 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're having a great time here in Atlanta, Georgia, and we have one of our CUBE alumni back with us, Calvin Chu, Vice President of Product Marketing at Citrix. Calvin, thank you for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you so much, it's great to be here. We have had a great action-packed day yesterday, half-day today or so. What you guys announced yesterday with respect to the digital workspace, the intelligent experience, is really resonating with the audience here. People are excited about it, because we get it. We're all workers, employees of whether it's our own companies, or a company like Citrix, and we just need things to work. Yeah, no matter what, as much as anybody loves their job, it could always be better, right? It could always be things that are more streamlined, or everybody talks about the red tape, or the bureaucracy that they get to get through, and more and more, we're just building red tape and bureaucracy into our systems and into our enterprise applications, and now we start to blame the technology, and it's not really the technology, it's just that we're not thinking about what it takes to get through someone's daily work, right? And how we get some of that noise out of their way and just make it a more streamlined. Some of the stats that David Henshall shared were shocking that companies spend seven trillion waste, seven trillion dollars a year on lost output, because employees are having to, before they even get to their actual function, you're a marketer. All of the different tasks that you have that are bombarding you and distracting you is a massive amount of money that companies are wasting every year. I love the line that he used also. Basically, we're taking knowledge workers and turning them into task workers, and then I think the other part is we take task workers who are supposed to be focused on specific tasks and they can focus on the wrong tasks, right? So there's just a lot of opportunity for people to be either giving them time to be more productive, doing the things that they normally would do, or time, I think, in a lot of organizations today to be more innovative and be creative, because that, certainly we know from psychological studies, that takes concerted blocks of time. That takes thoughtfulness, that takes non-distraction, but that's why there's all these practices about mindfulness and things like that now. How can you find time to be mindful if every two minutes you're getting a disruption somewhere, right, so? So Calvin, you sit in a unique position. One, you've been at Citrix for almost 15 years, and then you're over the security products. So when you look at solving this $7 trillion problem, this one-fifth of our work we've going to do with rudimentary tags, that involves automation. When, as a security guy, every time I present some type of automation, process automation tool to someone, oh, you don't have to sign into Salesforce directly, there'll be some back-end system. As you talk to your long-term customers that might be a little bit apprehensive and looking at this kind of cloud way of doing legacy technologies, what are some of the insights and how do you help pull those customers along? First, just before anyone says anything, I'm not a security guy per se. I know the security value problem in my business, I know what we do, but I know a lot of security professionals would be like, I know Calvin, he's not a security guy. But I would say, for those organizations, particularly for the ones that have been with Citrix for a long time, don't try to solve all $7 trillion of problems at once, right? Take it one step at a time. Build some trust in one area. I like what a lot of our customers have started to do and we're starting to plan with them on their first potential implementations of intelligent experience in the workspace. And that is say, take something that's just really painful, something that gets done a lot, and just solve that one thing. Build one micro app for it. See how that gets adoption, learn from it. This is part of the reason we built analytics and telemetry into all our products so you can start to measure the utilization of it. Are we really achieving the productivity gains that we thought with that one task? And then go from there, right? Just earn that trust on that one action, that one process or workflow. And then, sooner or later, then the business will start to tell IT which things they need to optimize. They'll say, okay, that worked great. Here's the next one I want you to do for me. And then it just becomes a matter of sort of prioritizing them. So taking those baby steps, getting started somewhere. I think we see a lot of, you know, paralysis by analysis of just trying to solve too much of a problem all at once. So as the VP of product marketing, you talk with customers a lot. What's been some of the feedback from some of the beta customers who are in there getting their hands dirty and playing with intelligent experience? What's some of the feedback that these customers are sharing with you, but also how involved were they in saying Citrix, this is where you need to take digital workspace? Yeah, so the second part of it first, I mean, in everything from the UI, the interface design process, as well as in sort of architectural review, we've had customers in along the way. And so it's been interesting to watch them. We did this thing internally where we set up a bunch of tests of common tasks for people to do. We had them do it the old way and then we had them do it the new way. And we were just basically time trials, right? Trying to figure out what kind of productivity savings. And so we invite some real end users and customers and things in to do that. And so they're definitely very influential in that whole process and in giving us information about what's working and what's not working. The thing I would say is what's getting them really excited is that they see that there's alignment with the line of business. And so we typically, most of our executive briefings are with the IT part of the house. And when you talk to them about what the possibilities are, then their eyes light up because they know, hey, this is what my line of business has been asking for. This is how I can engage with them. This looks like a meaty project where at the end of the day, we get this all done right. Everybody's pats each other on the back and says, okay, now we know what we need to go do next. And I think sometimes IT projects get sort of lost and just the procurement and they sort of rack them and stack them and they're thinking about it and those terms of project lines, not, what is the business person trying to do at the end of the day? How do we integrate