastructure model, "so no longer purchasing storage," interesting. "In general, we're trying to reduce spending "based on current market conditions." So, people, again, are concerned. Storage, as a category, is way down. "We're moving from Teradata to AWS and a data lake." I'll make some comments, as well, later on about EDW and Snowflake in particular, who, you know, remains very healthy. "We're moving our data to G Suite and AWS. "We're migrating our SaaS offering to elastic. "We're sunsetting Cognos," which, of course, is owned by IBM. "Talend, we decided to drop after evaluating. "Tableau, we've decided to not integrate anymore," even though Tableau is, actually, looking very strong subsequent to the sales force acquisition. So, there's some comments there that people, again, are replacing and they're narrowing some of their focus on spending. All right, Alex, bring up the next slide. I want to share with you the sector momentum. So, we've talked about this methodology of net score. Every time ETR does one of these pulse surveys, they ask, "Are you spending more or are you spending less? "Or, are you spending the same?" And then, essentially, they subtract the spending less from the spending more, and the spending more included new adoptions. The spending less includes replacements. And, that comes out with a net score, and that net score is an indicator of momentum. And, what you can see here is, the momentum I've highlighted in red, is container orchestration, the container platforms, machine learning, AI, automation, big theme. We were just at the UiPath conference, huge theme on automation. And, of course, robotic process automation, RPA. Cloud computing remains very strong. This dotted red line that I put in there, that's at the, you know, 30%, 35% level. You kind of want to be above that line to really show momentum. Anything below that line is either holding serve, holding steady, but well below that line, when you start getting into the low 20s and the teens, is a red zone. That's a danger zone. You could see data warehouse software is kind of on that cusp. and I'm not, you know, a huge fan of the sector in general, but I love Snowflake and what they're doing and the share gains that are going on there. So, when you're below that red line, it's a game of share gain. Storage, same thing we've talked about. The overall storage sector is down. It's being pressured by cloud, as that anectdotal suggested. It's also being pressured by the fact that so much flash has been injected into the data center over the last couple of years. That given headroom for buyers. They don't need as much storage, so overall, the sector is soft. But then, you see companies, like Pure, continuing to gain share, so they're actually quite strong in this quarter survey. So, you could see some various sectors here. IT consulting and outsourced IT not looking strong, data center consolidation. By the way, you saw, in IBM's recent earnings, Jim Kavanaugh pointed to their outsourcing business as a real drag, you know. Some of these other sectors, you could see, actually, PC laptop, this is obviously a big impact for Dell and HP, you know, kind of holding steady. Actually, better than storage, so, you know, for that large of a segment, not necessarily such a bad thing. Okay, now, what I want to do, I want to shift focus and make some comments on Microsoft, specifically, and AWS. So, here's just some high level points on this slide on Microsoft. The N out of that total was 1200, so very large proportion of the survey is weighted toward Microsoft. So, a good observation space for Microsoft. Extremely positive spending outlook for this company. There's a lot of ways to get to Microsoft. You want cloud, there's Azure, you know. Visualization, you got Power BI. Collaboration, there's Teams. Of course, email and calendaring is Office 365. You need hiring data? Well, we just bought LinkedIn. CRM, ERP, there's Microsoft Dynamics. So, Microsoft is a lot of roads, to spend with Microsoft. Windows is not the future of Microsoft. Satya Nadella and company have done a great job of sort of getting out of that dogma and really expanding their TAM. You're seeing acceleration from Microsoft across all key sectors, cloud, apps, containers, MI, or machine intelligence, AI and ML, analytics, infrastructure software, data warehousing, servers, GitHub is strong, collaboration, as I mentioned. So, really, across the board, this portfolio of offerings powered by the scale of Azure is very strong. Microsoft has great velocity in the cloud, and it's a key bellwether. Now, the next slide, what it does is compares the cloud computing big three in the US, Azure, AWS, and GCP, Google Cloud Platform. This is, again, net score. This is infrastructure as a service, and so you can see here the yellow is Microsoft, that darker line is AWS, and GCP is that blue line down below. All three are actually showing great strength in the spending data. Azure has more momentum than AWS, so it's growing faster. We've seen this for a while, but I want to make a point here that didn't come up on the ETR call. But, AWS is probably two and a half to three times larger in infrastructure as a service than is Microsoft Azure, so remember, AWS has a $35 billion at least run rate business in infrastructure as a service. And, as I say, it's two and a half to three times, at least, larger than Microsoft, which is probably a run rate of, let's call it, 10 to 12 billion, okay. So, it's quite amazing that AWS is holding at that 66 to now dropping to 63% net score given that it's so large. And, of course, way behind is GCP, much smaller share. In fact, I think, probably, Alibaba has surpassed GCP in terms of overall market share. So, at any rate, you could see all three, strong momentum. The cloud continues its march. I'll make some comments on that a little bit later. But, Azure has really strong momentum. Let's talk, next slide if you will, Alex, about AWS. Smaller sample size, 731 out of the total, which is not surprising, right. Microsoft's been around a lot longer and plays in a lot more sectors. ETR has a positive to neutral outlook on AWS. Now, you have to be careful here because, remember, what ETR is doing is they're looking at the spending momentum and comparing that to consensus estimates, okay. So, ETR's business is helping, largely, Wall Street, you know, buy side analysts make bets, and so it's not only about how much money they make or what kind of momentum they have in aggregate. It's about how they're doing relative to expectation, something that I explained on the last Breaking Analysis. Spending on AWS continues to be very robust. They've got that flywheel effect. Make no mistake that this positive to neutral outlook is relative to expectations. Relative to overall market, AWS is, you know, kicking butt. Cloud, analytics, big data, data warehousing, containers, machine intelligence, even virtualization. AWS is growing and gaining share. My view, AWS will continue to outperform the marketplace for quite some time now, and it's gaining share from legacy players. Who's it hurting? You're seeing the companies within AWS's sort of sphere that are getting impacted by AWS. Oracle, IBM, SAP, you know, cloud Arrow, which we mentioned last time is at all time lows, Teradata. These accounts, inside of AWS respondents, are losing share. Now, who's gaining share? Snowflake is on a tear. Mongo is very strong. Microsoft, interestingly, remains strong in AWS. In fact, AWS runs a lot of Microsoft workloads. That's, you know, fairly well known. But, again, Snowflake, very strong inside of AWS accounts. There's no indication that, despite AWS's emphasis on database and, of course, data warehouse, that Snowflake's being impacted by that. The reverse, Snowflake is taking advantage of cloud momentum. The only real negative you can say about AWS is that Microsoft is accelerating faster than AWS, so that might upset Andy Jassy. But, he'll point out, I guess, what I pointed out before, that they're much larger. Take a look at AWS on this next slide. The net score across all AWS sectors, the ones I mentioned. And, this is the growth in Fortune 500, so you can see, very steady in the large accounts. That's that blue line, you know, dipped in the October 18 survey, but look at how strong it is, holding 67% in Fortune 500 accounts. And then, you can see, the yellow line is the market share. AWS continues to gain share in those large accounts when you weight that out in terms of spending. That's why I say AWS is going to continue to do very well in this overall market. So, just some, you know, comments on cloud. As I said, it continues to march, it continues to really be the watchword, the fundamental operating model. Microsoft, very strong, expanding its TAM everywhere, I mean, affecting, potentially, Slack, Box, Dropbox, New Relic, Splunk, IBM, and Security, Elastic. So, Microsoft, very strong here. AWS continues to grow, not as strong as '18, but much stronger than its peers, very well positioned in database and artificial intelligence. And so, not a lot of softness in AWS. I mentioned on one of the previous Breaking Analysis, Kubernetes', actually, container's a little soft, so we always keep an eye on that one. And, Google, again, struggling to make gains in cloud. One of the comments I made before is that the long term surveys for Google looked positive, but that's not showing up yet in the near term market shares. All right, Alex, if you want to bring up the next slide, I want to make some quick comments before I close, on enterprise software. There was a big workday scare this week. They kind of guided that their core HR business was not going to be as robust as it had been previously, so this pulled back all the SaaS vendors. And, you know, the stock got crushed, Salesforce got hit, ServiceNow got hit, Splunk got hit. But, I tell you, you look at the data in this massive dataset, ServiceNow remains strong, Salesforce looks, very slight deceleration, but very sound, especially in the Fortune 100 in that GPP, the giant public and private companies that I talked about on an earlier call. That's one of the best indicators of strength. Tableau, actually, very strong, especially in large accounts, so Salesforce seems to be doing a good job of integrating there. Splunk, (mumbles) coming up shortly, I think this month. Securities, the category is very strong, lifting all ships. Splunk looks really good. Despite some of the possible competition from Microsoft, there's no indication that Splunk is slowing. There's some anecdotal issues about pricing that I talked about before, but I think Splunk is really dealing with those. UiPath's another company. We were just out there this past week at the UiPath Forward conference. UiPath, in this dataset, when you take out some of the smaller respondents, smaller number of respondents, UiPath has one of the highest net scores in the entire sample. UiPath is on a tear. I talked to dozens of customers this week. Very strong momentum, and then moving into, got new areas, and I'll be focusing on the RPA sector a little later on. But, automation, in general, really has some tailwinds in the marketplace. And, you know, the other comment I'll make about RPA is a downturn actually could help RPA vendors, who, by the way, all the RPA vendors look strong. Automation Anywhere, UiPath, I mentioned, Blue Prism, you know, even some of the legacy companies like Pega look, actually, very strong. A downturn in the economy could help some of the RPA vendors because would be looking to do more with less, and automation, you know, could be something that they're looking toward. Snowflake I mentioned, again, they continue their tear. A very strong share in expansion. Slightly lower than previous quarters in terms of the spending momentum, but the previous quarters were off the charts. So, also very strong in large companies. All right, so let me wrap. So, buyers are planning for a slowdown. I mean, there's no doubt about that. It's something that we have to pay very close attention to, and I think the marker expects that. And, I think, you know, it's okay. There's less spaghetti against the wall, we're going to try everything, and that's having a moderating effect on spending, as is the less redundancy. People were running systems in parallel. As they say, they're placing bets, now, on both disruptive tech and on legacy tech, so they're replacing both in some cases. Or, they're not investing in some of the disruptive stuff because they're narrowing their investments in disruptive technologies, and they're also replacing some legacy. We're clearly seeing new adoptions down, according to ETR, and replacements up, and that's going to affect both legacy and disruptive vendors. So, caution is the watchword, but, overall, the market remains healthy. Okay, so thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching this Breaking Analysis. We'll see you next time. (dramatic music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we're going to look at recent spending data from the ETR Spending Intentions Survey. We believe tech spending is slowing down. Now, it's not falling off a cliff but it is reverting to pre-2018 spending levels. There's some concern in the bellwethers of specifically financial services and insurance accounts and large telcos. We're also seeing less redundancy. What we mean by that is in 2017 and 2018 you had a lot of experimentation going on. You had a lot of digital initiatives that were going into, not really production, but sort of proof of concept. And as a result you were seeing spending on both legacy infrastructure and emerging technologies. What we're seeing now is more replacements. In other words people saying, "Okay, we're now going into production. We've tried that. We're not going to go with A, we're going to double down on B." And we're seeing less experimentation with the emerging technology. So in other words people are pulling out, actually some of the legacy technologies. And they're not just spraying and praying across the entire emerging technology sector. So, as a result, spending is more focused. As they say, it's not a disaster, but it's definitely some cause for concern. So, what I'd like to do, Alex if you bring up the first slide. I want to give you some takeaways from the ETR, the Enterprise Technology Research Q4 Pulse Check Survey. ETR has a data platform of 4,500 practitioners that it surveys regularly. And the most recent spending intention survey will actually be made public on October 16th at the ETR Webcast. ETR is in its quiet period right now, but they've given me a little glimpse and allowed me to share with you, our Cube audience, some of the findings. So as I say, you know, overall tech spending is clearly slowing, but it's still healthy. There's a uniform slowdown, really, across the board. In virtually all sectors with very few exceptions, and I'll highlight some of the companies that are actually quite strong. Telco, large financial services, insurance. That's rippling through to AMIA, which is, as I've said, is over-weighted in banking. The Global 2000 is looking softer. And also the global public and private companies. GPP is what ETR calls it. They say this is one of the best indicators of spending intentions and is a harbinger for future growth or deceleration. So it's the largest public companies and the largest private companies. Think Mars, Deloitte, Cargo, Coke Industries. Big giant, private companies. We're also seeing a number of changes in responses from we're going to increase to more flat-ish. So, again, it's not a disaster. It's not falling off the cliff. And there are some clear winners and losers. So adoptions are really reverting back to 2018 levels. As I said, replacements are arising. You know, digital transformation is moving from test everything to okay, let's go, let's focus now and double-down on those technologies that we really think are winners. So this is hitting both legacy companies and the disrupters. One of the other key takeaways out of the ETR Survey is that Microsoft is getting very, very aggressive. It's extending and expanding its TAM further into cloud, into collaboration, into application performance management, into security. We saw the Surface announcement this past week. Microsoft is embracing Android. Windows is not the future of Microsoft. It's all these other markets that they're going after. They're essentially building out an API platform and focusing in on the user experience. And that's paying off because CIOs are clearly more comfortable with Microsoft. Okay, so now I'm going to take you through some themes. I'm going to make some specific vendor comments, particularly in Cloud, software, and infrastructure. And then we'll wrap. So here's some major themes that really we see going on. Investors still want growth. They're punishing misses on earnings and they're rewarding growth companies. And so you can see on this slide that it's really about growth metrics. What you're seeing is companies are focused on total revenue, total revenue growth, annual recurring revenue growth, billings growth. Companies that maybe aren't growing so fast, like Dell, are focused on share gains. Lately we've seen pullbacks in the software companies and their stock prices really due to higher valuations. So, there's some caution there. There's actually a somewhat surprising focus given the caution and all the discussion about, you know, slowing economy. There's some surprising lack of focus on key performance indicators like cash flow. A few years ago, Splunk actually stopped giving, for example, cash flow targets. You don't see as much focus on market capitalization or shareholders returns. You do see that from Oracle. You see that last week from the Dell Financial Analyst Meeting. I talked about that. But it's selective. You know these are the type of metrics that Oracle, Dell, VMware, IBM, HPE, you know generally HP Inc. as well will focus on. Another thing we see is the Global M&A across all industries is back to 2016 levels. It basically was down 16% in Q3. However, well and that's by the way due to trade wars and other uncertainties and other economic slowdowns and Brexit. But tech M&A has actually been pretty robust this year. I mean, you know take a look at some examples. I'll just name a few. Google with Looker, big acquisitions. Sales Force, huge acquisition. A $15 billion acquisition of Tableau. It also spent over a billion dollars on Click software. Facebook with CTRL-labs. NVIDIA, $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox. VMware just plunked down billion dollars for Carbon Black and its own, you know, sort of pivotal within the family. Splunk with a billion dollar plus acquisition of SignalFx. HP over a billion dollars with Cray. Amazon's been active. Uber's been active. Even nontraditional enterprise tech companies like McDonald's trying to automate some of the drive-through technology. Mastercard with Nets. And of course the stalwart M&A companies Apple, Intel, Microsoft have been pretty active as well as many others. You know but generally I think what's happening is valuations are high and companies are looking for exits. They've got some cool tech so they're putting it out there. That you know, hey now's the time to buy. They want to get out. That maybe IPO is not the best option. Maybe they don't feel like they've got, you know, a long-term, you know, plan that is going to really maximize shareholder value so they're, you know, putting forth themselves for M&A today. And so that's been pretty robust. And I would expect that's going to continue for a little bit here as there are, again, some good technology companies out there. Okay, now let's get into, Alex if you pull up the next slide of the Company Outlook. I want to start with Cloud. Cloud, as they say here, continues it's steady march. I'm going to focus on the Big 3. Microsoft, AWS, and Google. In the ETR Spending Surveys they're all very clearly strong. Microsoft is very strong. As I said it's expanding it's total available market. It's into collaboration now so it's going after Slack, Box, Dropbox, Atlassian. It's announced application performance management capabilities, so it's kind of going after new relic there. New SIM and security products. So IBM, Splunk, Elastic are some targets there. Microsoft is one of the companies that's gaining share overall. Let me talk about AWS. Microsoft is growing faster in Cloud than AWS, but AWS is much, much larger. And AWS's growth continues. So it's not as strong as 2018 but it's stronger, in fact, much stronger than its peers overall in the marketplace. AWS appears to be very well positioned according to the ETR Surveys in database and AI it continues to gain momentum there. The only sort of weak spot is the ECS, the container orchestration area. And that looks a little soft likely due to Kubernetes. Drop down to Google. Now Google, you know, there's some strength in Google's business but it's way behind in terms of market share, as you all know, Microsoft and AWS. You know, its AI and machine learning gains have stalled relative to Microsoft and AWS which continue to grow. Google's strength and strong suit has always been analytics. The ETR data shows that its holdings serve there. But there's deceleration in data warehousing, and even surprisingly in containers given, you know, its strength in contributing to the Kubernetes project. But the ETR 3 Year Outlook, when they do longer term outlook surveys, shows GCP, Google's Cloud platform, gaining. But there's really not a lot of evidence in the existing data, in the near-term data to show that. But the big three, you know, Cloud players, you know, continue to solidify their position. Particularly