 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, live from Atlanta, Georgia. We're at Citrix Synergy 2019. The first time theCUBE has been back here in eight years and I've geeked out even more, yes, I know it's early. Tim Minahan, CMO and EVP of Strategy at Citrix, Tim. It's great to have you back on theCUBE. Well, thanks for joining us here. The keynote was awesome this morning. Keith and I were both tweeting like crazy and like, wow, we're going to have a great couple of days. You can hear all of the networking and the innovation and the conversations going on behind us here in the Solutions Expo. I think record number of people attending live as well as watching the live stream today. There was at least one round of applause standing here only. Citrix, lot of transformation in the last year alone. Really talking about the employee experience as a critical enabler of digital business transformation. Talk to us about that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with all the technology and the technology choices we've had with cloud and SaaS and mobile, we've created a lot of opportunity but we've also created a lot of complexity, both for IT and especially for the employee who now needs to navigate across all of this different environment to try to get a bit of information or to get their key work done. So Citrix and our customers are saying, hey look, employee experience has become a C level and a board level imperative. So what we've done is we've unveiled and continue to extend upon our digital workspace, not just a place where we've unified access to everything an employee needs to be productive, all their SaaS apps, web apps, mobile apps and content, wrapper that in the layer of security so that IT and the company are confident that applications or information are more secure in the workspace than out but now we're infusing intelligence into the workspace. Machine learning and simplified workflows in order to guide an employee through their day. So they don't need to spend all their time navigating multiple apps but the task and insights that they need to get done are presented to them very quickly. They can move on and get to perform their best work. So Tim, you're literally preaching to the choir. Me and Lisa, we get it, we understand it and then even at the keynote, David was preaching to all the major announcements, big claps, thousands of people clapping, the innovation, the ideal of extending the workspace to the intelligent experience. I think the Citrix faithful today got that but a seven trillion dollar problem that you guys are addressing, you just mentioned that now we're talking about talking to the CEO, the CIO, the CMO, the COO. Talk about expanding the message beyond the faithful into the C-Suite. How is that impacting your job and how are you getting that message out? Yeah, that's a great question, you're absolutely right. Employee experience is something that is shared. In fact, we've just done a considerable amount of research into that with the economists on a global basis. We're finding is IT and HR sharing this problem together. They're rethinking not just the digital environment of how they're delivering technology to the employee, but the physical space and the culture and how it all weaves together and how we're engaging within Citrix at a much higher level with not just the CIO but the chief human resources officer, the CEO, the CFO is because employee experience and how well an employee feels they have access to the information and tools they need to get their job done is directly related to the business outcomes that the company is trying to achieve. It's proven to deliver greater customer satisfaction, increased revenues, greater profitability, all the metrics that really move a business. And this is pervasive across any industry in every role in every organization. I mean, the cool video that David showed this morning showed this example of a senior marketing manager who wants to deliver Rockstar campaigns for her company but she's got before Citrix Workspace Intelligent and her experience, all these different apps and all of this distraction, every a couple of minutes, distraction, you think about how that impacts that marketing manager's role even all the way to like a call center and how a call center employee who's on the front lines with a customer, whether it's your ISP or something who has so much choice, if that call center person doesn't have access to all the apps and the information that they need, not only are you affecting the employee experience and potentially causing attrition, but the end user customer of that service might say, forget it, I'm going to go somewhere else. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, we all have that experience where you call a call center and they might not have the answer for you or in some cases the connection might be poor and so really what we're trying to do with the digital workspace is eliminate that. When we talk about experience, it's not just unifying and infusing intelligence into it but we also leverage our networking portfolio to ensure reliable connectivity so that employee has access to the applications they need. They can reliably access the information they need and any kind of their telephony or voice over IP is consistent. So you or I think they're on a landline in a big call center and they might be working from home but still have access to everything they need through the Citrix workspace. So just a couple of weeks ago I was at SAP Sapphire and we're talking about customer experience, employee experience, kind of the X data versus the O data, operational data and Citrix in the past has been about operational data. You guys shared stuff in your wheelhouse about improving analytics so administrators and engineers can deliver applications and experiences