with that? How do we help that move along and improve that process? So, Calvin, talk to us about the foundation. As a long time Citrix customer, you come to this show and it's changed. Used to be day one, we talk about products, speeds, feeds. Yesterday it was all about solutions. Like, okay, we're solving this $7 trillion problem, we're increasing productivity. We, you know, the intelligent experience is the future. But tie the foundation. Like, how do we get from traditional Citrix products into this intelligent experience? Where's the connection? Yeah, so at the core of it, I think it's all about sort of what we've been doing for generations really is about trying to get applications out to people. And so really all we're doing is we're adding to the variety of applications that we're delivering. It's no longer just Windows virtualization, which has been a huge part of our history, but now it's extending out into SaaS applications and into mobile applications. Along the way, I think what we also realized in the past year or so is that, you know, if we're powering the future of work, work is not done by applications. Work gets accomplished by actions, right? And so can we extract actions out of applications and then we have a fast path to getting work done? Anytime that we, what we're starting to realize now is that anytime we send somebody into an application to get to an action, to get work done, then we've already moved them, you know, a couple of steps away, and anytime they have to go to one application to go to another application to go to another application to get to an action, right? Then we've already wasted a lot of time and that sort of realization is really helpless along the way. And then I think your point about, you know, presenting solutions is a really good one in the sense that that same journey made us realize, well, we had a networking business and we had sort of an end user computing business, but more and more, you can't get to the end using computing components without some networking in between. So there's just this interconnected mesh of I have an action, I want to connect to another action. There's always some kind of connectivity, some kind of network that has to happen. All these things need to work in concert and if those things are working in concert, then you have this amazing opportunity to collect data and get analytics and insights and, you know, apply some machine learning against it. And so it's that that kind of led us to say, let's start talking more about solutions because, you know, people aren't going to get if we try to explain this whole daisy chain of events. Let's just talk about what the outcome is and what we want to achieve. People like that, right? We're kind of outcome oriented by nature and speaking of outcomes, I couldn't help but think yesterday when you guys were showing that great demo David showed during his keynote of the marketing manager and the bombardment that happens when that person in the line of business comes in and has, you know, five or seven different apps to interact with, go to the app as you were kind of describing that, what can be a complicated process of then having to take an action and being able to use intelligence and machine learning to surface, Lisa's a marketing manager, this is how she engages with Workday and with Salesforce, so bringing that to the surface based on the data analysis and the insight. I can't help but think another business outcome that we haven't really talked about yet is increased adoption of those SaaS web and mobile apps that the business is investing in. As we all know, if you're spending money on applications like that and they're not being effectively utilized by your entire company or all the people that need to use it, it's not going to work very well. So I'm kind of even thinking from a product marketing perspective, that's got to be one of the benefits is actually fine-tuning even the cost optimization of some of those apps that you guys can now bring that right to the user based on what you know they need. Yeah, yeah, I think there's a couple of important points there that you mentioned. One is bringing the apps to the user, right? So they're not, or the actions. The actions, yes, thank you. So instead of them going to multiple places to get them, they're all just kind of coming to them in one feed. The other is from the adoption perspective, I think there's a lot of opportunity not just to improve the adoption but also to improve the satisfaction with the usage that's happening there. And anytime somebody talks to me about adoption now, I think about this one customer briefing that I had where there was a very unique titled person. They were director of end user experience, not director of end user computing. They were director of the experience. And their job was, you know, you're saying we're in charge of the adoption and the satisfaction, overall experience with it. And I said, oh, well, so by adoption, are you just creating mandates or policies or saying, hey, you will use this application, not these other four options that you found online, just doing a search. I said, no, because that doesn't lead to good experience. So our NPS scores, so he's rated more on NPS scores than anything else, our NPS scores go down, even if we can drive adoption up, that the NPS scores go down, that's a failure for us. So it's not just, because you can get adoption by forcing people to use something and they hate it, and then you sort of know better off from an employee engagement perspective. Just kind of goes to show how essential the employee experience is to customer experience and customer satisfaction. Employees touch and any function, some level, we're all engaging with our employer's customers. And if there's dissatisfaction going on within the employee, it has a very good chance of making it to the customer. And customers these days, if any product or service, we have choice. Customer churn is something that all marketers aim to eliminate and prevent, but we know we have choice. So I thought you guys did a great job yesterday of really elevating the employee experience to a business critical imperative. I don't even want to say it's a C-suite topic of discussion. It seems to be an absolute imperative because to your point, you can by forcing function make your teams use certain software applications, but if an internal NPS goes down, so does an external NPS or the risk thereof. And so you guys did a great job of tying those two together as really, this is something that every business needs to be laser focused on as that employee experience. Yeah, well, the other thing to think about is a lot of these systems are not necessarily part of their primary function of their job, right? So, you