AWS and Microsoft. Now let's turn our attention to enterprise software. Just going to name a few. ETR will have an extensive at their webcast. We'll have an extensive review of these vendors, and I'll pick up on that. But I just want to pick out a few here. Some of the enterprise software winners. Workday continues to be very, very strong. Especially in healthcare and pharmaceutical. Salesforce, we're seeing a slight deceleration but it's pretty steady. Very strong in Fortune 100. And Einstein, its AI offering appears to be gaining as well. Some of the acquisitions Mulesoft and Tableu are also quite strong. Demandware is another acquisition that's also strong. The other one that's not so strong, ExactTarget is somewhat weakening. So Salesforce is a little bit mixed, but, you know, continues to be pretty steady. Splunk looks strong. Despite some anecdotal comments that point to pricing issues, and I know Splunk's been working on, you know, tweaking its pricing model. And maybe even some competition. There's no indication in the ETR data yet that Splunk's, you know, momentum is attenuating. Security as category generally is very, very strong. And it's lifting all ships. Splunk's analytics business is showing strength is particularly in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, as well as financial services. I like the healthcare and pharmaceuticals exposure because, you know, in a recession healthcare will, you know, continue to do pretty well. Financial services in general is down, so there's maybe some exposure there. UiPath, I did a segment on RPA a couple weeks ago. UiPath continues its rapid share expansion. The latest ETR Survey data shows that that momentum is continuing. And UiPath is distancing itself in the spending surveys from its broader competition as well. Another company we've been following and I did a segment on the analytics and enterprise data warehousing sector a couple weeks ago is Snowflake. Snowflake continues to expand its share. Its slightly slower than its previous highs, which were off the chart. We shared with you its Net Score. Snowflake and UiPath have some of the highest Net Scores in the ETR Survey data of 80+%. Net Score remembers. You take the we're adding the platform, we're spending more and you subtract we're leaving the platform or spending less and that gives you the Net Score. Snowflake and UiPath are two of the highest. So slightly slower than previous ties, but still very very strong. Especially in larger companies. So that's just some highlights in the software sector. The last sector I want to focus on is enterprise infrastructure. So Alex if you'd bring that up. I did a segment at the end of Q2, post Q2 looking at earning statements and also some ETR data on the storage spending segment. So I'll start with Pure Storage. They continue to have elevative spending intentions. Especially in that giant public and private, that leading indicator. There are some storage market headwinds. The storage market generally is still absorbing that all flash injection. I've talked about this before. There's still some competition from Cloud. When Pure came out with its earnings last quarter, the stock dropped. But then when everybody else announced, you know, negative growth or, in Dell's case, Dell's the leader, they were flat. Pure Storage bounced back because on a relative basis they're doing very well. The other indication is Pure storage is very strong in net app accounts. Net apps mix, they don't call them out here but we'll do some further analysis down the road of net apps. So I would expect Pure to continue to gain share and relative to the others in that space. But there are some headwinds overall in the market. VMware, let's talk about VMware. VMware's spending profile, according to ETR, looks like 2018. It's still very strong in Fortune 1000, or 100 rather, but weaker in Fortune 500 and the GPP, the global public and private companies. That's a bit of a concern because GPP is one of the leading indicators. VMware on Cloud on AWS looks very strong, so that continues. That's a strategic area for them. Pivotal looks weak. Carbon Black is not pacing with CrowdStrike. So clearly VMware has some work to do with some of its recent acquisitions. It hasn't completed them yet. But just like the AirWatch acquisition, where AirWatch wasn't the leader in that space, really Citrix was the leader. VMware brought that in, cleaned it up, really got focused. So that's what they're going to have to do with Carbon Black and Security, which is going to be a tougher road to hoe I would say than end user computing and Pivotal. So we'll see how that goes. Let's talk about Dell, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies. The client side of the business is holding strong. As I've said many times server and storage are decelerating. We're seeing market headwinds. People are spending less on server and storage relative to some of the overall initiatives. And so, that's got to bounce back at some point. People are going to still need compute, they're still going to need storage, as I say. Both are suffering from, you know, the Cloud overhang. As well, storage there was such a huge injection of flash it gave so much headroom in the marketplace that it somewhat tempered storage demand overall. Customers said, "Hey, I'm good for a while. Cause now I have performance headroom." Whereas before people would buy spinning discs, they buy the overprovision just to get more capacity. So, you know, that was kind of a funky value proposition. The other thing is VxRail is not as robust as previous years and that's something that Dell EMC talks about as, you know, one of the market share leaders. But it's showing a little bit of softness. So we'll keep an eye on that. Let's talk about Cisco. Networking spend is below a year ago. The overall networking market has been, you know, somewhat decelerating. Security is a bright spot for Cisco. Their security business has grown in double digits for the last couple of quarters. They've got work to do in multi-Cloud. Some bright spots Meraki and Duo are both showing strength. HP, talk about HPE it's mixed. Server and storage markets are soft, as I've said. But HPE remains strong in Fortune 500 and that critical GPP leading indicator. You know Nimble is growing, but maybe not as fast as it used to be and Simplivity is really not as strong as last year. So we'd like to see a little bit of an improvement there. On the bright side, Aruba is showing momentum. Particularly in Fortune 500. I'll make some comments about IBM, even though it's really, you know, this IBM enterprise infrastructure. It's really services, software, and yes some infrastructure. The Red Hat acquisition puts it firmly in infrastructure. But IBM is also mixed. It's bouncing back. IBM Classic, the core IBM is bouncing back in Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 and in that critical GPP indicator. It's showing strength, IBM, in Cloud and it's also showing strength in services. Which is over half of its business. So that's real positive. Its analytics and EDW software business are a little bit soft right now. So that's a bit of a concern that we're watching. The other concern we have is Red Hat has been significantly since the announcement of the merger and acquisition. Now what we don't know, is IBM able to inject Red Hat into its large service and outsourcing business? That might be hidden in some of the spending intention surveys. So we're going to have to look at income statement. And the public statements post earnings season to really dig into that. But we'll keep an eye on that. The last comment is Cloudera. Cloudera once was the high-flying darling. They are hitting all-time lows. They made the acquisition of Hortonworks, which created some consolidation. Our hope was that would allow them to focus and pick up. CEO left. Cloudera, again, hitting all-time lows. In particular, AWS and Snowflake are hurting Cloudera's business. They're particularly strong in Cloudera's shops. Okay, so let me wrap. Let's give some final thoughts. So buyers are planning for a slowdown in tech spending. That is clear, but the sky is not falling. Look we're in the tenth year of a major tech investment cycle, so slowdown, in my opinion, is healthy. Digital initiatives are really moving into higher gear. And that's causing some replacement on legacy technologies and some focus on bets. So we're not just going to bet on every new, emerging technology, were going to focus on those that we believe are going to drive business value. So we're moving from a try-everything mode to a more focused management style. At least for a period of time. We're going to absorb the spend, in my view, of the last two years and then double-down on the winners. So not withstanding the external factors, the trade wars, Brexit, other geopolitical concerns, I would expect that we're going to have a period of absorption. Obviously it's October, so the Stock Market is always nervous in October. You know, we'll see if we get Santa Claus rally going into the end of the year. But we'll keep an eye on that. This is Dave Vellante for Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thank you for watching this breaking analysis. We'll see you next time. (upbeat tech music)

(upbeat music) >> From theCube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While by no means a safe haven, the cybersecurity sector has outpaced the broader tech market by a meaningful margin, that is up until very recently. Cybersecurity remains the number one technology priority for the C-suite, but as we've previously reported the CISO's budget has constraints just like other technology investments. Recent trends show that economic headwinds have elongated sales cycles, pushed deals into future quarters, and just like other tech initiatives, are pacing cybersecurity investments and breaking them into smaller chunks. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we explain how cybersecurity trends are reverting to the mean and tracking more closely with other technology investments. We'll make a couple of valuation comparisons to show the magnitude of the challenge and which cyber firms are feeling the heat, which aren't. There are some exceptions. We'll then show the latest survey data from ETR to quantify the contraction in spending momentum and close with a glimpse of the landscape of emerging cybersecurity companies, the private companies that could be ripe for acquisition, consolidation, or disruptive to the broader market. First, let's take a look at the recent patterns for cyber stocks relative to the broader tech market as a benchmark, as an indicator. Here's a year to date comparison of the bug ETF, which comprises a basket of cyber security names, and we compare that with the tech heavy NASDAQ composite. Notice that on April 13th of this year the cyber ETF was actually in positive territory while the NAS was down nearly 14%. Now by August 16th, the green turned red for cyber stocks but they still meaningfully outpaced the broader tech market by more than 950 basis points as of December 2nd that Delta had contracted. As you can see, the cyber ETF is now down nearly 25%, year to date, while the NASDAQ is down 27% and change. Now take a look at just how far a few of the high profile cybersecurity names have fallen. Here are six security firms that we've been tracking closely since before the pandemic. We've been, you know, tracking dozens but let's just take a look at this data and the subset. We show for comparison the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, again, just for reference, they're both up since right before the pandemic. They're up relative to right before the pandemic, and then during the pandemic the S&P shot up more than 40%, relative to its pre pandemic level, around February is what we're using for the pre pandemic level, and the NASDAQ peaked at around 65% higher than that February level. They're now down 85% and 71% of their previous. So they're at 85% and 71% respectively from their pandemic highs. You compare that to these six companies, Splunk, which was and still is working through a transition is well below its pre pandemic market value and 44, it's 44% of its pre pandemic high as of last Friday. Palo Alto Networks is the most interesting here, in that it had been facing challenges prior to the pandemic related to a pivot to the Cloud which we reported on at the time. But as we said at that time we believe the company would sort out its Cloud transition, and its go to market challenges, and sales compensation issues, which it did as you can see. And its valuation jumped from 24 billion prior to Covid to 56 billion, and it's holding 93% of its peak value. Its revenue run rate is now over 6 billion with a healthy growth rate of 24% expected for the next quarter. Similarly, Fortinet has done relatively well holding 71% of its peak Covid value, with a healthy 34% revenue guide for the coming quarter. Now, Okta has been the biggest disappointment, a darling of the pandemic Okta's communication snafu, with what was actually a pretty benign hack combined with difficulty absorbing its 7 billion off zero acquisition, knocked the company off track. Its valuation has dropped by 35 billion since its peak during the pandemic, and that's after a nice beat and bounce back quarter just announced by Okta. Now, in our view Okta remains a viable long-term leader in identity. However, its recent fiscal 24 revenue guide was exceedingly conservative at around 16% growth. So either the company is sandbagging, or has such poor visibility that it wants to be like super cautious or maybe it's actually seeing a dramatic slowdown in its business momentum. After all, this is a company that not long ago was putting up 50% plus revenue growth rates. So it's one that bears close watching. CrowdStrike is another big name that we've been talking about on Breaking Analysis for quite some time. It like Okta has led the industry in a key ETR performance indicator that measures customer spending momentum. Just last week, CrowdStrike announced revenue increased more than 50% but new ARR was soft and the company guided conservatively. Not surprisingly, the stock got absolutely crushed as CrowdStrike blamed tepid demand from smaller and midsize firms. Many analysts believe that competition from Microsoft was one factor along with cautious spending amongst those midsize and smaller customers. Notably, large customers remain active. So we'll see if this is a longer term trend or an anomaly. Zscaler is another company in the space that we've reported having great customer spending momentum from the ETR data. But even though the company beat expectations for its recent quarter, like other companies its Outlook was conservative. So other than Palo Alto, and to a lesser extent Fortinet, these companies and others that we're not showing here are feeling the economic pinch and it shows in the compression of value. CrowdStrike, for example, had a 70 billion valuation at one point during the pandemic Zscaler top 50 billion, Okta 45 billion. Now, having said that Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler are all still trading well above their pre pandemic levels that we tracked back in February of 2020. All right, let's go now back to ETR'S January survey and take a look at how much things have changed since the beginning of the year. Remember, this is obviously pre Ukraine, and pre all the concerns about the economic headwinds but here's an X Y graph that shows a net score, or spending momentum on the y-axis, and market presence on the x-axis. The red dotted line at 40% on the vertical indicates a highly elevated net score. Anything above that we think is, you know, super elevated. Now, we filtered the data here to show only those companies with more than 50 responses in the ETR survey. Still really crowded. Note that there were around 20 companies above that red 40% mark, which is a very, you know, high number. It's a, it's a crowded market, but lots of companies with, you know, positive momentum. Now let's jump ahead to the most recent October survey and take a look at what, what's happening. Same graphic plotting, spending momentum, and market presence, and look at the number of companies above that red line and how it's been squashed. It's really compressing, it's still a crowded market, it's still, you know, plenty of green, but the number of companies above 40% that, that key mark has gone from around 20 firms down to about five or six. And it speaks to that compression and IT spending, and of course the elongated sales cycles pushing deals out, taking them in smaller chunks. I can't tell you how many conversations with customers I had, at last week at Reinvent underscoring this exact same trend. The buyers are getting pressure from their CFOs to slow things down, do more with less and, and, and prioritize projects to those that absolutely are critical to driving revenue or cutting costs. And that's rippling through all sectors, including cyber. Now, let's do a bit more playing around with the ETR data and take a look at those companies with more than a hundred citations in the survey this quarter. So N, greater than or equal to a hundred. Now remember the followers of Breaking Analysis know that each quarter we take a look at those, what we call four star security firms. That is, those are the, that are in, that hit the top 10 for both spending momentum, net score, and the N, the mentions in the survey, the presence, the pervasiveness in the survey, and that's what we show here. The left most chart is sorted by spending momentum or net score, and the right hand chart by shared N, or the number of mentions in the survey, that pervasiveness metric. that solid red line denotes the cutoff point at the top 10. And you'll note we've actually cut it off at 11 to account for Auth 0, which is now part of Okta, and is going through a go to market transition, you know, with the company, they're kind of restructuring sales so they can take advantage of that. So starting on the left with spending momentum, again, net score, Microsoft leads all vendors, typical Microsoft, very prominent, although it hadn't always done so, it, for a while, CrowdStrike and Okta were, were taking the top spot, now it's Microsoft. CrowdStrike, still always near the top, but note that CyberArk and Cloudflare have cracked the top five in Okta, which as I just said was consistently at the top, has dropped well off its previous highs. You'll notice that Palo Alto Network Palo Alto Networks with a 38% net score, just below that magic 40% number, is healthy, especially as you look over to the right hand chart. Take a look at Palo Alto with an N of 395. It is the largest of the independent pure play security firms, and has a very healthy net score, although one caution is that net score has dropped considerably since the beginning of the year, which is the case for most of the top 10 names. The only exception is Fortinet, they're the only ones that saw an increase since January in spending momentum as ETR measures it. Now this brings us to the four star security firms, that is those that hit the top 10 in both net score on the left hand side and market presence on the right hand side. So it's Microsoft, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Okta, still there even not accounting for a Auth 0, just Okta on its own. If you put in Auth 0, it's, it's even stronger. Adding then in Fortinet and Zscaler. So Microsoft, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Okta, Fortinet, and Zscaler. And as we've mentioned since January, only Fortinet has shown an increase in net score since, since that time, again, since the January survey. Now again, this talks to the compression in spending. Now one of the big themes we hear constantly in cybersecurity is the market is overcrowded. Everybody talks about that, me included. The implication there, is there's a lot of room for consolidation and that consolidation can come in the form of M&A, or it can come in the form of people consolidating onto a single platform, and retiring some other vendors, and getting rid of duplicate vendors. We're hearing that as a big theme as well. Now, as we saw in the previous, previous chart, this is a very crowded market and we've seen lots of consolidation in 2022, in the form of M&A. Literally hundreds of M&A deals, with some of the largest companies going private. SailPoint, KnowBe4, Barracuda, Mandiant, Fedora, these are multi billion dollar acquisitions, or at least billion dollars and up, and many of them multi-billion, for these companies, and hundreds more acquisitions in the cyberspace, now less you think the pond is overfished, here's a chart from ETR of emerging tech companies in the cyber security industry. This data comes from ETR's Emerging Technologies Survey, ETS, which is this diamond in a rough that I found a couple quarters ago, and it's ripe with companies that are candidates for M&A. Many would've liked, many of these companies would've liked to, gotten to the public markets during the pandemic, but they, you know, couldn't get there. They weren't ready. So the graph, you know, similar to the previous one, but different, it shows net sentiment on the vertical axis and that's a measurement of, of, of intent to adopt against a mind share on the X axis, which measures, measures the awareness of the vendor in the community. So this is specifically a survey that ETR goes out and, and, and fields only to track those emerging tech companies that are private companies. Now, some of the standouts in Mindshare, are OneTrust, BeyondTrust, Tanium and Endpoint, Net Scope, which we've talked about in previous Breaking Analysis. 