 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Wikibond.org and I'm here with Jeff Kelly who's my co-host today, John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE and founder of SiliconANGLE is on the West Coast with some personal commitments, but I've seen a few tweets from him and John will shout out to you, wish you were here, but Jeff's happy that you're not. So, I'm sure John is watching theCUBE when he's not on theCUBE. So, fire off a few questions on Twitter, I'm at Dave Vellante, he's at Jeffrey F. Kelly. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's continuous production. We're here live at the Tableau Customer Conference. We go to these events, we extract the signal from the noise, we bring the smartest guests that are at these shows and really find out how they're applying technology to create a business capability. It's not just about the tech itself, we always hear about people processing technology. Practitioners will tell you that technology is sometimes the easiest part of the equation, it's the people in process that are more challenging. Steve Keller is here, he's a staff software engineer at Citrix, we're going to talk about how they deal with data and the life cycle of data. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. So, we all know Citrix as we were talking off camera, we were at Citrix Synergy a couple of years ago, great event, a wonderful company, you guys do a lot of really interesting things, cloud, end user computing, all kinds of software as a service capabilities. Talk about your role inside of Citrix as a developer and we'll get into the whole visualization and tableau thing. Sounds great. Well, let me first start by saying that the organization that I'm in is called Lifecycle Maintenance and the role that we play is we are right next to the code when it comes to providing customer fixes. So, our role is when we have situations that come in, when we have problems that can't be addressed by the first and second level support, we actually take care of those problems, make the code fixes, test them and then provide them to our customers. So, that's the role. Specifically, I play a really unique role within that organization and I'm actually a Microsoft liaison. So, as you know, we're very close partners with Microsoft and so in that, we need to bring the technologies in early to make sure our products are ready and compatible and then also, as we run into issues along the way, we have to filter those back to Microsoft. So, that's the role I play, kind of with our teams in Redmond, as well as our teams in the development areas, I kind of work between those. Yeah, because people, they're used to flipping through, especially executives, you know, just print me their copy and I'll flip through it. Sure. So, there's a whole sort of different mindset that has to occur there and as you say, you're sort of learning now. What surprises have you seen, you know, positive or negative, bringing in Tableau and this whole visualization culture that you're trying to drive? What surprised you the most? The thing that surprised me the most, I would say a couple of things. First, the simplicity. The simplicity not only of laying out the visualization, the dragging and dropping of data elements, but the simplicity of the variety of data connections that I can make. So, that's another thing, just simplicity there and then the value behind utilizing a given graphic or a given chart as a filter for the others. I think that's been the biggest surprise of how valuable that is and the ability to utilize that to answer your questions interactively. So, as we go forward, you know, Tableau of course, recently gone public and there's a lot of attention in the media, they're doing quite well on Wall Street, but you know, of course, they're always, they're still going to be under pressure to innovate as well. Of course. You know, if you could, what would be on your to-do list for Tableau? What are some of the things you'd like to see from their application? What are some of the key things that would make your job even easier? Well, you know, like I've mentioned, I'm kind of new to this, so I'm just learning how to use what's there and I think they've done a very good job of putting instructional videos out there as things come out. I think those are invaluable. I've used those incredibly much so that would be the one thing going forward, keep that up because that has been very helpful. I can point folks to that and you know, example visualizations and showing how they're doing things and the context with which they fit, that's invaluable. So I think as we grow and learn that, we'll realize what more we want and what more we need. So right now, unfortunately, I can't really say, hey, I'd like to have this, this and this because I don't think I know enough but I would say these are the things that are being done well now and keep that up. Is that how you got started in terms of your training? Was sort of use the community, use the videos? Exactly. Like I said, I heard about Tableau. I went out, I used my favorite search engine, Bing, in my case and I went out there and I found Tableau. I downloaded the trial and I started playing around and again, being a developer, I want to see what I can do without having to read anything and I got a good start there and then I went out and started looking at training videos. So that's how I got my start. Well, we're seeing software evolve and the point where, you know, no training is the sort of objective and it sounds like you feel as though Tableau's achieved that to a large extent. Very much so. Do you feel like the balance of the industry is getting there or maybe is there already or won't get there for another decade? What's your thought on that? I really think it depends on the industry because I think, you know, different industries have different focus and some things, you know, takes a matter of complexity so it takes some real thought and some real innovative design thinking, if you will, to make something simple that's complex in nature. So I think as a whole we are definitely getting simpler as we go on because we're having so much more technology that helps us to do that but, you know, obviously I don't think we're there yet. And the app culture, right? There's an app for that culture, right? Absolutely. You know, there's no training manuals for apps. Right, right, yeah. And that's the direction we're heading, a lot more so. Yeah. So what's exciting you from a development standpoint? There's a lot of stuff going on, right? I mean, there's really new and interesting types of databases coming up. The whole boring, the whole, you know, Hadoop trend, this whole visualization thing, big data, cloud, what's, from a developer standpoint, it's like a renaissance. Right, right. What are you watching? What are you tracking? What's exciting you? I think there are two key things right now. One of which you mentioned, apps. I think mobile is a big focus these days and I think anyone that's developing any kind of applications or any kind of interfaces with people, you have to have that mobile focus. And we at Citrix realize that and are doing that as well. You'll see that in our product focus. The other thing is data. And you know, exactly where Tableau is sitting right now, but data everywhere. And we're seeing that more and more, not just from a consumer standpoint of the things that we think of. Hey, we've got this support case in my instance or we've got this customer sales information but taking it even further and realizing that we have these mobile devices in our hands every day and we need to tie that together with what's going on the social networks. We need to link those things together and realize the value that we can get by looking at those feeds and correlating that with what's going on in our sales and also in our support. Is that part of your corpus of data today? Do you ingest social data? Let's say it's something that we're starting to realize there's value in. And we're in the process right now of realizing the big role that data is playing and we're trying to understand what we can do with that. Do you feel, I mean, there's obviously an opportunity for organizations like yours to be proactive with regard to what's happening in social data but I don't know if anybody's really figured that out yet. I mean, there are certain organizations that are good about maybe responding on social or interacting on social and that engagement piece is good. That's a good thing. It's good, very customer driven. But I haven't seen and maybe you have or maybe one of you guys are thinking about it sort of a data driven approach. Like there's all this exhaust out there. How do you make sense of it and how do you drive value to an organization like yours? Have you had those discussions? Do you see light at the end of that tunnel or? Again, it's an area that we realize there's value in and we're in the process of exploring things like that right now. We've got a whole Citrix Labs team that's involved in a lot of different data initiatives and doing just those kinds of things is trying to experiment and do research on the fact of what can we do to make value out of this and some of the key things and initiatives going on there. Excellent. All right, Steve, listen, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. I really appreciate it. Yet another good Tableau customer case story. We go to theCUBE, we go to all these events and you can always evaluate the quality of the company by the quality of the customers that they're able to have on. So you really appreciate the time and the insights. Mark Jackson is coming up next. He is with Piedmont Healthcare. Jeff and I have been talking this morning about the application of data in healthcare. So stay tuned for that. This is theCUBE. We're live here all day at the Tableau Customer Conference. I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back after this word.