better. Let's talk about the user experience in this new or the employee experience in this new world, this future of work. I have this SAP green screen and man would my job be so much easier if I could just push a button and get that data into Salesforce but I have to engage IT for that. I have to open a ticket, we have to kick up a project. Six months later we abandoned it because the industry has moved on. How is Citrix going to make that faster for the employee and improving my employee experience? Yeah, great. Well, first of all, coming from an enterprise application background myself, including SAP, I know the depth of functionality of those applications and for specialized roles, whether you're in supply chain or finance or the like, they spend their day in that core application. However, the rest of us were hired for a specific purpose, whether it's the example we gave on stage today about Maria, the senior marketing director, or whether it's an engineer who wants to spend their time building product, we weren't hired to spend our day navigating expense reporting apps or performance review apps or other types of applications that we're all exposed to. They're not our primary application, we have to learn a new interface, we have to manage different authentication and what the workspace does, is in the words of one of our customers, is by unifying it all and being able to reach into those applications and extract out the information and tasks that are very personal to you. One customer says to their employees, you may never need to log into an enterprise application again, but you'll still get all the utility, all the value, because you have the insights you need and you can get them quickly without needing to navigate or search across multiple applications. You can get that task, improve that expense report like that without needing to go through four screens to do it and take you away from your core job. And so really what this is all about is removing the noise from an employee's day so they can perform it their very best. So critical because, sorry Keith, one of the stats also I think David shared this morning was that enterprise software is designed for power users, which is 1% of the population. So for those folks who just need to get their job done as effectively as possible so that they're delivering what they need to and that the end user customer's experience is what it should be. That's, to be able to say, you don't ever have to log into an enterprise application again and making that experience personalized game changers. Absolutely, I mean we think about the frustration that employees have today. I know David shared the findings today from the Gallup study but 85% of employees are disengaged at work. The number one reason happens to be around their level of their manager, but the number two one is they don't feel they have access to the right information and tools to do their job, right? They want to get that noise out of their day so that they can do what they were hired to do and what they're passionate about. So we talked a lot today about the consumerization of enterprise tech. We love these things. We don't love these things because the hardware is great. We love these things because we're able to do our jobs. So whether I'm downloading an app or Angry Birds or whatever experience that I'm having on this, I get instant gratification from this device. Talk to us about the overall potential of speed to value in a repeatable process that enterprises can enjoy around digital transformation based on Citrix versus, you know, I've heard similar things from ISVs. They can come in and write a customization from enterprise app into another solution, simplify a specific job, but if I have to do that for every application, one, I don't have the money, bandwidth, time, and the industry will pass me up. How are you guys bringing this consumerized experience to the future for it? Yeah, that's a great illustration is our mobile devices. We live on our mobile devices. A lot of enterprise application providers have created really good mobile applications, you know, concur from SAP where I came from. That's a great experience, very quick to go in. Salesforce, while an awesome tool, their mobile experience is different than their regular experience. So you have to relearn and navigate it. And then there's others that have never really created a mobile experience. So we're all doing this on our phone and trying to get that done. And even if every, to your point, even if every individual enterprise app had a great mobile experience, that still means we need to navigate a whole bunch of different interfaces. What we're doing with, by unifying this into a single digital workspace, by curating and personalizing your work day and creating a work stream very similar to what Facebook or others have done for our personal stream and how we get information through that feed, how we get news through that feed. We're doing the same for work. So on a mobile device, that experience is so much richer than we've seen since almost the invention of the smartphone. So as we talk about the consumerization of tech, big announcements with Azure and Google, how does that impact that new audience? When you go talk to another CMO at a big car manufacturer, why should they get excited about Azure or Google compute? They really don't see that. Yeah, there is no doubt that the world is moving to the cloud, but everyone's moving at their own pace. Companies has invested decades in some cases of infrastructure and on premise, and they're not going to move that to the cloud overnight, but they are beginning to move certain workloads, certain styles, and by the way, they want to have the choice of multiple clouds, which is why Citrix has invested to partner with all of the major cloud providers to allow our