1Password, which has been acquisitive on its own. In identity, the managed security service provider, Arctic Wolf Network, a company we've also covered, we've had their CEO on. We've talked about MSSPs as a real trend, particularly in small and medium sized business, we'll come back to that, Sneek, you know, kind of high flyer in both app security and containers, and you can just see the number of companies in the space this huge and it just keeps growing. Now, just to make it a bit easier on the eyes we filtered the data on these companies with with those, and isolated on those with more than a hundred responses only within the survey. And that's what we show here. Some of the names that we just mentioned are a bit easier to see, but these are the ones that really stand out in ERT, ETS, survey of private companies, OneTrust, BeyondTrust, Taniam, Netscope, which is in Cloud, 1Password, Arctic Wolf, Sneek, BitSight, SecurityScorecard, HackerOne, Code42, and Exabeam, and Sim. All of these hit the ETS survey with more than a hundred responses by, by the IT practitioners. Okay, so these firms, you know, maybe they do some M&A on their own. We've seen that with Sneek, as I said, with 1Password has been inquisitive, as have others. Now these companies with the larger footprint, these private companies, will likely be candidate for both buying companies and eventually going public when the markets settle down a bit. So again, no shortage of players to affect consolidation, both buyers and sellers. Okay, so let's finish with some key questions that we're watching. CrowdStrike in particular on its earnings calls cited softness from smaller buyers. Is that because these smaller buyers have stopped adopting? If so, are they more at risk, or are they tactically moving toward the easy button, aka, Microsoft's good enough approach. What does that mean for the market if smaller company cohorts continue to soften? How about MSSPs? Will companies continue to outsource, or pause on on that, as well as try to free up, to try to free up some budget? Adam Celiski at Reinvent last week said, "If you want to save money the Cloud's the best place to do it." Is the cloud the best place to save money in cyber? Well, it would seem that way from the standpoint of controlling budgets with lots of, lots of optionality. You could dial up and dial down services, you know, or does the Cloud add another layer of complexity that has to be understood and managed by Devs, for example? Now, consolidation should favor the likes of Palo Alto and CrowdStrike, cause they're platform players, and some of the larger players as well, like Cisco, how about IBM and of course Microsoft. Will that happen? And how will economic uncertainty impact the risk equation, a particular concern is increase of tax on vulnerable sectors of the population, like the elderly. How will companies and governments protect them from scams? And finally, how many cybersecurity companies can actually remain independent in the slingshot economy? In so many ways the market is still strong, it's just that expectations got ahead of themselves, and now as earnings forecast come, come, come down and come down to earth, it's going to basically come down to who can execute, generate cash, and keep enough runway to get through the knothole. And the one certainty is nobody really knows how tight that knothole really is. All right, let's call it a wrap. Next week we dive deeper into Palo Alto Networks, and take a look at how and why that company has held up so well and what to expect at Ignite, Palo Alto's big user conference coming up later this month in Las Vegas. We'll be there with theCube. Okay, many thanks to Alex Myerson on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well, as our newest edition to our Boston studio. Great to have you Ken. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our EIC over at Silicon Angle. He does some great editing for us. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly David.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. Please do checkout etr.ai, they got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to The Cube's Thrilling live coverage of AWS Reinvent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Farer. John, things are really ramping up in here. Day one. >>Yep, it's packed already. I heard 70,000 maybe attendees really this year. I just saw that on Twitter. Again, it continues to show that over the past 10 years we've been here, you're seeing some of the players that were here from the beginning growing up and getting bigger and stronger, becoming more platforms, not just point solutions. You're seeing new entrants coming in, new startups, and the innovation you start to see happening, it's really compelling to fun to watch. And our next segment, we have multi 10 time Cube alumni coming on and a first timer, so it should be great. We'll get into some of the innovation, >>Not only as this guest went on the cube 10 times, he also spoke at the first AWS reinvent, just like you were covering it here with Cube. But without further ado, please welcome Ronan and Kevin from NetApp. Thank you gentlemen, both for being here and for matching in your dark blue. How's the show going for you? Ronan, I'm gonna ask you first, you've been here since the beginning. How does it feel in 2022? >>First, it's amazing to see so many people, right? So many humans in one place, flesh and blood. And it's also amazing to see, it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right? Like this is our, this is our event, the people in the cloud. I'm really, really happy to be here and be in the cube as well. >>Fantastic. It, it is a party, it's a cloud party. Yes. How are you feeling being here, Kevin? I'm >>Feeling great. I mean, going all the way back to the early days of Spot T, which was the start that eventually got acquired as Spot by NetApp. I mean this was, this was our big event. This is what we lived for. We've gone, I've gone from everything, one of the smaller booths out here on the floor all the way up to the, the huge booth that we have today. So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem and it's just a lot of fun to get here, see all the customers and talk to everybody. >>That's a lot of fun. Fun. That's the theme that we've been talking about. And we wrote a story about on, on Silicon Angle, more that growth from that getting in and getting bigger, not just an ISV or part of the startup showcase or ecosystem. The progression of the investment on how cloud has changed deliverables. You've been part of that wave. What's the biggest walk away, what's, and what's the most important thing going on now cuz it's not stopping. You got new interests coming in and the folks are rising with the tide and getting platforms built around their products. >>Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago is, is cloud in my decision path and now it's cloud is in my decision path. How much is it and how am I going to use it? And I think especially coming up over the next year, macroeconomic events and everything going on is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud go further than my last dollar? Because I know I'm gonna be there, I know I'm gonna be growing in the cloud, so how do I effectively use it to run my business going forward? >>All right, take a minute to explain Spot now part of NetApp. What's the story? What take us through for the folks that aren't familiar with the journey, where it's come from, where it's today? >>Sure. So SPOT is all about cloud optimization. We help all of our customers deploy scale and optimize their applications in the cloud. And what we do is everything from VMs to containers to any type of custom application you want to deploy, we analyze those applications, we find the best price point to run them, we right size them, we do the automation so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it. And we basically make the whole cloud serverless for you at the end of the day. So whatever you're doing in the cloud, we'll manage that for you from the lowest level of the stack all the way up to the highest level financials. >>Is this what you call the evolved cloud state? >>It is in the evolve clouds a little bit more, and Ronan can touch on that a little bit too. The Evolve clouds not only the public cloud but also the cloud that you're building OnPrem, right? A lot of big companies, it's not necessarily a hundred percent one way or the other. The Evolve cloud is which cloud am I on? Am I on an OnPrem cloud and a public cloud or am I on multiple public clouds in an OnPrem cloud? And I think Ronan, you probably have an opinion on that too. >>Yeah, and and I think what we are hearing from our customers is that many of them are in a situation where a lot of their data has been built for years on premises. They're accelerating their move to the cloud, some of them are accelerating, they're moving into multiple cloud and that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy and cloudy all the time. And then accelerated cloud adoption. This is what the customers are calling the Evolve cloud and that's what we're trying to support them in that journey. >>How many customers are you supporting in this Evolve cloud? You made it seem like you can just turnkey this for everyone, which I am here >>For it. Yeah, just to be clear, I mean we have thousands of customers, right? Everything from your small startups, people just getting going with a few VMs all the way to people scaling to tens and thousands of VMs in the cloud or even beyond VM services and you know, tens of millions of spend a month. You know, people are putting a lot of investment into the cloud and we have all walks of life under our, you know, customer portfolio. >>You know, multi-cloud has been a big topic in the industry. We call it super cloud. Cause we think super cloud kind of more represents the destination to multi-cloud. I mean everyone has multiple clouds, but they're best of breed defaults. They're not by design in most cases, but we're starting to see traction towards that potential common level services fix to late. See, I still think we're on the performance game now, so I have to ask, ask you guys. Performance has becoming back in VO speeds and feeds back during the data center days. Well, I wouldn't wanna talk speeds and feeds of solutions and then cloud comes in. Now we're at the era of cloud where people are moving their workloads there. There's a lot more automation going on, A lot more, as you said, part of the decision. It is the path. Yeah. So they say, now I wanna run my workloads on the better, faster infrastructure. No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware. >>I think that's a tall up for you. Ronan go. >>I mean, I put out my story, no developer ever said, give me the slower software performance and and pay more fast, >>Fastest find too fastest. >>Speed feeds your back, >>Right? And and performance comes in different, in different parameters, right? They think it is come throughput, it comes through latency. And I think even a stronger word today is price performance, right? How much am I paying for the performance that that I need? NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage for customers on both the high end performance as well as in the dollar per performance. That is, that is needed. This is actually one of the key differentiator that Fsx for NetApp on top is an AWS storage based on the NetApp on top storage operating system. This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering. It is SAP certified, for example, where latency is the key, is the key item. It is offering new and fastest throughput available, but also leveraging some advanced features like tiering and so on, is offering unique competitive advantage in the dollar for performance specifically. >>And why, why is performance important now, in your opinion? Obviously besides the obvious of no one wants to run their stuff on the slower infrastructure, but why are some people so into it now? >>I think performance as a single parameter is, is definitely a key influencer of the user experience. None, none of us will, will compromise our our experience. The second part is performance is critical when scale is happening, right? And especially with the scale of data performance to handle massive amounts of data is is becoming more and more critical. The last thing that I'll emphasize is again is the dollar for performance. The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost effective way. This is kind of, that's kind of in the, in the, in the secret sauce of the success of every workload. >>There isn't a company or person here who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper. So you're certainly got your finger on the pulse With that, I wanna talk about a, a customer case study. A little birdie told me that a major US airline recently just had a mass of when we're where according to my notes response time and customer experience was improved by 17 x. Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time. Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that? >>Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow, right? >>Exactly. It's airlines matter. Probably most folks listening, they're >>Doing very well right now. Yes, the >>Airlines and I think we all also needed to deal with changes in the flights with, with really enormous amount of complexity in managing a business like that. We actually rank and choose what, what airline to use among other things based on the level of service that they give us. And especially at the time of crunch, a lot of users are looking through a lot of data to try to optimize, >>Plus all of them who just work this holiday weekend sidebar >>E Exactly right. Can't even, and Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times that are in the middle of this. So 70 x improvement in performance means a loss seven >>Zero or >>17 1 7 1 7 x Right? >>Well, and especially when we're talking about it looks like 50,000, 50,000 messages per minute that this customer was processing. Yes. That that's a lot. That's almost a thousand messages a second. Wow. I think my math tees up there. Yeah. >>It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale and really increase their support for the customer. It also allows them to be more efficient when it comes to cost. Now they need less infrastructure to give better service across the board. The nice thing is that it didn't require them for a lot of work. Sometimes when the customers are doing their journey to the cloud, one of the things that kind of hold them back is like, is either the fear or, or maybe is the, the concern of how much effort will it take me to achieve the same performance or even a better performance in the cloud? They are a live example that not only can you achieve, you can actually exceed the performance that I have on premises and really give customer a better service >>Customer a better service. And reliability is extremely important there. 99.9%. 99% >>99. Yes. >>Yes. That second nine obviously being very important, especially when we're talking about the order of magnitude of, of data and, and actions being taken place. How much of a priority is, is reliability and security for y'all as a team? >>So reliability is a key item for, for everybody, especially in crunch times. But reliability goes beyond the nines. Specifically reliability goes into how simple it is for you to enable backup n dr, how protected are you against ransomware? This is where netup and, and including the fsx for NETUP on top richness of data management makes a huge difference. If you are able to make your copy undeletable, that is actually a game changer when it comes to, to data protection. And this is, this is something that in the past requires a lot of work, opening vaults and other things. Yeah. Now it becomes a very simple configuration that is attached to every net up on top storage, no matter where it is. >>We heard some news at VMware explorer this past fall. Early fall. You guys were there. We saw the Broadcom acquisition. Looks like it's gonna get finalized maybe sooner than later. Lot of, so a lot of speculation around VMware. Someone called the VMware like where is VMware as in where they now, nice pun it was, it was actually Nutanix people, they go at each other all the time. But Broadcom's gonna keep vse and that's where the bread and butter, that's the, that's the goose that lays the Golden eggs. Customers are there. How do you guys see your piece there with VMware cloud on AWS that integrates solution? You guys have a big part of that ecosystem. We've covered it for years. I mean we've been to every VM world now called explorer. You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers. What's the, what's the outlook? >>Yeah, and, and I think the important part is that a big part of the enterprise workloads are running on VMware and they will continue to run on VMware in, in, in the future. And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode if not moving completely to the cloud. The cloud give them unparallel scale, it give them DR and backup opportunities. It does a lot of goodness to that. The partnership that NetApp brings with both VMware as well ass as well as other cloud vendors is actually a game changer. Because the minute that you go to the cloud, things like DR and backup have a different economics connected to them. Suddenly you can do compute less dr definitely on backup you can actually achieve massive savings. NetApp is the only data store that is certified to run with VMware cloud. And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity for unparalleled data protection as well as real, real savings, hard savings. And customers that look today and they say, I'm gonna shrink my data center, I'm gonna focus on, on moving certain things to the cloud, DR and backup and especially DR and backup VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things to take into the cloud. And the partnership betweens VMware and NetApp might actually give you >>And the ONAP is great solution. Fsx there? Yes. I think you guys got a real advantage here and I want to get into something that's kind of a gloom and doom. I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah, but they me nervous John. But you know, if you look at the economic realities you got a lot of companies like that are in the back of a Druva, Netta, Druva, cohesive rub. Others, you know, they, you know, there's a, their generational cloud who breaks through. What's the unique thing? Because you know there's gonna be challenges in the economy and customers are gonna vote with their wallets and they start to see as they make these architectural decisions, you guys are in the middle of it. There's not, there may not be enough to go around and the musical chairs might stop or, or not, I'm not sure. But I feel like if there's gonna be a consolidation, what does that look like? What are customers thinking? Backup recovery, cloud. That's a unique thing. You mentioned economics, it's not, you can't take the old strategy and put it there from five, 10 years ago. What's different now? >>Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection, there is a real change in, in the technology landscape that opened the door for a lot of new vendors to come and offer. Should we expect consolidation? I think microeconomic outside and other things will probably drive some of that to happen. I think there is one more parameter, John, that I wanna mention in this context, which is simplicity. Many of the storage vendors, including us, including aws, you wanna make as much of the backup NDR at basically a simple checkbox that you choose together with your main workload. This is another key capabilities that is, that is being, bringing and changing the market, >>But it also needs to move up. So it's not only simplicity, it's also about moving to the applications that you use, use, and just having it baked in. It's not about you going out and finding a replication. It's like what Ronan said, we gotta make it simple and then we gotta bake it into what they use. So one of our most recent acquisitions of Insta Cluster allows us to provide our customers with open source databases and data streaming services. When those sit on top of on tap and they sit on top of spots, infrastructure optimization, you get all that for free through the database that you use. So you don't worry about it. Your database is replicated, it's highly available, and it's running at the best cost. That's where it's going. >>Awesome. >>You also recently purchased Cloud Checker as well. Yes. Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time? We >>Do. We do. We, >>I'm not >>The, if he walk and act around and then we find the best thing and then we, we break out the checkbook, no, but more seriously, it, it rounds out what customers need for the cloud. So a lot of our customers come from storage, but they need to operate the entire cloud around the storage that they have. Cloud Checker gives us that financial visibility across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud and also gives us a better go to market motion with our MSPs and our distributors than we had in the past. So we're really excited about what cloud checker can unlock for us in >>The future. Makes a lot of sense and congratulations on all the extremely exciting things going on. Our final and closing question for our guests on this year's show is we would love your, your Instagram hot take your 32nd hot take on the most important stories, messages, themes of AWS reinvent 2022. Ronan, I'm gonna start with you cause you have a smirk >>And you do it one day ahead of the keynotes, one day ahead with you. >>You can give us a little tease a little from you. >>I think that pandemic or no pandemic face to face or no face to face, the innovation in the cloud is, is actually breaking all records. And I think this year specifically, you will see a lot of focus on data and scale. I think that's, these are two amazing things that you'll see, I think doubling down. But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow, so I'll learn more about it. >>All right. We might have to chat with you a little bit after tomorrow. Is keynotes and whatnot coming up? What >>About you? I think you're gonna hear a lot about cost. How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities? How, how efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud? I think that's gonna be a huge topic. It's on everybody's mind. It's the macro economics situation right now. I think it's gonna be in every session of the keynote tomorrow. All >>Right, so every >>Session. Every session, >>A bulk thing. John, we're gonna have >>That. >>I'm with him. You know, all S in general, you >>Guys have, and go look up what I said. >>Yeah, >>We'll go back and look at, >>I'm gonna check on you >>On that. The record now states. There you go, Kevin. Thank both. Put it down so much. We hope that it's a stellar show for Spotify, my NetApp. Thank you. And that we have you 10 more times and more than just this once and yeah, I, I can't wait to see, well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions are accurate tomorrow and we get to learn a lot more. >>No, you gotta go to all the sessions down just to check his >>Math on that. Yeah, no, exactly. Now we have to do our homework just to call him out. Not that we're competitive or those types of people at all. John. No. On that note, thank you both for being here with us. John, thank you so much. Thank you all for tuning in from home. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada here at AWS Reinvent with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hey is Keith Townsend a CTO Advisor on the Twitter and we have yet another CUBE alum for this, AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual coverage. AWS re:Invent 2020 unlike any other, I think it's safe to say unlike any other virtual event, AWS, nearly 60, 70,000 people in person, every conference, there's hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to watch the coverage, and we're talking to builders. No exception to that is our friends at Densify, co founder and CTO of Densify Andrew Hillier, welcome back to the show. >> Thanks, Keith, it's great to be with you again. >> So we're recording this right before it gets cold in Toronto. I hope you're enjoying some of this, breaking the cold weather? >> Yeah, no, we're getting the same whether you are right now it's fantastic. We're ready for the worst, I think in the shorter days, but we'll get through it. >> So for those of you that haven't watched any of the past episodes of theCUBE in which Andrew has appeared. Andrew can you recap, Densify, what do you guys do? >> Well, we're analytics where you can think of us as very advanced cost analytics for cloud and containers. And when I say advanced, what I mean is, there's a number of different aspects of cost, there's understanding your bill, there's how to purchase. And we do those, but we also focus heavily on the resources that you're buying, and try to change that behavior. So it's basically, boils down to a business value of saving a ton of money, but by actually changing what you're using in the cloud, as well as providing visibility. So it's, again, a form of cost optimization, but combined with resource optimization. >> So cost of resource optimization, we understand this stuff on-premises, we understand network, compute, storage, heating, cooling, etc. All of that is abstracted from us in the public cloud, what are the drivers for cost in the public cloud? >> Well, I think you directly or indirectly pay for all of those things. The funny thing about it is that it happens in a very different way. And I think everybody's aware, of course, on-demand, and be able to get resources when you need them. But the flip side of on-demand, the not so good size, is it causes what we call micro-purchasing. So when you're buying stuff, if you go and turn on a, like an Amazon Cloud instance, you're paying for that instance, you're paying Rogers and storage as well. And, implicitly for some networking, a few dollars at a time. And that really kind of creates a new situation and scale because all of a sudden now what was a control purchase on-prem, becomes a bunch of possibly junior people buying things in a very granular way, that adds up to a huge amount of money. So the very thing that makes cloud powerful, the on-demand aspects, the elasticity, also causes a very different form of purchasing behavior, which I think is one of the causes of the cost problem. >> So we're about 10, 12 years into this cloud movement, where public cloud has really become mainstream inside of traditional enterprises. What are some of the common themes you've seen when it comes to good cloud management, the cost management, hygiene across organizations? >> Yeah, and hygiene is a great word for that. I think it's evolved, you're right it's been around this is nothing new. I mean, we've probably been going to cloud expos for over a decade now. But it's kind of coming waves as far as the business problem, I think the initial problem was more around, I don't understand this bill. 'Cause to your point, all those things that you purchase on-prem, you're still purchasing in some way, and a bunch of other services. And it all shows up in this really complicated bill. And so you're trying to figure out, well, who in my organization owes what. And so that was a very early driver years ago, we saw a lot of focus on slicing and dicing the bill, as we like to call it. And then that led to well, now I know where my costs are going, can I purchase a little more intelligently. And so that was the next step. And that was an interesting step because what the problem is, the people that care about cost can't always change what's being used, but they can buy discounts and coupons, and RIs and Savings Plans. So we saw that there was a, then start to be focused on, I'm going to come up with ways of buying it, where I can get a bit of a discount. And it's like having a phone bill where I can't stop people making long distance calls, but I can get on a better phone plan. And that, kind of the second wave, and what we're seeing is the next big wave now is that, okay, I've done that, now I actually should just change what I'm actually using because, there's a lot of inefficiency in there. I've got a handle on those other problems, I need to actually, hopefully make people not buy giant instances all the time, for example. >> So let's talk about that feedback loop, understand what's driving the cost, the people that's consuming that, those services and need to understand those costs. How does Densify breach that gap? >> Well, again, we have aspects of our product that lineup with basically all three of those business problems I mentioned. So there's a there's a cloud cost intelligence module that basically lets you look at the bill any different ways by different tags. Look for anomalies, we find that very important, you say, well, this something unusual happened in my bill. So there's aspect that just focuses on kind of accountability of what's happening in the cost world. And then now, one of the strengths of our product is that when we do our analytics, we look at a whole lot of things at once. So we look at, the instances and their utilization, and what the catalog is, and the RIs and Savings Plans, and everything all together. So if you want to purchase more intelligently, that can be very complicated. So we see a lot of customers that say, well, I do want to buy savings plans, but man, it's difficult to figure out exactly what to do. So we like to think of ourselves as kind of a, it's almost like a, an analytics engine that's got an equation with a lot of terms in. It's got a lot of detail of what we're taking into account when we tell you what you should be doing. And that helps you by more intelligently, it also helps you consume more intelligently, 'cause they're all interrelated. I don't want to change an instance I'm using if there's no RI on it, that would take you backwards. I don't want to buy RIs for instances that I shouldn't be using, that takes you backwards. So it's all interconnected. And we feel that looking at everything at once is the path to getting the right answer. And having the right answer is the path to having people actually make a change. >> So when I interviewed you a few years ago, we talked about very high level containers, and how containers is changing the way that we can consume Cloud Services, containers introduced this concept of oversubscription, and the public cloud. We couldn't really oversubscribe and for large instance, back then. But we can now with containers, how are containers in general complicating cloud costing? >> So it's interesting because they do allow overcommit but not in the same way that a virtual environment does. So in a virtual environment, if I say I need two CPUs for job X, I need two CPUs for job Y, I can put them both on a machine that has two CPUs, and there will be over committed. So over committed in a virtual environment, it is a very well established operation. It lets you get past people asking for too much effectively. Containers don't quite do that in the same way, when they refer to overcommit, they refer to the fact that you can ask for one CPU, but you can use up to four, and that difference is if you overcommit. But the fact that I'm asking for one CPU is actually a pretty big problem. So let me give an example. If I look into my laptop here, and I've got Outlook and Word and all these things on it, and I had to tell you how many millicores I had to give each one, or with Zoom, let's see I'm running Zoom. Now, well, I want Zoom to work well, I want to give it $4,000 millicores, I want to give it four CPUs, because it uses that when it needs it. But my PowerPoint, I also want to give 4000 or $2,000 millicores. So I add all these things up of what I need based on the actual more granular requirements. And it might add up to four laptops. But containers don't overcommit the same way, if I asked for those requests by using containers, I actually will use for laptops. So it's those request values that are the trick, if I say I need a CPU, I get a CPU, it's not the same as a virtual CPU would be in a virtual environment. So we see that as the cause of a lot of the problem and that people quite rationally say I need these resources for these containers. But because containers are much more granular, I'm asking for a lot of individual resource, that when you add them up, it's a ton of resources. So almost every container running, we see that they're very low utilization, because everybody, rightfully so asked for individual resources for each container, but they are the wrong resources, or in aggregate, it's not creating the behavior you wanted. So we find containers are a bit, people think they're going to magically cause problems to go away. But in fact, what happens is, when you start running a lot of them, you end up just with a ton of cost. And people are just starting to get to that point now. >> Yeah, I can see how that could easily be the case inside of a virtual environment. I can easily save my VM needs four CPUs, four VCPUs. And I can do that across 100 applications. And that really doesn't cost me a lot in the private data center, tools like VMware, DRS, and all of that kind of fix that for me on the back-end is magical. In the public cloud, if I ask for four CPUs, I get four CPUs, and I'm going to pay for four CPUs, even if I don't utilize it, there's no auto-balancing. So how does Densify help actually solve that problem? >> Well, so they, there's multiple aspects for that problem, ones of the thing was that people don't necessarily ask for the right thing in the first place, that's one of the biggest ones. So, I give the example of, I need to give Zoom 4,000 millicores, that's probably not true at all, if I analyze what it's doing, maybe for a second it uses that, but for the most of the time, it's not using nearly those resources. So the first step is to analyze the container behavior patterns, and say, well, those numbers should be different. And so for example, the one thing we do with that is, we say, well if a developer is using terraform templates to stand up containers, we can say, instead of putting the number 1000, in that, a thousand millercores, or 400 millicores in your template, just put a variable and that references our analytics, just let the analytics figure what that number should be. And so it's a very elegant solution to say, the machine learning will actually figure out what resources that container needs, 'cause humans are not very good at it, especially when there's 10s of thousands of containers. So that's kind of the, one of the big things is to optimize the container of requests. And then once you've done that the nodes that you're running on can be optimized, because now they start to look different. Maybe you don't have, you don't need as much memory or as much CPU. So it's all again, it's all interrelated, but it's a methodical step that's based on analytics. And, people, they're too busy to figure this out, that they can't figure it out for thousands of things. Again, if I asked you don't get your laptop, on your laptop, how many miillicores do you need to get PowerPoint? You don't know. But in containers, you have to know. So we're saying let the machine figure out. >> Yes kind of like when you're asked how many miillicores do you need to give Zoom answer's yes. >> Yeah exactly. >> (laughs) So at the end of the day, you need some way to quantify that. So you guys are doing the two things. One, you're quantifying, you're measuring how much this application typically take. And then when I go to provision it, we're using a tool like terraform. Though then instead of me answering the question, the answer is go ask Densify, and Densify will tell you, and then I'll optimize my environment. So I get both ends of that equation, if I'm kind of summarizing it correctly. >> Absolutely. And that last part is extremely important because, in a legacy environment, like in a virtual environment, I can call an API and change the size of VM, and it will stay that way. And so that's a viable automation strategy for those types of environments. In the cloud, or when you're using terraform, or in containers, they will go right back to what's in the terraform template, that's one of the powerful things about terraform is that it always matches what's in the code. So I can't go and change the cloud, it'll just go back to whatever is in the terraform template next time, it's provision. So we have to go upstream, you have to actually do it at the source, when you're provisioning applications, the actual resource specifications should be coming through at that point, you can't, you don't want to change them after the fact, you can update the terraform and redeploy with a new value, that that's the way to do automation in a container environment, it doesn't, you can't do it, like you did in a VMware environment, because it won't stick, it just gets undone the next time the DevOps pipeline triggers. So it's both a, it's a big opportunity for a kind of a whole new generation of automation, doing it, we call it CICDCO. It's, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Optimization. It's just part of the, of the fabric of the way you deploy Ops, and it's a much more elegant way to do it. >> So you hit two trigger words, or a few trigger terms, one, DevOps, two, I'm saying DevOps, CICD, and Continuous Operations. What is the typical profile of a Densify customer? >> Well, usually, they're a mix of a bunch of different technologies. So I don't want to make it sound like you have to be a DevOps shop to benefit from this, most of our customers have some DevOps teams, they also have a lot of legacy workloads, they have virtual environments, they have cloud environments. So don't necessarily have 100%, of all of these things. But usually, it's a mix of things where, there might be some newer born in the cloud as being deployed, and this whole CICDCO concept really makes sense for them, they might just have another few thousand cloud instances that they stood up, not as a part of a DevOps pipeline, but just to run apps or maybe even migrated from on-prem. So it's a pretty big mix, we see almost every company has a mix, unless you just started a company yesterday, you're going to have a mix of some EC2 services that are kind of standalone and static, maybe some skill groups running, or containers running skill groups. And there's a generally a mix of these things. So the things I'm describing do not require DevOps, the notion of optimizing the cloud instances, by changing the marching orders when they're provisioned not after the fact, that that applies to any anybody using the cloud. And our customers tend to be a mix, some again very new, new school processes and born in the cloud. And some more legacy applications that are running that look a little more like on-prem environment would, where they're not turning on and off dynamically, they're just running transactional workloads. >> So let's talk about the kind of industries, because you you hit on a key point, we kind of associate a certain type of company with born in the cloud, et cetera. What type of organizations or industries are we seeing Densify deployed in. >> So we don't really have a specific market vertical that we focus on, we have a wide variety. So we find we have a lot of customers in financial services, banks, insurance companies. And I think that's because those are very large, complicated environments, where analytics really pay dividends, if you have a lot of business services, that are doing different things, and different criticality levels. The things I'm describing are very important. But we also have logistics companies, software companies. So again, complexity plays a part, I think elasticity plays a part in the organization that wants to be able to make use of the cloud in a smart way where they're more elastic, and obviously drive costs down. So again, we have customers across all different types of industries, manufacturing, pharmaceutical. So it's a broad range, we have partners as well that use our like IBM, that use our product, and their customers. So there's no one type of company that we focus on, certainly. But we do see, again, environments that are complicated or mission critical, or that they really want to run in a more of elastic way, those tend to be very good customers for us. >> Well, CUBE alum Andrew Hillier, thank you for joining us on theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual. Say goodbye to a couple hundred thousand of your closest friends. >> Okay, and thanks for having me. >> That concludes our interview with Densify. We really appreciate the folks that Densify, having us again to have this conversation around workload analytics and management. To find out more of, well or find out just more great CUBE coverage, visit us on the web SiliconANGLE TV. Talk to you next episode of theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Cube with digital coverage of Dev >>Ops Virtual Forum Brought to You by Broadcom. Welcome to Broadcom, Step Ups, Virtual Forum I and Lisa Martin and I'm joined by another Martin very socially. Distance from me all the way. Coming from Birmingham, England, is Glynn Martin, head of Q. A transformation at BT Glenn. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. I'm looking forward, Toa. >>As we said before, we went live to Martin's for the price of one in one segment. So this is gonna be an interesting segment, Guesses. What we're gonna do is Glen's gonna give us a really kind of deep inside out view of Dev ops. From an evolution perspective, Soglo's Let's start transformation is at the heart of what you dio. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the transformation that you are so responsible for driving? >>Yeah. Thank you, Leigh. So I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year Bond, although working for BT, which is ah, global telecommunications company. Relatively resilient, I suppose, as an industry through covert, it obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges on bond. If anything is actually caused us to accelerate of our transformation journey, you know, we had to do some great things during this time around. You know, in the UK for our emergency and health workers give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them and that spent that we've had to deliver changes quickly. Um, but what? We want to be able to do it, deliver those kind of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency eso we were already on the kind of journey to by John, but ever so ever more important now that we are what we're able to do, those that kind of work, do it more quickly on. But it works because the implications of it not working is could be terrible in terms of, you know, we've been supporting testing centers, new hospitals to treat covert patients, so we need to get it right and therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do. It really has taken on a new scowling what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. Um, you know, what I would say is that you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have small cost challenges. We have to obviously deal with the fact that you know, Cove in 19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less cost, but they're having to deliver more value quicker on bond, you know, to higher quality. So, yeah, certainly the finances is on our minds. And that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth. But we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value, especially in, you know, these times when there are financial challenges on companies. >>So one of the things that I want to ask you about again looking at, develops from the inside out on the evolution that you've seen you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think Dev ops, we think speed. But one of the things I love to get your perspective on we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that scene there as as needing to get, as you said, get things right but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers? How have you seen that cultural shift? >>Yeah, I think you know, before, you know, test test team saw themselves of this part of the software delivery cycle. Andi, actually, now, really, our customers were expecting their quality and to deliver for our customers what they want. Quality has to be ingrained throughout the life cycle. Obviously that you know, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left. How do you do? Shift left testing. But for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities shared capabilities throughout the life cycle. That Dr you know, Dr Automation drive improvements. I always say that you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator on one thing that we're finding on our Dev Ops Journey Waas that we were you know, we would be trying thio do certain things quicker and had automated build automated tests. But if we were taking weeks to create test scripts or we were taking weeks to manly craft data, and even then when we had taken so long to do it that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later in the lifecycle or even in in our production environment, we just couldn't afford to do that. And actually, you know, focusing on continuous testing over the last 9 to 12 months has really given us the ability Thio delivered quickly across the the whole life cycle and therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi agile kind of thing where we did you use the stories we did a few of the kind of, you know, as our ceremonies. But we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because, you know, our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more water for releases. And, you know, when way didn't think ourselves. So we've done a lot of work on every aspect, especially from a testing point of view, every aspect of every activity, rather than just looking at automated test, you know, whether it is actually creating the test in the first place, Whether it's doing security testing earlier in the light and performance testing. Learn the life cycle, etcetera. So, yeah, it Z It's been a riel key thing that for for C T for us to drive, develops, >>talk to me a little bit about your team. What are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through life cycle? >>Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this, you know, there's a thing. I think people were pretty quiet. Customer experience. Gap. It reminds me of a cart, a Gilbert cartoon where, you know, we start with the requirements here on Do you know, we almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver eyes completely, completely different. So we think the testing team or the the delivery team, you know, you know, you think they've done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria, but then our customers the same Well, actually, that's not working. This isn't working, you know, on there's this kind of gap Way had a great launched this year of actual Requirement Society, one of the board common tools Onda that for the first time in in since I remember actually working within B. T, I had customers saying to may, Wow, you know, we want more of this. We want more projects, um, to have a actual requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration, but how do you actually, you know, do that have something that both the business on technical people can understand? And we've actually been working with the business using at our requirement. Designer Thio, you know, really look about what the requirements are. Tease out requirements to the hadn't even thought off and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage. And so what we actually deliver at the end of it, not only have you been able Thio generate test more quickly, but we've got much higher test coverage and also can more smartly, you're using the kind of AI within the tour and with some of the other kind of pipeline tools actually deliver to choose the right tests on the bar, still actually doing a risk based testing approach. So that's been a great launched this year, but just the start of many kind of things that we're >>doing. But what I hear in that Glenn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Uh, talk to me about it and I like that perspective. This is a very challenging time for everybody in the world, but it sounds like from a collaboration, perspective is you're right. We talk about that a lot critical with Dev Ops. But those challenges there you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pit it so fast? >>I mean, you talked about culture. I mean, you know, Bt is like most come countries companies. So, um, is very siloed. You know, we're still trying to work to become closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around. How do you integrate with other tools? How do you integrate with you know, the various different technologies and bt we have 58 different whitey stacks? That's not systems that stacks all of those stacks of can have, you know, hundreds of systems on we're trying to. We're gonna drive at the moment a simplified program where we're trying Thio, you know, reduce that number 2 14 stacks. And even then they'll be complexity behind the scenes that that we will be challenged. Maurin Mawr As we go forward, how do you actually hired that to our users on as an I T organization? How do we make ourselves Lena so that even when we you know, we've still got some of that legacy and we'll never fully get rid of it on that's the kind of trade off that we have to make. How do we actually deal with that and and hide that for my users a say and and and drive those programs so we can actually accelerate change. So we take, you know, reduce that kind of waste, and that kind of legacy costs out of our business. You know, the other thing is, well, beating. And I'm sure you know telecoms probably no difference to insurance or finance we've got You know, when you take the number of products that we do and then you combine them, the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we as a business to trying to simplify. We are trying Thio do that in a natural way and haven't trying to do agile in the proper way, you know, and really actually work it paste really deliver value. So I think what we're looking Maura, Maura, at the moment is actually, um is more value focus? Before we used to deliver changes, sometimes into production, someone had a great idea or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago. But actually, then we end up deploying it. And then we look at the the the users, you know, the usage of that product of that application or whatever it is on. It's not being used for six months, so we're getting much we haven't got, you know, because of the last 12 months, we certainly haven't got room for that kind of waste and you know, the for not really understanding the value of changes that we we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing at the moment is really taken that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management. What bits of the our process are actually taking too long, and we've We've started on that journey, but we've got a hell of a long way to go, you know, But that that involves looking every aspect off the kind of software delivery cycle. >>What are some? Because that that going from, what, 58 i t stocks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be go simplifying is sounds magical. Took everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we've started on a continuous testing journey, and I think that's just the start. I mean, that's really, as I say, looking at every aspect off, you know, from a Q, a point of view. It's every aspect of what we dio. But it's also looking at, you know, we're starting to branch into more like a AI ops and, you know, really, the full life cycle on. But, you know, that's just a stepping stone onto, you know, I think oughta Nomics is the way forward, right? You know all of this kind of stuff that happens um, you know, monitoring, you know, monitoring systems, what's happening in production had to be feed that back. How do you get to a point where actually we think about a change on then suddenly it's in production safely. Or if it's not going to safety, it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey. But if we want Thio, you know, in a world where the pace is ever increasing the demands of the team and you know, with the pressures on at the moment where with we're being asked to do things, you know more efficiently Ondas leaving as possible. We need to be, you know, thinking about every part of the process. And how do we put the kind of stepping stones in players to lead us to a more automated kind of, you know, their future? >>Do you feel that that plant outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered? Given this massive shift that you're experiencing, >>I think it's starting to, and I think you know, Azzawi. Look at more of a value based approach on. Do you know a Zeiss? A princess was a kind of flight management. I think that's that will become ever evermore important. So I think it's starting to people. Certainly realized that, you know, people teams need to work together. You know, the kind of the cousin between business and ICT, especially as we go Teoh Mawr kind of sad space solutions, low cold solutions. You know there's not such a gap anymore. Actually, some of our business partners expects to be much more tech savvy. Eso I think you know, this is what we have to kind of appreciate. What is I ts role? How do we give the capabilities become more for centers of excellence rather than actually doing Mount amount of work And for May and from a testing point of view, you know, amount, amount of testing, actually, how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of created? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. >>What are some? As we look forward, what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next say, 6 to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? >>Yeah, I think you know, certainly for for where we are as a company from a Q A perspective. We are. Yeah, there's certain bits that we do Well, you know, we've started creating continuous delivery. A day evokes pipelines. Um, there's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for May I I've challenged my team with saying, How do we do an automated journey? So if I, you know, I put a requirement injera or value whoever it is, that's why. Then click a button on bond, you know, with either zero touch of one touch, then put that into production and have confidence that that has been done safely on that it works. And what happens if it doesn't work? So you know, that's that's the next in the next few months, that's what our concentration is about. But it's also about decision making, you know, how do we actually understand those value judgements? And I think there's lots of the things Dev ops, ai ops, kind of always that aspects of business operations. I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kind of decisions. How does it all tied together, as I say, even still with kind of Dev ops, we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing some doing similar kind of things but the walking of working in silos Still. So I think, having a eye ops Aziz becomes more and more to the fore as we go to the cloud. And that's what we need to. You know, we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know. So we need to make sure the technologies work with Cloud as well as you kind of legacy systems. But it's about bringing that all together and having a full visible pipeline. Everybody can see and make decisions against >>you said the word confidence, which jumped out at me right away. Because absolutely, you've gotta have be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, dev ops to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? >>Yeah, I mean, I think the the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology we've actually taken human centered design a za core principle of what we dio within the i t part of BT. So by using humans tend to design. That means we talked to our customers. We understand their pain points, we map out their current processes on. But when we mapped out, those processes also understand their aspirations as well, you know, Where do they want to be in six months? You know, Do they want to be more agile and you know, or do they want Teoh? Is this apart their business that they want thio run better? We have to Then look at why that's not running well and then see what solutions are out there. We've been lucky that, you know, with our partnership with Broadcom within the P l. A. A lot of the tortures and the P l. A have directly answered some of the businesses problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, um, you know, especially if the business hold the purse strings, which is you know, in some companies, including as they do there is that kind of, you know, almost by understanding their their pain points and then saying This is how we can solve your problem We've tended to be much more successful than trying Thio impose something and say We're here to technology that they don't quite understand doesn't really understand how it could have resonate with their problems. So I think that's the heart of it is really about, you know, getting looking at the data, looking at the processes, looking at where the kind of waste is on. Then actually then looking at the right solutions. And as I say, continuous testing is a massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with capitals looking at visual ai on. Actually, there's a common theme through that, and I mean, AI is becoming more and more prevalent, and I know yeah, sometimes what is A I and people have kind of the semantics of it. Is it true, ai or not? But yes, certainly, you know, AI and machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work, and it's allowing us to be much more effective, the quicker and what we do on being more accurate. You know, whether it's finding defects, running the right tests or, you know, being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. >>Welcome. Thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight. Outlook at Dev Ops, sharing the successes that you're having taking those challenges, converting them toe opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes or maybe slightly behind advice. I'm sure they appreciate it. We appreciate your time. >>It's been an absolute pleasure, Really. Thank you for inviting me of Extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. >>Excellent. Me too. I've learned a lot for Glynn Martin and Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBEConversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeffrey here with theCUBE we're in our Palo Alto Studios the calendar has turned to late September I still can't believe it. We're still getting through the COVID issue and as we've seen in the news companies are taking all different types of tacts and how they're announcing kind of their go forward strategy with the many of them saying they're going to continue to have work from home or work from anywhere policies. And we're really excited to have our next guest from Citrix. He's Tim Minahan, the EVP of Strategy and the CMO of Citrix, Tim great to see you. >> Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Yeah so love having you guys on we had Tamara on and Amy Haworth this back in April when this thing was first starting and you know we had this light switch moment and everyone had to deal with a work from anywhere world. Now, it's been going on for over six months, people are making announcements, Google, Facebook, Twitter I'm out in the Valley so a lot of the companies here locally saying we're probably not going to have you back for a very long period of time. You guys have been in the supporting remote workers for a really long time, you're kind of like Zoom right place, right time, right market and then suddenly this light switch moment, it's a whole lot more important than it was before. We're six months into this thing what can you share that you've seen from your customers and kind of the transition that we've gone from kind of the shock and awe back in March to now we're in late September almost to October and this is going to continue for a while. >> Yeah, Jeff well, if there is any silver lining to the global crisis that we're all living through, it's that it has indeed caused organizations in all industries really to accelerate their digital transformation and to rethink how they work. And so at Citrix we've done considerable crisis scenario modeling. Engaging with our own customers, with government officials, with influencers around the globe really to determine how will the current environment change, cause companies to change their operating models and to prioritize their IT investments. And it really boils down to while there's variations by geography and sector, our modeling points to three major shifts in behavior. The first is looking for greater agility in their operations companies are adopting more variable operating models, literally in everything from their workforce strategy to the real estate strategy, to their IT strategy to allow them to scale up quickly to the next inevitable, unplanned event or opportunity. And for IT this typically means modernizing their application environment and taking that kind of one to three year cloud transition plan and accelerating it into a few months. The second thing we're seeing is because of the pandemic companies are realizing they need to prioritize employee experience to provide a consistent and secure work experience wherever work needs to get done. Whether that's in the office, whether that's on the road or increasingly whether that's at home and that goes beyond just traditional virtualization applications but it's also for delivering in a secure and unified environment. Your virtual apps alongside your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, et cetera. And then finally, as companies rapidly move to the cloud and they adopt SaaS and they moved to these more distributed IT operating models, their attack surface from a security standpoint expands and they need to evolve their security model to one that is much more contextual and understands the behaviors and the access behaviors of individuals so if you're going to apply security policies and you'll keep your company information and application secure no matter where work is getting done. >> That's a great summary and you know there's been lots of conversation about security and increased attack surface but now you had a blog post that you published last month, September 15th, really interesting. And you talked about kind of COVID being this accelerant in work from home and we talk a lot about consumerization of IT and apps but we haven't talked a lot about it in the context of the employee experience. And you outlined some really great specific vocabulary those people need to be able to sit and think and create and explore the way they want so they can become what they can be free from the distractions at the same time you go through the plethora of I don't know how many business apps we all have to interact with every single day from Salesforce to Asana to Slack to Outlook to Google Drive to Box to et cetera, et cetera. And as you point out here the distractions in I think you said, "People are interrupted by a text, a chat or application alert every two minutes." So that there's this real battle between trying to do higher value work and less minutiae versus this increasing number of applications that are screaming for my attention and interrupting me anytime I'm trying to get something done. So how do you guys look at that and say, hey, we've got an opportunity to make some serious improvements so that you can get to that and cut the employee experience so they can deliver the higher value stuff and not just moving paper down the line. >> Yeah, absolutely Jeff, to your point you know a lot of the tools that we've introduced and adopted and the devices we've used in the like over the years certainly provide some advantages in helping us collaborate better, helping us execute business transactions and the like. However, they've also added a lot of complexity, right? As you said, typical employees use more than a dozen apps to get work done often four or more just to complete a single business process like submitting an expense or a purchase order or approving time off. They spend another 20% of their time searching for information they need to do their jobs across all of these different applications and collaboration channels and they are interrupted by alerts and texts and chats every few minutes. And that really