know, unless you're in HR, you're not there to use the HRIS system all day long. And so you just got to get them to the point so that they can do the things they need to do as an employee for legal or financial reasons and then just get them out of the way and let them go on and feel productive, feel like they're contributing to the actual outcomes of the company that goes a long way towards that experience and engagement. Absolutely. So let's peek a little bit into the future. You know, it's funny that we're talking post-digital transformation as most people are still going into digital transformation, but customer experience, employee experience are the output of digital transformation. You get data from your digital transformation. You guys are doing a great job of providing analytics. Let's talk about the importance of those analytics as we go beyond employee experience, digital transformation and customer experience. When we removed one bottleneck, you know, when I first got my first iPhone, it was awesome until the next iPhone came out. And then the next one and the next and my level of expectation changes. So what was good seven years ago is not unacceptable today. As you guys help customers innovate and you collect data, what types of X data, experience data will you continue to collect? So even when the employee experience rises, that bar again rises and you help customers meet that bar. How important analytics to that? Yeah, so the whole analytics platform is, I mean, I could foresee a day where people almost buy the workspace or buy our networking solutions to get to the analytics that they want, right? Because we are in a unique situation where we have information about who the end user is, what device they're using, what files they're accessing, what networks they're going over, what servers are touching, what clouds they're using. And all of this stuff that it's very rare in the industry that all those kinds of things come together in one place. So I think for one, the great thing about the purpose of gathering those analytics is for the machine learning. So the machine learning never stops learning. As the end users continue to use it over time, it just keeps getting better and better and better. It understands their behaviors, it understands their patterns. And so that sort of the longevity is actually what helps it transform with the end user, as long as we're just continuing to provide those sorts of capabilities. I think also the analytics, particularly in the area of engaging and engagement and productivity, we go back to the idea of breaking down applications into actions, into micro-apps. I think once you start to see what micro-apps people use and what micro-apps people use in concert with each other or in sequence, that also has an interesting analytic behavioral benefit to it, right? You can see what workflows are developing, whether organically or inorganically, or whether there are things, patterns that you should take advantage of or patterns that you should stop. And those analytics then start to evolve in a way that we're getting at very granular pieces or granular units of work. And then we can start to see how those impact the business outcomes. So as long as we keep thinking about not just how analytics apply to one piece of software and the experience with that software, but start to think now, what is the daisy chain of micro-apps? What is the experience of work and the interconnectedness of that? The analytics just become more and more important in bringing that together, because you can't do that mentally as a human being. You need some of that help from the machine learning. So Calvin, last question for you. Lots of folks here, over 6,000. The keynotes, yesterday and this morning, were standing room only. We heard record numbers watching the live stream. Intelligent experience, not GA yet. We mentioned there's some customers in beta. That was the most popular demo here in the Solutions Expo, long line yesterday. Got to ask you as a VP of product marketing, what are some of the feedback that you've gotten from customers here since that breaking news yesterday morning? Number one is, can I get it now? Because they didn't pay attention to that. Of course, right? So can I get it now? The other one I think is really great discussion because they see it, they see the end vision of it. It's kind of like the cooking shows. You pull out the finished cake and they're like, oh, that's great. How do I make it? How do I get there? And so that's been the nature of a lot of those conversations. We're also holding executive briefings here a lot and what I've been hearing from all the teams is, we'll start kicking off into a presentation. We'll say, okay, so let me recap what you saw. And they're like, no, no, no, no. I like what I saw. Tell me how we're going to do it. What does it look like? You get right into that conversation of execution and planning and who do I need to get on board? Who do I need to talk to? Do I bring in my CHRO? You know, that kind of stuff. It's been that kind of reaction. It's exactly what we're hoping for. So, and I'll sink one more question in because you've been at Citrix for 15 years, but looking at the employee experiences as horizontal across, not just IT's issue to make sure things are connected. It's HR, it's people officer, it's marketing, it's sales. Have you seen a big change in how Citrix is going to market? Not just talking to the IT folks, but people saying, who do I need to engage in my business to get on board with this direction? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I don't want to overstate it in that we're in front of, we're not a consumer name yet. But in the past several months, the audiences that we've been talking to, it's not uncommon that we'll have a briefing with a CIO and the next time we talk, the CHRO is in there with them, somebody else from the line of business, the Chief Revenue Officers, and they're starting to bring people in that we've never met with before. And I think that's good for the CIO too. It says, I'm investing in this business, I understand what our business is, and I found a way to help you. And let's talk about how to do it. Exciting times, never a dull moment. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon at Synergy. We've heard so many exciting things, talking a couple more of your innovation award nominees this afternoon. Really great stuff. It's a really good flock this year of the Innovation Award final. Outstanding. I love how you guys do the voting too, that it's some of the public gets a chance to vote as well as some of the experts. I thought that was very cool. American Idol style. Exactly. Well, Kevin, thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.