 Live from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. Mark Templeton is here, industry legend, former CEO of Citrix. Mark, really a pleasure having you on. Thanks, thanks. Really great to be here. So what are you doing these days? Enjoying retirement, all right? Way more than I thought. But earlier today at the Nutanix next conference, Mark Leslie, the legend icon, talked about the arc of life, and he had this one slide that said there is no finish line. And I think anyone who is blessed to have worked their career around their passion, he just captured it all in that one slide. And so there's no finish line. It's just sort of continuing the journey with maybe some new friends and colleagues. Right, no hammock, no umbrella drinks. Oh, plenty of drinks. Plenty of drinks. But it doesn't end there. No, plenty of drinks, as always, but no hammock. And so you heard your keynote yesterday, which is outstanding. You're spending a lot of time thinking about the future. Yes. And so you've got time to do that now. What are you seeing? What's in the binoculars of Mark Templeton? Well, you know, a big thing for me is people and how generations of people actually influence changes in our environment and how they drive different ages in the sense of description of time. So I think, you know, for me, I was born analog. I'm a boomer, and boomers generally, you know, born analog, but I fell in love with digital and it made it my career. My children are XY-genres. They were born digital mainly because of my career, but many in their generation were actually, you know, born analog, but learned digital pretty quickly. Right. Now millennials, you know, they're born digital and they're not interested in how things work from a computing perspective. They want to know what can it do? And so the question is now, what's next? And as I sort of talk to a lot of millennials, talk to a lot of companies that are out there with ideas, I've concluded that we're actually at the end of the digital age because we're on digital overload. There are too many devices. There are too many apps, too much data, too many social connections. I mean, no one can handle and manage it all. And the only way we can keep going in terms of leveraging technology to the benefit of humankind is for it to become invisible. And the way it becomes invisible is to take what we've accepted as analog for a long, long time, human emotion, relationships, location of people, intersections amongst people, et cetera, and start creating context out of that through digital mechanisms. So I think this next, where things are going, is away from digital toward contextual, and it's through contextual that we can actually have a greater experience with technology underneath. And yeah, and tremendous opportunities for invention, innovation, et cetera. You asked the question yesterday of the audience, who could program an assembler? I put my hand up. I don't know if I still could, but I certainly have. But your point was that everybody who's programming today is programming an assembler. It's just invisible. That's right. Every layer of extraction makes the layers below invisible. And it's one of the things I love about Nutanix because they're making cloud infrastructure, hypervisors, kind of all this componentry invisible, allowing the focus on a common set of services that are exposed. And for a whole set of people, that's great. And that means you can move on to the higher layers of the stack. Same thing goes for contextuality. Contextuality will create layers of abstraction that when you enter the room, the right things happen. You don't have to think about, oh, I'm using Lutron switches or I've got a nest going on here. Did it move from away to home? All of that becomes invisible and goes away. It's just early in the cycle of getting there. So what do you see that having an impact on the jobs that are people having? You talk about moving up the stack, it's even an IT here and for Nutanix, it's, oh, wow, this is what my job's been for years and now I don't need to do that. I'm retraining, moving up the stack. There's lots of challenges. Well, I think history shows that every generation of where there's a layer of abstraction that has lots of staying power, what it does is it takes a bunch of people and it says, okay, you stay below that stack and you're a specialist and you stay deep on it. I mean, let's face it, you put Nutanix technology in place, you have to have deep specialists under that. It's just that the dev apps people don't have to know anything about how it works underneath. The business units don't have to know anything about that and so they can take all of that stuff that's cluttering their time in mind and focus on the missions that are important to them. So I think, so it creates layers of specialization along the way and then it pushes generalists up, up, up. And look, if, I mean, I think the Nutanix team, I think, adequately talked about the notion of what do we do when we get time back whether we're admins or whether we're CIOs or whether we're CEOs or whether we're just individuals. And I think that's where, you know, humankind seems to not have a problem in consuming that extra time, whether it's recreational or maybe a more return to some of the basic values of families and relationships or new levels of innovation and invention. I think there are a lot of, there are a lot of things that get done with that extra time. You don't, I infer from your talk yesterday, you don't like the term consumerization of IT. You used a different term. Yeah, you know, I actually, Jeff with Slack made that point around consumerization of IT and he said really it's about humanization of IT. You know, I think these terms serve purposes along the way and I think that we're still in the process of consumerizing IT. It's just that the purpose of the consumerization is to humanize it and the consumerization basically is making things, making the IT experience much more retail, right? Where people get choice, where they get self-service and IT organizations actually describe themselves in a way that where they're merchandising services that benefit the business. So I don't dislike consumerization as much as I really like the idea of moving the idea forward to humanization because that's the outcome you're looking for. So, square a circle for me because you said something