keeps them from doing their core jobs and so Citrix is committed to delivering a digital workspace solutions that help companies transform employee experience to drive better business outcomes. And we do that in three ways. Number one is leveraging our heritage around delivering a unified and secure work environment. We bring all of the resources and employee needs together, your virtual apps and desktops, your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, your information and your content into one unified experience. We wrapper that in a contextualized security model that doesn't get in the way of employees getting their job done but understands that employees, their behavior, their access protocols and assigns additional security policies, maybe a second level of authentication or maybe turning off certain features if they're behaving a little bit differently. But the key thing I think is that the third component we've also over the past several years infused within this unified workspace, intelligence, machine learning, workflows or micro apps that really remove that noise from your day, providing a personalized work stream to that individual employee and only offering up the individual tasks or the insights that they need to get their job done. Really guiding them through their day and automating some of that noise out of their day so they can really focus on being creative, focus on being innovative and to your point, giving them that space they need to succeed. >> Yeah, it's a great point, Tim and you know one of the hot buzz words that we hear all the time right now is artificial intelligence and machine learning. And people talk about it, it's kind of like big data where that's not really where the opportunity is in kind of general purpose AI as we've talked to people in natural language processing and video processing. It's really about application specific uses of AI to do something and I know you guys commissioned looks like a report called Work 2035. There's a nice summary that I was able to pull off the internet and there's some really positive things in here. It's actually, you know it got some good news in it about work being more flexible and new jobs will be created and productivity will get a major boost but the piece  I wanted to focus on which piggybacks on what you're just talking is the application of AI around a lot of specific tasks whether that's nudges, personal assistance, wearables that tell you to get up and stretch. And as I think and what triggered as you said, as this person is sitting at their desk trying to figure out what to do now, you've got your calendar, you've got your own tasks but then you've got all these notifications. So the opportunity to apply AI to help me figure out what I should be focusing on that is a tremendous opportunity and potential productivity enhancer, not to mention my mental health and positive attitude and engagement. >> Yeah, absolutely Jeff, and this Work 2035 project that we undertook is from a year long effort of research, quantitative research of business executives, IT executives supplemented with qualitative research with futurist work experts and the like to really begin a dialogue together with governments, with enterprises, with other technology companies about how we should be leveraging technology, how we should be changing our operating models and how we should be adapting our business culture to facilitate a new and better way to work. And to your point, some of the key findings are it's not going to be Skynet out there in the future. AI is not going to overtake all of our jobs and the like it is going to actually help us, you're going to see more of the augmented worker that really not only offers up the insights and the tasks like we just talked about when they're needed but actually helps us through decision-making helps us actually assess massive amounts of data to better engage with customers, better service healthcare to patients and the like. To your point, because of this some jobs certainly will be lost but new jobs will be created, right? And some people will need to be the coaches or trainers for these bots and robots. You'll see things like advanced data scientists becoming more in demand, virtual reality managers, privacy and trust managers. And then to your point, work is going to be more flexible we already talked about this but the ability to allow employees to perform at their best and give them all the resources they need to do so wherever work needs to happen, whether that's in the office, in the field or at home but importantly for businesses and even for employees this actually changes the dynamic of what we think about as a workforce. We can now tap into new pools of talent not just in remote locations but entire segments that had because of our traditional work hub model where I build a big office building or a call center and people have to commute there. Now they can work anywhere so you think about recent retirees that have a lot of domain expertise can get back into the workforce, stay at home parents or stay at home caregivers can actually engage and use their skills and expertise to reengage in that workforce. These are really, really exciting things and then the last thing is, it will help us improve employee engagement, improve wellness and improve productivity by having AI help us throughout our day, guiding us to the right decisions and automating tasks that typically added noise to our day so that we can focus on where we as humans are great which is some of the key decision-making, the creativity, the innovation to drive that next wave of growth for our companies. >> Yeah it's really interesting the kind of divergence that you're seeing with people in this opportunity, right? One of the benefits is that there is no script in how to move forward today, right? This has never happened before, especially at the scale so people are trying all kinds of things and you're talking about is a lot of positive uses of technology to an aide or to get blockers out of the way and help people do a better job. Unfortunately, there's this whole other track that we hear about, you know monitoring, are you in front of your desk, monitoring how many Zoom calls are you on a day, monitoring all these silly things that are kind of old school management of activity versus kind of new school managing of output. And we've done a lot of interviews on this topic, one of Darren Murph from GitLab great comments, does it now as a boss, your job should be removing blockers from your people to help them do a better job, right? That's such a different kind of mentality than managing their tasks and managing the minutiae. So really a lot of good stuff and we could go for a very long time and maybe we'll have a followup, but I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about the other big delta that impacts both of you and I pretty dramatically and that's virtual events or the fact that basically March 15th there was no more gatherings of people, period. And you guys we've covered Citrix Synergy in the past but this year you guys have gone a different kind of tact. And again, I think what's so interesting about it is there is no right answer and everyone is trying to experiment and we're seeing all different ways to get your message to the market. But then the other really important part of events is getting leads, right? And getting engagement with your audience whether that's customers, whether that's partners, whether it's prospects, whether it's press and analysts and everything else. So I wonder if you can share with us kind of the thinking you had the benefit of kind of six months into this thing versus a couple of weeks which a few people had in early May, you know how did you kind of look at the landscape and how did you come to the conclusion that for you guys, it's this three event you've got Citrix Cloud on October 8th, Citrix Workspace Summit on October 22nd and Citrix Security Summit on October 29th. What did you think about before you came to this decision? >> Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff and certainly we put a lot of thought into it and to your point what helped clarify things for us is we always put the customer first. And so, like many other companies we did have our Big User Conference scheduled for the May timeframe, but you know considering the environment at that time and companies were just figuring out how to get their employees home and working securely and safely, how to maintain business continuity. We felt the inappropriate at time to be able to be talking about future innovations and so on and so forth. So we made the decision to kind of put an end to our Citrix Synergy for the year and instead, we went through all this scenario modeling as I mentioned and we've accelerated our focus and our investments and our partnerships to develop new innovations to help our customers achieve the three things that they prioritize which is accelerating that cloud transition, that hybrid multicloud transition plan, advancing their digital workspace and employee experience strategies and embracing a new, more contextual security framework. And so when we thought about how do we bring those announcements to market, how do we help educate our customers around these topics? It became very clear that we needed to design for digital attention spans which means it's not everything in the kitchen sink and we hope that we're bringing a whole bunch of different buying segments together and customer segments together and hope that they glean out the key insights we want. Instead, we wanted to be very focused around the cloud acceleration, the workspace and employee experience strategies and the security strategies is we created three separate summits. And even within the summits we've designed them for digital attention spans, no individual segment is going to be more than 20 minutes long. There'll be very descriptive so you can almost choose your own pathway as you go through the conference rather than having to commit a whole day or the likes you can get the information you need, it's supplemented by knowledge centers so you can go deeper if you want to and talk to some of our experts, if you want to. And it's certainly something we'll use to facilitate ongoing dialogue long after the day of event. >> Really interesting 20 minutes is the longest session. That is really progressive and again I think it's great to hear you say that you started from the perspective of the customer. I think so many people have basically started from the perspective of what did we do for the SaaS convention May five through eight in 2019 and then try to replicate that kind of almost one-to-one in a digital format which isn't really doing justice to either of the formats, I think and not really looking at the opportunity that digital affords that physical doesn't and we just getting together and grabbing a coffee or a drink or whatever in those hallways but there's a whole lot of things that you can do on a digital event that you can't do in a physical event. And we're seeing massive registration and more importantly, massive registration of new people that didn't have the ability couldn't afford it, couldn't get away from the shop whatever the reason is that that the physical events really weren't an option. So I think instead of focusing on the lack of hallway chatter spend your time focusing on the things you can do with this format that you couldn't before. And I think removing the space-time bounds of convention space availability and the limited number of rooms that you can afford, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the budget this really does open up a very different way to get your message to market. >> It does, Jeff and what I'm excited about is what does it mean for the future of events overall? I think there's going to be some very valuable lessons learned for all of us in the industry and I expect just like work won't be the same when we return back to the office, post-pandemic. I don't think the events approach that companies take is going to be quite the same as it was previous and I think that'll be a good thing. There'll be a lot of lessons learned about how people want to engage, how to reach new segments, as you mentioned. And so I think you'll see a blended events strategy from companies across the industry going forward. >> Yeah. And to your point, event was part of your communication strategy, right? It was part of your marketing strategy it is part of your sales strategy so that doesn't necessarily all have to again be bundled into one week in May and can be separated. Well, Tim really, really enjoyed the conversation I have to say your blog posts had some really kind of really positive things in it in terms of the way people should be thinking about their employees not as resources but as people which is one of my pet peeves I'm not a big fan of the human resources word and I really was encouraged by some of the stuff coming out of this 2035 I think you said it's going to be an ongoing project so it'll be great to see what continues to come out because I don't know how much of that was done prior to COVID or kind of augmented after COVID but I would imagine the acceleration on the Delta is going to go up dramatically over the next several months or certainly over the next couple of years. >> Yeah, Jeff, I would say I think Winston Churchill said it best "Never waste a good crisis." And smart companies are doing that right now. I think there's going to be a lot of lessons learned there's going to be a lot of acceleration of the digital transformation and the work model transformations and the business model transformations that companies have had on the radar but haven't really been motivated to do so. And they're really accelerating those now I think that the world of work and the world of IT is going to look a heck of a lot different when we emerge from all of this. >> Yep, yep. I agree well, Tim thank you again for sharing your insight, sharing your information and is great to catch up. >> You too. >> Alright, take care. >> I know. >> He's Tim, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is an episode in the Remote Works Citrix Virtual Series. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year covering VMworld, the global experience, so we get to be able to pull in the community from around the globe. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, but a new role. Jill Stelfox, she is the chairman and CEO at Panzura. Jill, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, Jill, so first, before we get into kind of what you're bringing to Panzura and the direction, we're here at VMworld. Panzura is a longtime partner of VMware. Why don't you just give us the update as to VMware and Panzura and how you support customers together? >> Yeah, so most of our deployments of Panzura actually run on VMware, whether it's on-prem or at the closest cloud location. So we work really closely in our hundreds and hundreds of deployments across the world. >> Wonderful, and for most of our audience, if they're not familiar with Panzura, of course, it's very high performance, really look at that cloud file system. Is that how it's positioned on your website? Bring us as to what brought you to Panzura, and what that means to the organization now that you're chairman and CEO. >> Yeah, so about five months ago now, we purchased the company from the current set of investors. We saw a really interesting technology here, and the ability to grow quite quickly, which, honestly, it's come true in the last few months, and Panzura is more than just a file system. It is a piece of fabric that allows you to put files in a really high performance way into the cloud, and collaborate across the globe, and who knew that five months ago when we bought the company, literally we bought the company a few days before California closed for COVID, and so this is the moment where file storage and collaboration is absolutely key, so great timing for us from that perspective. >> Yeah, absolutely. We've had so many conversations with companies as they have to really move fast, to be able to exist in the, I guess we call it the new abnormal, Jill. Help us maybe, if you've got a customer example of what's bringing the customers to Panzura, especially right now when there's acceleration of cloud, it's the theme we see, and the keynote here at VMworld and beyond, but what is it that differentiates Panzura and brings customers to you? >> Yeah, so we work, for example, with one of the largest banks in the world that took a legacy wire transfer application and put it out into the cloud, because they had no way of managing both the volume of transactions and the breadth worldwide that they needed in order to manage that application, and it would have taken years to rewrite that in a cloud native app, and putting it on Panzura works great. We also work with architecture firms, some of the largest in the world, where they're able to collaborate on building buildings all from home, which is pretty amazing, and then I would say the last, and maybe the coolest, is what we do in entertainment. We work with a large majority of the gaming companies, and they use Panzura to run all their files and collaborate on those really large games where they can code across the world, and then in the case, we just announced a partnership with the New Orleans Saints, where we're taking all their game day footage, and making it available to all their constituents quite quickly, and the big difference in all of those examples from other solutions, and what we do at Panzura, is that in other solutions, you have to duplicate that data across the world. We don't. We provide one single file, one single source, that's kept securely all the time and available all the time. >> Jill, help us understand how this fits into the cloud environment. So we talked about your VMware connection. I know Panzura is in the AWS marketplace, lots of discussions, AWS, Azure, even Oracle Cloud as to how it fits there. When I think about storing things in cloud, there's some of that just global replication that can happen, or how it can access it. Help us understand really the added value that Panzura has, and why that's important for that New Orleans Saints example that you talked about. >> Yeah, so one of the great things about the way that we handle data is you don't have to duplicate it. We just do snapshots, and it's there and available when you need it. The really important thing about putting this much data, very large files in the cloud, is you need to be able to manage your costs and also where you put it. So let's talk about cost for a second. Being able to have a solution that automatically manages cash versus S3 and longterm storage, that's one of our key, we have 34 patents or something like that. It's one of our main claims to fame is that we can absolutely do that, and that reduces the costs longterm of your storage in the cloud. That's one of the big deals. The other is look, AWS, pick Google, pick Azure. You likely are using more than one cloud, and we have a full hybrid solution. It can mirror what you have going on within your cloud or across clouds, which is perfect. >> Yep, maybe it would help if you dig in a little bit there. When people talk about hybrid cloud, they talk about multicloud. Often the red herring gets thrown out of portability. When we're talking about large data sets, we know we're not moving it. I mean, AWS has the big boxes they can ship you, or have a truck come to your facility to move it, but most customers, wherever you create your data, you tend to want to keep it there, but it's managing my data and fitting across these hybrid environments, or I'll have my data application in one cloud, I'll have a transactional application in another cloud. What are you seeing from your customers out there? How are they dealing and managing this overall cloud environment that they end up with? >> Yeah, it's actually really interesting, because I think the expectations from users day to day is that the cloud works exactly like your laptop or desktop would work in your office environment where you can seamlessly go between an Outlook 365 to a Dropbox. Each of those are on different cloud environments. They're different in terms of how they work, but from a user perspective, you want no latency and immediate access to your data. Well, the cloud doesn't really work like that, and so you need something like Panzura to be the system in the middle, the fabric in the middle that connects all those things together, so that when you want to reach for your big CAD drawing, and pull that, it's going to pull just as quickly as an email from Office 365, and you, as the user, don't need to know whether you pulled that out of cash, because it's a file that's used quite often, or whether it was over on S3 and in longterm storage, or longterm or cheaper storage in the cloud, and I think it's interesting, because a lot of people, we, by the way, work with a lot of customers that do move their data around. They have petabytes and petabytes of data, and they do move it around based on cost and availability, and we can do it all in the background, and as a user, you would see no degradation in legacy or in latency, and you would see no legacy data gone missing, which is kind of cool. >> Jill, it really sounds, David Floyer on the Wikibon team, writes about the hybrid and multicloud environments, and he says we've got these planes. So if you think of the networking planes, people in VMware will say that the vision that Nicera originally had, and MSX has, is that interconnective issue for the networking piece. It sounds like