customers to have that choice. So if they want to leverage some aspects of Azure, and they want to move some of the Citrix workloads there, they can do that. If they want to virtualize, as you heard today, the announcement with Google, if they want to take some of their Citrix virtualization, virtual apps or virtual desktops and move that to Google Cloud, that's available to them, including now as we announced today with automated provisioning. So IT can quickly set up a desktop, maybe it's for a new hire, maybe it's for a contractor to come in, give them the tools they need to be productive. So companies want choice across those clouds, they don't want to have lock-in and they're going to move at their own pace, as we heard today from Partners Healthcare, for example. Security first, cloud considered. They're considering aspects to move to the cloud when it makes sense, and they want to have that flexibility to allow them to move at their own pace and make it seamless with their on-premise infrastructure, and that's what we provide. That flexibility is key, and as you brought up, every business today lives in a hybrid multi-cloud world. So employees, that employee experience needs to deliver access to SaaS apps, mobile apps, web apps, to deliver that great employee experience. But I want to turn the tides a little bit and take a look at what you guys are doing within marketing, and on the business strategy side, it suggests to help deliver that outstanding employee experience to your customers by way of your CSM team, when you even have a relatively new adoption marketing team, I'd love to know how that ladder fits into your business strategy. So I'll come to the adoption marketing team in a moment, but the first thing we're doing, as illustrated here earlier, is that this discussion around employee experience, as it becomes a C-level and a board-level imperative, it's become a company-wide initiative, and so from a marketing perspective, we have not only got a higher up in the organization, having a much more strategic discussion around how we can drive the business outcomes that the companies want to achieve, but also making sure we're putting it in the language of these other roles, right? HR wants to talk about employee engagement and how, and we can demonstrate through the workspace of how we're doing that. IT wants to talk about adoption of their technologies and the like. So getting to the customer adoption component. So within, as you move to the cloud, it's no longer, I'll sell you a product, good luck, when you engage with the customer, once you get that agreement, that's when the real work starts, right? You're in a long-time service agreement, and the value they extract from your application, the adoption they get, is going to determine their level of success and their level to renew with you at the end of the term, and so we've put a lot of investment as a company into what we call our customer success team, folks that view them as the coach at the gym. It's the difference between you buy a treadmill at home, you might use it for a while and then it becomes a towel rack, or you join the gym and your trainers there telling you how to get the best performance. That's what our customer success team does, but to do that at scale and to engage in a real-time basis, we've paralleled that with the customer adoption marketing team, and really we're providing both auto product and in-product marketing cues to the customer, to the user, on how best to take advantage of the product that they've already subscribed to. That's exciting, Tim. Speaking of customer success, last question as we wrap here, you guys kind of have the American Idol of Customer Awards, the Innovation Awards, there are down to three finalists, we will get to speak with all three of them over the next two days, but something that I mentioned to you that really piqued my interest is, this is an awards opportunity for other folks to vote on, and then the winner, Ryan Seacrest, probably going to be here to announce it on Thursday, tell us a little bit about the innovation awards and how these customers are really articulating the value prop of Citrix. Yeah, the Citrix Customer Innovation Awards one of my favorite times of the year, the program's been around for a number of years, and it's really grown a cult following within the Citrix community as customers get nominated to based on their deployment and the business outcomes they're driving. We have initially an individual panel that winners all those nominations down, and so that panel consists of former winners as well as analysts and other influencers in the community, and then to your point, the three finalists that we have right now, we expose their stories to the world, to everyone here at Synergy and beyond, and they get to vote, and so the votes are going to be tallied, I believe the voting polls close on Wednesday night, and then we'll announce the winner on Thursday, and the customers love it, not only to get the recognition, but the other customers love it because I have those same problems, I want to be able to solve it, and I want to understand how Citrix can help me. And that is, as a marketer, I know I'm preaching to the choir when I think there's no better brand validation than the voice of your customer articulating how their business is benefiting significantly and giving them the opportunity to talk to peers in any industry. Absolutely, that's why we're in it for the customer success. Well, we'll be anxiously awaiting to hear the results on Thursday, and Tim, I'm already excited for next year, so thank you so much for having theCUBE, Keith and me at Synergy 2019. Thank you for being here, thank you for having me. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, live from Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta. Thanks for watching.