that surprised me at the end of the digital age. And you defended that position but I wanted to ask you about something like autonomous vehicles. Talking to my teenage daughters the other day and one of them made the point that turning 16 is a symbol of freedom. And one of the pieces of that freedom is you get to drive a car. And so I thought you were going to say this is just the beginning of the digital age. What do you make of that? In terms of the impact on society and its humanization of aspects? Well, so the end of the digital age includes it's the end of the visibility of digital because it's just peaked out. And so digital sort of technologies around digital they're just becoming more and more and more invisible as machines do more work that humans used to do. I mean, here's a question. Why is it so hard for older people to adopt new technologies? If they're so simple and they're so great why do they have a hard time adopting? Because they're complicated. They're complicated, right? You know, when you're doing it over and over you don't realize how much knowledge you're applying to something that's so simple, right? So all I'm saying is the test will be when a generation that's behind us can actually consume it in pretty ubiquitous ways. And so it's the boomerang kind of a fact, right? So Stu, you were talking a little bit about the work that we did with the guys at MIT and Bryn Jolson and McAfee of the second machine age. So do you think much about, I'm sure you do about the impact of machines? These machines have always replaced humans. They seem to be now doing it at a cognitive level. And what are your thoughts on education and the state of education in this country in particular? Well, I mean, there are two ways to answer that. Half full, half empty. I'm an optimist. And I think that these kinds of things I'm talking about actually will serve to make education more personalized by individual. When I look at the things like Khan Academy, right, and the impact that Khan Academy has made in public school systems, and you squint at it so that you only see the shapes and forms, here's what it's done. It's allowed the teachers to focus on the students by exception and where they need help as opposed to mass kind of education in an entire classroom. That's been one of the big effects of Salkan's work. So I'm optimistic about machines, contextuality and the intersection of all of that when it comes to education because I think the more context a teacher has around a student, what's going on at home, what's happening in other classes, extracurricular activities or lack thereof gives them a better ability to actually teach them and gives them a better ability to learn if the systems are set up to make that connection. And we're optimists too. I think the observation is that the industry is marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades and that's what's driven innovation and it's not driving innovation anymore. It's the combination of technologies. We think that creativity, teaching, I don't know if you could teach creativity, I guess you can. I guess you can. I can't you, right? So that seems to be the new frontier of education in our view anyway. Does that make sense to you? It makes total sense and by the way, you travel the world and you characterize various educational methodologies and priorities around the world. What still, I mean a lot of people throw rocks at the educational system in the U.S. It's actually a system that promotes creativity more than any other educational system in the world. You go to certain countries in Asia and they promote knowledge and just in knowing facts and being able to state facts and correlate facts. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. It's just that you're not driving a creative sort of process. You aren't teaching creativity. So yes, I'm optimistic about where we're headed in the sense of how this age of contextuality can actually propel us forward as a nation around education. And that's why you hear so much criticism about teaching the test. You know, you had little young kids and you hear a lot of that backlash. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Mark, I wanna go back. You talked a lot about kind of generations and journeys. When we look in the IT space, the pace of change is just faster than ever. You know, what advice do you give to, you know, how do you get, you know, by now by the time you're relevant, you're almost irrelevant, you know, soon after. So how do you plan for that? Well, so first of all, I think you always have to start with an opinion about the future that you believe in and so strongly that you're willing to make bets. Okay? And some of the bets, you know, there are low-risk bets, there are high-risk bets. Mark Leslie talked about transformation, et cetera, today. And that's really about having an opinion about the future and making a bet. So, and he gave some great case studies, but if you look at those case studies, you ask the CEOs, the leaders there, they didn't think they were high-risk because, you know, they felt the greater risk was not betting, right? And it's because of their opinion of the future. So I think you have to start there. Too many, my observation, opinion is too many people read too many books, too much of the net and form their opinions based upon what they read as opposed to forming an opinion on their own through some amount of introspection and experience. Okay? And I think that, I'll give you an example. I remember, it was probably 1999. I was newly CEO of Citrix and I had a whole faction of our dev team saying, Mark, it's all about WAP. It's like, what do you mean it's all about WAP? It's like, it's all about WAP. I said, what's WAP? Well, it's the wireless, I can't even remember what it stood for, something protocol, access, security stuff. So, okay, I said, all right, let's meet on that like next week. It's like, okay, fine. So over the weekend, I go somewhere and I bought a WAP phone, a Nokia WAP phone that's supported WAP. So I get on there over the weekend and blah, blah, blah, blah, fine. I go to the meeting next week, sit down and the whole team comes, it's all about WAP. Here's why I said, okay, let me start with a question. Can everyone show me their WAP phones? No one had one. And I pulled mine out and I said, you know, hey, let me give you a demo. And