you're doing very much the same thing on the data layer to be able to sit on top of the storage, but provide some consistency in books. I know Panzura has been around for a while. Are there certain use cases that are kind of bubbling to the top? You mentioned things like collaboration, being something that, of course, is very active here in 2020, but if there's some of the, a couple of use cases that bubble up for you as to key things that customers are driving forward today. >> Yeah, I would say two main use cases in the last five months. One is, there is, sadly, dealing with a global pandemic isn't enough. We're getting ransomware at a higher level, and if you've got Panzura, and the way in which we take snapshots and we store your data, you can have a ransomware attack, and we've seen it with a number of our clients during COVID. You simply, in minutes, re-install a snapshot, and off you go. You didn't lose a thing and you can completely ignore ransomware, which has been really great for the folks that have had that installed. The second is the need to collaborate at the bitter end, people's houses. So this is one of the great things about working with VMware is we can put a VM certainly on-prem, but we can put it in your nearest cloud. So, for example, let's say you're using AWS, but the closest place to a particular group of people's home is a Google area. Fine, put it in Google. It won't matter for our deployment, and so you can get those files really quickly at the very edge, and being able to deploy it on VMware just makes it even faster, so. >> All right, Jill, as you said, you've been on for five months. What should we be looking at from Panzura through the rest of 2020? Give us a little bit as to your vision, and what we should expect to see. >> The company is growing really quickly. We've invested a ton of money in our sales partners and customers. So since I've been here, we've literally grown our revenue about 65%, and so that's been super fun. Also, we're investing heavily in R&D, and you're going to see some fun things coming from us on the R&D front about how to really support this data services layer that's coming, and the kinds of information that we all need to get about what's going on in the cloud and our ever-important data, so excited about that. >> Wonderful, we always love VMworld's one of those times where people go through the show floor, and they're like, "Okay, wait." You're hiring, what positions you have, any key things that people should be looking for? If you say, "Hey," what are you looking for when it comes to new talent for Panzura? >> Yeah, so one of the best things about, by the way, new talent for Panzura is that we use Panzura to run our company, and so you can work anywhere in the world, or live anywhere in the world, and work for us, and we're looking for development talent at all levels. We're looking for sales help at all levels, and honestly, there are some internal roles as well, so you can definitely come to our website and see all of those. We're very excited about the growth and hires. >> Always good to see that growth. Jill, why don't you give us a final takeaway that you want people to have about Panzura, what you're seeing from VMware customers these days, and help us get the final takeaways? >> Yeah, so what we enjoy about Panzura and VMware is really being able to deploy some of the largest companies in the world, whether it's federal government, or a very large worldwide enterprise, and if you are looking for a common fabric that allows you to deploy across clouds, we are your choice. >> Jill, thank you so much for catching up. We need to bring you back. Jeff Frick's going to want to talk to you more about the technology and football. Glad to see that you're still plugged in with those as we knew you were. Jill Stelfox, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we always love when we get to talk to practitioners, and not just any practitioner. CIOs, obviously under huge pressures in general, but in today's day and age, lots of pressures on the CIO. So, I'm happy to welcome to the program Rich Gagnon. He is the CIO from the city of Amarillo in Texas. Rich, thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >> All right, so, you know, CIO in a city in Texas, why don't you give us a little bit of what your role entails, a little bit of your background, and looking forward to the conversation. >> So, my background is actually more from the private sector side of the house. Previous to coming to the city of Amarillo, I was the Vice President of Systems Engineering for Palo Alto Networks, for the Americas. Before that, the Global Vice President of Systems Engineering for F5 Networks, and before that, the Director of Global Infrastructure for GameStop. So I stepped into government with a very private-sector, profit-centered mindset, if you will, coming from very high-growth companies. My role with the city is really to be an enabler for local government, to drive not only IT direction, but as a smaller community, I also have to wear the CSO hat, and the Data Privacy Officer hat. Pretty much anything when it comes to leadership of IT and technology, as an enabler to the government, that role falls on me. >> Wow, so a pretty broad mandate that you have there. Rich, give us a little bit, how does that span? How many constituents do you have in your infrastructure, your IT? Maybe you can sketch that out a little bit for us, too. >> Sure, so, I've had peers from the private sector ask me, "What's it like to actually lead in local government?" And the best comparison I can come up with is someone like GE. I have 49 different subsidiaries, different departments that operate as individual business units, only I don't have GE's money or their staff. We have 200,000 people and the departments we support span everything, from the obvious, like public safety, police, fire. We have an airport, a public clinic, water treatment plants, public health. There are streets, all the infrastructure departments. It's very diverse. >> Wow. And with all of those constituents that you have, why don't you give us the pre-COVID-19 discussion first, which is, what are some of those pressures there, from a budgeting standpoint? Are there specific initiatives you've been driving? And how are you responding to all those variables? >> Sure. Well, coming in, it was a little jarring. City leadership was very transparent that the city had sort of stood still for about a decade. I come from a high-growth environment where money was not the precious resource, really. It was always time. It was about speed to market. How do we get competitive advantage and move fast enough to maintain it? That was not the case here. I stepped into an environment where the limitations were Cat 3 cable and switches that still ran CatOS. The year before I came in, the big IT accomplishment was finally completing the migration to Windows 7 and Office 2007. That's where we started. So, for the past three years, I guess I'm starting my fourth year, we have undergone massive transformation. I think my staff thinks I'm a bit of a maniac, because we've run like we were being chased by a rabid dog. We have updated, obviously, the Layer 1 infrastructure, replaced the entire network. We've rolled out a new data center that's all hyper-converged. That enabled us to move our security model from the traditional Layer 3 firewall at the edge to a contextually-based data center with regulation on east-west traffic and segregation. We have rolled out VDI and Office 2016 and Windows 10. It's been a lot. >> Yeah, it really sounds like you went through multiple generations of change there. It's almost like going a decade forward, not just one step forward. Bring us through a little bit, that transformation. Obviously, there should be some clear efficiencies you had, but give us kind of the before and after as you started to deploy some of these technologies. Was there some reskilling? Did you hire some new people? How did that all go? >> Very much so. And like everything, it starts with financials, right? All of the resources at the city within IT were focused on operations, so there was literally no capital budget. As where typically you would update as you go, and update infrastructure, what happened was, as the infrastructure aged, the approach was to hire more staff to try to keep aging infrastructure up and running. That's a failing strategy. So, by moving to HCI, we've actually recovered about 26% of our operating budget, which allowed us to move that money into innovation and infrastructure updating. It took a tremendous amount of reskilling. Fortunately, the one thing that's been, I think, most surprising to me coming to local government, is the creativity of the staff. They were hungry for change. They were excited by the opportunity to move things forward. So, we spent an entire year doing nothing but training. We had a massive amount of budget poured into, "Let's bring the staff up to speed. "Let's get as many vendors in front of them as possible. "Let's get them educated on where the trends are going. "What is hyper-converged architecture "and why does it matter? "What is DevOps and why is the industry heading that way?" So as I said, we started, really, Layer 2-3, established that, built out the new data center, and now our focus is now, we built that platform, and our focus is starting to shift onto business relationship management. We've met with all 49 departments. We do that every six months. We're building 49 different roadmaps for every department, on "What applications are you using? "How do we help you modernize? "How do we help you serve the citizens better?" Because that's how IT serves the community. We serve the community by serving the departments that serve them directly, and being an innovation engine, if you will, for local government, to drive through new applications and ways to serve. So the transition has really started to happen is we've gotten that base platform out of the way and the things that were blocking us from saying, "Yes, and we can do more." >> Wow, so Rich, it's been an interesting discussion as the global pandemic has hit, so many people have talked about, "Boy, when I think about working from home "or managing in this environment, if I was using "10- or 15-year-old technology, "I don't know how, "or if I'd be able to do any of what I had." So, I know Dell brought you over, you're talking HCIs, so I believe you're talking about VxRail as your HCI platform. Talk to us about what HCI enabled as you needed to shift to remote workforce and support, that overall urgent need. >> It's been massive. And it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we matured, I think they embraced the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments, but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so fervently, why it was so urgent to me. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt. With VxRail in place, in a week, we spun up hundreds of instant clones. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business, and now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> All right, so, Rich, you talked a bunch about the efficiencies that HCI put in place. How about that overall management? You talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. You need to be able to do things much simpler. How does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. In the old environment, one, it took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive when we did make change. It overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. It wasn't cost-efficient. And then, simple things, like, I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production. You simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment, and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management, because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and reskill them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> Well, it's definitely a great proof point. So often, you deploy a solution, and when push comes to shove, will it deliver on that value that we're hoping for? HCI has been around for quite a while, but a crisis like this, how can you move past, how can your team respond? Congratulations to your team on that. The Dell team has recently done a number of updates on the VxRail platform. I'm curious, as someone who's been using the platform, what particularly is interesting to you, and what pieces of that have the most relevance to your organization? >> There are a few. So we're starting to look at our SCADA environments, industrial controls. And we're looking at some processing at the edge in those environments. So the new organized D series are interesting. There's some plant environments where that might really make sense to us. We've also partnered with our local counties and we have a DR site where being able to extend the network out to that DR site is going to be very powerful for us. And then there's just some improvements in vSphere that will allow us to do a little QA-ing, if you will, on new code before we roll it out, that I think will have a pretty huge impact for us as well. >> Excellent. So, Rich, when you think about the services that you need to deliver to all of your constituencies, walk us through how the pandemic has affected the team, how you're making sure that your employees are taken care of, but that you can still deliver all of those services. >> So from an internal perspective, not running a legacy architecture has made that a whole lot easier. We've remoted most of the IT team. Our entire development team is at home. Most of our support team is at home. Most of the city is still at home. So being able to do that, one, just having the capability has been huge for us. But also, from a business perspective, it's allowed most of our city functions just to keep running. So, modified services, for sure, but we're still functioning, and I just don't think that would have been capable, we wouldn't have been capable of supporting that, even two and a half years ago. >> So, Rich, we've talked a bit about your infrastructure. I'm curious, is the city, are you leveraging any public cloud environments, or any specific SaaS solutions that are enabling some of what you're doing today also? >> Yes, and we could probably have a 30-minute discussion on what is hybrid cloud and what is multicloud. In our instance, we are leveraging quite a bit of SaaS. We've migrated a lot of our services to SaaS offerings. We have spun up several applications in the cloud. I wouldn't call them truly hybrid. In my mind, hybrid is, I am able to take the workload and very seamlessly move it between my private infrastructure and one or more clouds. This is more, workloads specifically assigned to a public cloud. But yes, we've leveraged that. Simple things like Office365 and Outlook, but just as powerful for us has been VDI and being able to offer Horizon to our employees at home. And, with my other hat on, still maintain the contextual-based security, right? So I didn't have to open up the kingdom. I can still maintain the control that I need to to be able to sleep at night. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions I love to ask someone in your position is the role of data, how you think of security, how you think of the technology and put those together. Does it help that you wear both the CSO hat and the CIO hat? How do you think about leveraging data? Is there anything that you're sharing with other municipalities, without giving up, of course, personal information? >> Sure. It causes a lot of internal arguments, right? Because there's the two halves of my brain: the CIO half that wants to roll out as much service as I can and be innovative, and the CSO half of my brain that thinks about the exposure of the service that I'm about to roll out. That's part of where we're migrating now as we start to look into our whole approach to data. We've got the platform in place. We're now really migrating our thinking into revamping the way we look at data. I have seven sources for the same data. How do I consolidate and have one source of truth, and where does that reside? My development team is really starting to migrate out of classic development and more into the automation side of the house. How are we interfacing with all of our vendors? That's in review now. And how are we tying to third-party apps? Yeah, that's really the point we're at in our maturity that, now that the infrastructure is in place, we're now migrating to, "what is our data plan?" >> Excellent. Final question I have for you, Rich. I'd love your thoughts on the changing role of CIO. I loved the discussion you had at the beginning going from, really, the private sector to the public sector. Obviously, unique pressures on all businesses right now dealing with the global pandemic, but how do you see the role of the CIO today and how has it been changing? >> I think there's an expectation that you bring value to the business, whether that's local government, or retail, or banking. I think the expectation is that you're not just managing an infrastructure or managing a team, and providing service, but how do you bring actual value to the organization that you serve? And that means that you have to understand the business and all aspects of the business. I think you have to, at least I do as a CIO, I have to spend a tremendous amount of time understanding my internal customer and what are they trying to accomplish, and often, to show them a new way that they just may not be aware of. So I think there's a little more expectation as a CIO that you're going to drive value to whatever business that you're serving. >> Well, Rich, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on being able to react fast. So glad that you were able to get the transformation project done ahead of this hitting, because otherwise, it would have been a very different conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay safe and thank you for watching theCUBE.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation LeBron's special conversation I'm John Tory here in the cube I'm not in the studio I'm at home we're sheltering in place the studio quarantine crew is there we've got a great guest here to break down and Alice in the tech industries for vallah who's this principle of zk research Aziz great to check in with you for our check-in last time we chatted you broke down entire industry a lot to talk about now we have the Cisco earnings just came out and a lot of other great things are happening thanks for joining me well what's your take on what's going on yeah I think so thanks John it's uh it's been heard about tumultuous last few months I think one of the takeaways I had from Cisco's earnings actually was that it's not as bad as you think I know if you read a lot of what's going on the media we get everything from doomsday and the world's ending or whatever but I think what Cisco's earnings showed and in Cisco I know they have a lot of enemies and a lot of competitors out there but they're really still a bellwether for the industry and so everyone should rejoice in the fact that they actually had a pretty good quarter I think what was was telling about that was security was up the services business was up the margins were good and what that shows me is that there's still room for innovation customers relax are still buying things and they're willing to pay for things that actually help drive their business forward and so Cisco's put a lot of energy into their services group to make sure that customers are able to adapt their technology and change their business right and so from an overall market perspective Cisco is you know they're the quarters are the court has shifted from almost everybody else's and so they're generally a leading indicator of where things are going so I think the fact that they showed some strength they guided up from where the street thought I think that's a good thing for the entire industry and I think I'm not saying we're out of this yet but I think businesses are starting to spend money where they need to in order to put themselves in a position to come on strong after well once we start going back to work whoever knows what that'll be I think the other sort of interesting pivot here is that I think the overall role the network has changed with income right we've covered networking technologies a long time it gets a little bit of interest sometimes from sea level certainly not as much as it should from CEOs and CIOs a lot of people think of it as the plumbing and the pipes it's hard to understand it's a very complicated technology sometimes but when you look at what's happened with digital transformation initiatives and now covent we've got more people at home or adopting cloud services we use video for connecting more things with IOT initiatives so the overall value of the network is increased that I think that was also reflected in Cisco's numbers I think this transition had started when you look at a lot of the building blocks and digital transformation IOT cloud mobility things like that they're all Network centric in nature and so for the first time in history I think business leaders actually need to look at their network strategies because if that's without a sound network strategy as we sort of come out of this and the companies that have a good one will be able to really step on the gas and do what they want with their business the ones that don't I think I'd a really struggle to survive because I'm not gonna be able to do a lot of these advanced things yeah great point one of the things Brazil the new cisco has a new leadership new c has been in place for a while positioning they're going after and you know with the cloven crisis it really puts more pressure knock the move of the network because it's a core staple of an organization yet the transformation journey is going to be accelerated this gives Cisco it's a lucky strike for Cisco because it'll move packets around and the multi cloud conversation comes in and the enablement of application development all being five to the network is what cisco has been preparing on and this has kind of been a nuance point then that everyone understands but coming out of Cova to have a growth strategy if you're not programming up and down the stack with DevOps and Nets a cops or whatever you want to call it people working at home a new perimeter is now emerged that's everything everything is the premise is this a tailwind for Cisco your thoughts on that your face oh yeah the big time tailwind francisco i think what's happened gentlemen you look at network evolution over the last five years we can do much more with our network that's coming to cost and that cost us complexity so trying to tie all these things together SP Winn Sassie datacenter Sdn right we've got Wi-Fi six coming we've got 5g coming so we've got all these great things that we're gonna let our networks be faster than ever before and run applications we can never run before right you look at some of the demos on 5g we're able to wear untethered Wi-Fi our virtual reality headsets complete creating completely new shopping experiences educational experiences but you need a lot of bandwidth that but not only you need bandwidth I think the one thing that Kovac has taught us is do you have any weakness in the network anywhere right from the user's hand all the way to the cloud that weak point at the time and so now you have to start thinking of your network not in pieces of having a campus network Wi-Fi network data center network and that a single network right and so cisco is really one of the few companies maybe the only company that can actually deliver that end and network that starts in the company extends to people's homes goes out to the cloud and with what they've done masterfully under Chuck Robbins is they've been able to pile those things together to create a much simpler way of operating this complicated network so you look at what they're doing you know with a CI and intent based networking what that is is you can think of it almost as a software overlay that masks the complexity of the network that's underneath it yeah talking about cisco over the past decade and a half and i'm with the stack guys you gotta move up the stack this has been this is now their opportunity and with multi cloud on the horizon or here this is going to give cisco a path but I got to ask you what is your take and advice to Cisco when you're out there talking to them you're talking to of the customers all the time and practitioners you're the analyst what do they need to do better because you can't just wish a multi cloud upon the marketplace it's coming but it's not clearly not the use case yet so that's a time lag between a CI intent based networking to true multi-cloud what if Cisco do in the meantime yeah well I think what's this go has to do is is think about what they're doing with a CI and multi cloud and actually help their customers implement it in in pieces and what the description I'd use is is the paths this goes on and the path customers are on actually in this world of you think if the end state is true hybrid multi-cloud right we have to get there in ship shots and not moon shots and what I mean by that is if you were to say to a customer this is your end state right the path to get there is so donkey and it's like a moon shot that it paralyzes the customer if you break this down into a set of chip shots right that gets much easier so so put the infrastructure in place to be able to just have the visibility across applause then maybe automate movement from hi private the public cloud right then automate some of the processes that give you the most headaches then move to a bigger Ottoman Ottoman automation framework right so yeah areas like security network configuration right things like that those are those are very difficult for customers to do manually those are the things they should be automating today so what they want to do is almost take through their intent-based network to almost as a lighthouse the road to a visionary state and then help customers get there in pieces because if they try and rush them along too fast I think they'll lose the customer because the complexity is too high the other area they should really be focused on is continuing to mature the services business I think that's something under Chuck Robbins that's night and day different than what it was the services business - Cisco prior to Chuck was a lot of break fix you know their TAC is well renowned as being a great pack but now they've gotten more of the pro services they've gotten more into adoption services and I think the more subscription they sell what Cisco needs to really understand is that customers tend not to renew things they don't use right so making sure that the services group helps customers and use the things that they're paying for and that'll pay dividends for them multiple dividends for them down the road I want to get the silken one on that opportunity to upsell and do a refresh because what refreshes are not gonna be on the docket early on unless discuss business value so let's hold that for a second John Chambers has been on the cube recently in his new role as a coach and investor and he says to us on the cube you know transitions versus transformation Cisco and the big companies are expected to win the transitions but now with coming out of this there's real transformation so you got to look at things like collaboration hey guys get better this is not just win the enterprise with a better web max zoom is they can ask Bob teams is out there so you know Cisco's that's a huge collaboration piece and a bunch of other business so where's their transition wins and where's their transformational opportunity in Europe in well I think the entire company is kind of going through transformations right even on the network side so it's right it's like you know the industry has been calling Francisco to get commoditized for years right and if you look the product gross margins are actually the strongest they've been in a decade right so I remember when I fell below 60% they everybody thought the world was falling this quarter I think was a little over 65 on the product side and so my belief is nothing is really a commodity if you can drive innovation that's what's this has been doing so from a transition standpoint I think they've done a lot of that they've transitioned the company to software and services they've transitioned the company more terrain model they've actually decoupled software from the hardware so customers can buy differently and you brought up the fact that we may not have a hardware refresh but that's okay as long as they keep the software a newa cycles forth where the transformations has to come is completely change the dynamics of how something works and so with intent-based networking you think of the old way that network engineers to work like the way I used to work when I was an engineer a lot of hunting pecking and at a CLI doing a lot of cutting and pasting and using homegrown tools that doesn't scale anymore my research shows that on average takes companies about four months the implemented change network-wide far too slow for digital company right so Francisco's done is they've accelerated that by letting customers automate more things and so Francisco the transformation comes in allowing customers to new new things I think you read in the collaboration side there's more work to do nobody's got a bigger collaboration portfolio than Cisco they got endpoints they got rooms just right they've got software they were a cloud on Prem but they got to take that and tie it together and I think the other area that's is gonna need improving is on they've they've got a lot of management tools that that look at different things they have at the ACI manager and a whole bunch of different security consoles in fact they funded them sometimes and said that the market leader in single panes of glass because they have more than anybody right I think eventually they got to be able to tie that information together and help customers understand what it means from a cross domain perspective because they still build a product's wireless campus data center but as I mentioned before we just have one network and so Cisco can aggregate this data up apply machine learning to it and help customers what that means they see insight across the entire network that would really be powerful because they they've got the footprint now they just have to be able to deliver the machine learning based insights some customers understand what that data means and they have a unique opportunity in the short term no one's going to be kidding Cisco out anytime soon there's a safety rating and using the big companies I think what what Cisco is able to bring is a there's a level of financial stability that other companies may not have and so they can weather the storm for a long time so you know I it's easy to say going to Cisco is the safe bet it has been for a long time but but i but I think it's also the smart bet I think they're they're able to continue to invest in things maybe smaller companies more people do yeah my question on Cisco a big fan of their strategy have been vocal about that for a while my question on Cisco want to be critical is to say how fast can you get that development going show the software value in market show customers a growth trajectory that they can execute on it can advantage the network policy intelligence if they could do that they're gonna be in good shape you agree yeah I think one of the challenges though is the transformation of their customer base do and that's where the work Suzy we've been doing in the dev that teams so important like if if they were to shift their whole strategy over at the developer folks talk word today I think that would largely put them in a position or trouble because the engineers that work with the stuff and the resellers that work with the stuff aren't they don't really have the skill sets they advantage that right so last year Suzy we she really talked a lot about the growth a definite this year they came out with in Barcelona this year they they came up with a bunch of certifications for dev net now there they were actually coming out with a number of a partner certifications as well so the resellers can get certified but I think it's important that they continue to push their engineer base into gaining these new skills I'll give you an interesting data point for my research and that's you know that only about a quarter of networking engineers has ever made an API call right and so you look at all Cisco's new gear it's all API driven and so if you want to do something as simple as say get all the IP addresses in your network you can just use an API call for that right the other way to do it is you do a show command and the CLI your screen scrape and you take a visual basic trip that you parse it you know and you get it that way right so the API map using those is a lot easier and so I think Cisco's got a good strategy with Deb net they've grown that face a lot it's still relatively small you know it's under a million people and you think of the overall size the Cisco customer user base point that's where they gonna put some effort right more and more out driving adoption to them now well I think you're smarter than I think you're researching them they must be listening to you because they haven't really tried to jam that down their throats they've been very humble about it and I think a million is pretty damn good number I think Cisco again to your point they're bringing people into the water the low end first before you you go to the deep end so swim with the bubble if you will with definite what they did was they assumed the engineer had no knowledge of software because I think at first when they put the lot of the programs a place they assumed people would have some knowledge of how to code right and and I also think the industry did them a bit of a disservice we used her there was a lot of stuff written in the media how every network engineer needs to become a software developer well they don't have to summer get make them software developers but they at least have to come software power ease right so do your job through software but you don't have to be a developer and that's where definite really when it really matured is that diverge down to past developer engineer who's your saw common software skills and then you break down a specialist after that and so they've they've actually helped with the maturity of that they've changed their certification programs for reflect that and I think Devin that really is a big be and if they can transition that engineer base then it helps the adoption of the new on these I want to get your final thoughts on this segment on multi-cloud obviously it would be a really great win for it creates of interoperability strictly with the network intelligence cisco could bring to the table and others you got startups out there like aviatrix and others and vmware with nsx trying to get that for the security fabric a lot of action going on with multi cloud and networking your thoughts what does your research tell you what's gonna transpire how do you see that market playing out in my research shows that little R ad percent of companies prior to Co vid had multi-cloud on the roadmap and I'm assuming that's that's gone up I haven't actually done a survey since then um one of the I think it's funny koban exposed a lot of things from a lot of vendors right and I think one of the things that is is shown cracks in the cloud yeah you look at some of the the data and how many outages Microsoft had Google had some strains AWS has held up pretty well under the strain of of a lot of the higher utilization when coated but they've been building a lot of capacity into theirs as well so I think from a customer perspective it makes sense you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket some cloud providers are stronger in some regions they each have different their own different cloud platforms other private cloud platforms and the problem is is if you decide if you decide to go multi-cloud you can't use the cloud providers tools right so if I use an AWS load balancer that works great in AWS but it's not gonna help me with Azure or GCE similarly if I use GCP tools I can't extend that out the azure so something needs to connect those and be able to five security and policy and that's where multi cloud comes from and you're right there's some good startups there I think um the difference with Cisco this time versus the Sdn world was when as the ends came about I think Cisco didn't want that to happen and I think they actually actively worked against us the end and I've talked to chuck Robbins about that he said you'll never ever see Cisco do that again if something is good for the customers they want to lead that transition and so Cisco's been very active in multi focking and given they've got the install base already I do think they will help bring this long but there are some good stir yeah it's interesting Sdn really wasn't ready for primetime even when VMware bought in this era hey when it was still there I didn't have a lot of revenue it had a future VMware claims that's the saves and NSX was saved by a Sdn some people say was completely rewritten final thoughts on outlook and you see coming out of Ovid obviously it's been well reported we've been reporting VPNs have been under provision that was a blind spot bought a blind spots and disruption that wasn't forecasted in the classic sense there was no there was no you know hurricane there was no flood it was a covin invisible disruption yeah and there's no impact right like even with when you think of what happened with the the floods in New York and 9/11 people knew that they'd eventually go back and so business continuity and disaster recovery was a temporary thing and I can I set up a data center to work for a couple months so I can go back to New York that's not the case with koban where we're trying to manage for an undefined endpoint which is extremely difficult for an IT perspective I do think that Kogan again has highlighted the value of the network I think we'll see a lot of transition from VPN to sd when I think that's that's certainly good I think the rise in video will also cause a Wi-Fi upgrade cycle we'll get back to the office and I think you'll see a lot of focus on programmability and agility because I don't believe we're gonna see everybody return to the office was like one big bang John I think we're more likely to see is the future work to be almost like when you and I were in college we do a bunch of stuff at home we go to the campus when we have classes and when we want to meet people similarly we'll go to work when we have meetings and then in between meetings we'll go find an open place to work but in general we'll do a lot of work a lot more work from home in fact my research shows 93 percent of the business leaders I interviewed said they expect to see at least a 30 percent increase in the work from home post Kovan right so we're gonna have a lot more people doing that but it's not gonna be everyone working for home everybody work in the office it's gonna be a hybrid of the two people are gonna come and go and that bribes the need for agility and today's networks really not that agile and so I need I want to go back to college if we do thirsty happy hours do I mean have the whole week or the stupid stuff it's the final point you mentioned SP when I was talking with Dave Volante SP Minutemen just last week and I said you know this SD win today is not your grandfather's sdn meaning SP where it's changed a lot it's basically the internet now so what was the modern update definition of SD grin I mean it used to be you connect the wide area network you can have some campus you'd do some networking what is it now what's the same name but it's yeah what is it your journey the technology if you look at the adoption of anything right the first wave of stuff is to make the new stuff look like the old stuff so we put VoIP in we made it look a lot like TDM when we had cloud we lifted and shift it and how did we didn't really enjoy wraps and then we eventually get smart and think what can I do with the new thing that I can't do the old thing and so a lot of early SD win deployments were simply just replacements for MPLS and they were put in to save a bit of money but now companies are getting smarter they're thinking about what can I do with my SD win that I couldn't do before so there's a lot more tighter integration with security I think as companies but SD win in and and think about what the win is today John it used to be corporate offices and data centers I think it's everybody's house right and so being able to extend your win at the single people out to planes trains and automobiles you remember that movie but those are all getting connected as well people's back acts fan kiosk those are all becoming way endpoints right so that's where you need to embed more security in the network and so I think that's a transition we've seen into that see you and I think the technology has matured to the point where it's getting easier to deploy faster to flow and you're right we can use the internet for transport in some cases some will still keep there still be a lot of MPLS out there but I do think we wind up in this hybrid world but clearly then the time has never been better for for SD win I will see a rule of curve for that because it's the only way to extend the win the people's homes the things the cars and really anything that's connected you know that's such a great point and I think this is a real new once in the industry it's a whole nother rebirth of the category because the aperture is brighter you got policy you've got reliability and get security built in this is key key Johnny H salt key yeah yeah whole concept the AI ops becomes real because we're collecting data and we're able to use AI to automate operations so Z's we call it s T win 2.0 that's what you got to do we got making an acronym out of this come on we can't just saw s T when it is SD win - righto because it's the next it's that it's it's the second wave of it we're actually thinking about how to transform our companies so the the John Chambers quote of transition for transversus transformation is apropos because the like I said a lot of the waves that that Cisco went through early on was we transition the market and then we transform right and so SD win so far has been transitional moving away from the old thing but now in strength and defense formed where our entire network operates these gradients that always a pleasure to talk to you get the straight scoop for the signal right there from all the noise in the industry now more than ever people are gonna be focused on critical project so thanks for your insight as DK now can research great stuff and we'll keep keep following you in great guest thank you come on thanks John first burger okay cute conversation here remote we're doing our part either at home and studio quarantine in this is the cube virtual virtualization has come to the cube will do will do whatever it takes to get the content out there Z's thanks so much for coming I appreciate thanks for watching on John Currier [Music]