so, you know, you form an opinion about something and then you can, and so I said, we're not spending one nickel on a WAP, right? So, you know, I think that's the number one advice I would give because then when you have a belief and an opinion about the future, your bets are, you feel they're low risk for the right reasons. I want to ask you as a CEO, a former CEO of a public company, you've heard Mark Leslie talk about today, the short-term focus. A lot of people talk about that. Ever since I've been in the business, people talk about, particularly U.S. companies, short-term focus, Wall Street, now you're seeing activist investors. Maybe it's gone to a new level. I presume you agree, but it's worked. The United States is dominant and they've always had this short-term focus. Have we gone beyond a point, though, of rationality? Well, you know, I think this is a semantical problem. So, I think I probably don't agree with Mark, right? And along the way, when people say, well, you know, public CEO, you know, go with the P.E. guys, you know, do that. Well, why would I do that? Well, because you don't have the short-term focus, like, you know, the quarterly thing and it's like, are you kidding me? You don't know P.E. guys, first of all, all right? Secondly, I disagree because you're measured as a public company against the expectations that you set. So, if you set the wrong expectations and miss them, then, you know, you're in trouble. If you set the right expectations, whether those expectations are financial, strategic, operational, and you exceed them, there's no problem with it. And our system is successful because there's a quarterly rhythm to measuring the path of companies that are public. And so, there's no law out there that says, every time you measure, it has to be something, you know, prescribed, it is prescribed, it's prescribed by the CEO and board. And the expectations that they set. And the expectations that get set. So, you know, I was CEO of Citrix for many, many years. And when I retired, it was my 70th earnings report, all right? And I figured, you know, 70 years in jail is enough, you know, I applied for parole a few times and it was denied. But seriously, the idea of a quarterly report against the expectations you set is not a bad thing. Yeah, Michael Dell talks about the 90-day shot clock, but I'll bet you he has a 90-day shot clock internally. Sure. I mean, absolutely. Do you think, you know, I don't know if this is the case, but it seems to me that some of the companies that I observe today that are successful, in particular, Nutanix, I would put service now in that category, Tableau, Splunk. They seem to be highly transparent, maybe more transparent than I'm used to. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention before. Is that, have you observed that? And do you think it's just a function of their success and their size allows them to be more transparent than a? No, I think that, I think that's a big change that's taken place. So more newly public companies like Splunk, for example. Have to be more transparent around the core metrics they use to measure success. So if you look at some of the success, like Adobe, hugely successful transformation story, they did it through obviously the right strategic mechanisms to move to a different business model, but they had to create a level of transparency to get there in order to successfully make that transformation. Companies like Splunk started there, right? And so that is the standard for a more of a subscription cloud-based, SaaS-oriented type business model, and investors reward that, I think. And so therefore it's a, it confirms. It's like positive strokes to transparency, which I'm all for. I wish we had more time to talk about things like culture and so many different topics, but we'll leave it at, what's next for you? What are you spending your time on? Any fun projects that you're working on? Yeah, I'm spending all my time on technologies that increase contextuality. So for example, one of them is a web psychographics company. So when you surf the web now, their web analytics really does more demographical kinds of things, right? But the science of psychographics actually takes a lot of that and actually figures out what's the why, your behavior, what's in your head. So I think that's a context that's important to add, again, to make the technology more invisible. Spending time on autonomic security, that actually not only dynamically sees attacks and discontinuities, it fixes them and then tells you later. Spending time on something that really exciting called human location analytics, which basically is technology that can passively track human motion and very precisely, so that as people occupy various spaces and have paths and interactions, systems around it can respond. So like in a retail environment, maybe if you're spending a lot of time at an end cap, somebody will come and help you. Or, and if you combine some of these things, the psychographics and the human location, you'll get the right kind of help and so forth. And that becomes all invisible and we just have a great experience. Combining innovations, right? Taking advantage of this invisible digital matrix. Yeah, and the thing that I'm really psyched about and most people that have known me for some time know that I have a particular weakness with four things that have round rubber tires, okay? So I'm deeply involved in a company, that an e-bike company that it's called Vintage Electric Bikes. It's an e-bike you love and you want to ride because of the joy that it gives you, all right? So yeah, so things that, you know, greater context, so technology can be invisible and things that bring out emotional kinds of pleasure and joy, that's where I'm spending my time. And I think they're, by the way, it's fun, which is the first bar I have. Number two, great people, the second bar, all right? And then the third bar is I think that actually these things are important for a better world and creating opportunity for people, et cetera. And I like doing that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and delighting our audience. It was really a pleasure having you. You look great, you sound great, congratulations. Having a great time. Thank you very much, I appreciate it a lot. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, we'll be right back.