 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith, it's great to be back with you. We had a great day yesterday. Wasn't it exciting? It was. And this is surprising. You know, I have to be honest, as a Citrix, as a former Citrix customer, and as a watcher of it, David Hansel talked about the 85% of IT budgets goes into keeping the lights on, et cetera. I firmly put Citrix in that 85% of a company that produces solutions that basically kept the lights on. They snuck into the other 15% yesterday. It was a really interesting keynote. They've made an obvious pivot towards general purpose users. David also mentioned, and this is something that I didn't know, that most enterprise software historically has been designed for power users, which is the 1% of users. And they are really positioning Citrix Workspace, intelligent experience for the general purpose user, the marketing managers, the folks in finance, et cetera, who can really leverage this tool to dramatically, not just simplify their workdays, but they made this really bold promise yesterday that Citrix Workspace One with the intelligent enterprise experience is going to be able to give each person back a user one full day a week. That's two months a year back to actually do their jobs. I think I'll choose to go on vacation for those two months. I'm with you. But one of the things that was consistent throughout the day was the tone of one excitement, all of the analysts, all of the executives we talked to yesterday, very excited about the intelligent experience. But it was more of a abstract thought versus solid, like this is what the product will do, this is what it looks like. So I'm looking forward to the coming months of seeing the product in action. I could equate it to robotic process automation tools, like UiPath and the many tools that are out there. But I didn't get a good sense of how deep Citrix is going to go into robotic process automation and who would control it. You mentioned the 1% power users. You know, when you look at an automation tool, these are tools that are for the 1% to create these automations, these processes. Will this be something that the Citrix administrators will do on the back end and then deploy to end users in the app store similar to how Citrix is deployed today? Or is this something they're going to give users, the power users, the ability to create so a department team can create a process, an automatic workflow, automated workflow and then deploy that to their team members. I'm a strong believer the further you push technology, simple to use to the end user, the more powerful it becomes and the more they come up with creative ways to use the technologies. And also the higher the adoption's going to be. You know, every tech conference we go to, Keith, talks about, you hear the buzz words, simplicity, frictionless, make it seamless. Those all sound great. And yes, of course, as employees of any company you want that, it's where does the rubber meet the road? So I did read though that even though the intelligent experience isn't going to be GA until later this year, there are a suite of beta customers. So I hope we can chat about that with PJ Huff, their Chief Product Officer later today to just get a sense of what are some of the impacts that this solution is having on some of these beta customers. Are they seeing significant reductions in, or increases in workforce productivity getting towards that, hey, one whole day back. That was the busiest booth I hear at the Solutions Expo yesterday. There was a very long line. So the interest certainly was definitely peaked in terms of what they announced yesterday with the audience here. So today's going to be a pretty exciting day of coverage. We're going to talk to hopefully a few customers. We're going to talk to PJ and I'm excited to kind of peel back the layers on the announcement around the intelligent experience. Then we cap off the day with talking to there's CTO, Christian Riley, who is always fun. So one thing that we didn't talk a lot about today, CubeCon is happening in Europe. The team is there covering that show. And we didn't talk much cloud yesterday while there was announcements around Azure and Google Compute platform. We didn't get into kind of the details of that. So I'm looking forward to talking to Christian later on today about how is Citrix relevant to the cloud conversation? You know, this whole future of work, we can't talk about the future of work without talking about cloud. Absolutely. I know that their cloud revenue is up, but you're right. That isn't something that we got into yesterday. We really focused a lot on with our spectrum of guests on the employee experience. And also got a really broad definition. You know, employee experience isn't just about when I log in as a manager on all of the different tasks that I need to do before I can actually start my function. It starts back up into the left when you even start recruiting for talent. And that was kind of eye opening to me is that they're right, it encompasses the end to end. I kind of thought of it as a marketing funnel where you're nurturing prospects into leads, converting them into opportunities. And then one of the most important things in the marketing funnel that's very similar here is turning those customers into advocates. Same thing on the employee experience side is turning those employees into empowered users that are happy because they're able to be productive and do their jobs appropriately. And then of course their business has nurtured them well enough that they retain that top talent. Yeah, we talked to, we did get at least one customer on yesterday. We talked to Adam Jones, the CRO, Chief Revenue Officer of the Florida Marlins. I got an opportunity to get a dig in on the Chicago Cups. So that's always a fun thing. But even from a customer's perspective, Adam brings the COO lens. So usually, you know, you're over HR, you're over vendor partnerships, et cetera. He talked about the importance of one, giving his employees a seamless experience. So he talked about the employee experience and overall keeping the motivation factor high. Speaking of motivation, we learned the new term yesterday, Tomo. Love that term. Total motivation, what was it? Yeah, total motivation. Total motivation. I'm definitely going to look at my Tomo score for the couple of contractors I have on my staff and or at least try and develop one. I thought it was a great, great acronym. But more importantly, I think organizations are starting to understand employee satisfaction, employee experience equates to outcomes when it comes to customer experience. If your employees are not having a great experience, we talked about onboarding experiences yesterday, if that isn't happening, then chances are there's a direct correlation between customer experience and employee experience. It's a huge risk that companies can't ignore. It is, employee experience is essential. We talked yesterday, like you said, about every employee engagement has some relation back to the customer, whether you're in marketing and you're creating collateral to nurture prospects or you're in finance or illegal or you're in the contact center. You're a touch point to that customer. And so your experience as an employee, they need to foster those relationships to turn those employees into advocates because the customers, for whatever product or service they're delivering, we have so much choice these days. The ability to go, nope, this isn't working. I'm going to go find another vendor who can deliver this service is a big risk. And so when we're talking to Mary Bell Lopez yesterday of Lopez Research, you could really hear her passion in the research that she's done on the future of work. And we talked about employee experience to your point, absolutely critical for customer satisfaction. But employee experience is really essential for digital transformation because businesses really can't transform successfully if the employees aren't productive, aren't satisfied and able to adapt to changing culture as a business digitizes itself. And as we talk about that other 15 to 20% of innovation, it's odd that we're having this employee experience conversation at Citrix. Citrix isn't an HR software company, let alone an HR company. And we talked to David about this in the opening. How do they transition from just having this conversation with IT administrators, which is the primary audience here at Citrix Energy to having this conversation with CEOs, CIOs, CMOs, CDOs, the COs, other C-suite executives. Why does Citrix belong at the table versus these traditional companies we think of, the management consulting firms who specialize in HR and employee experience or even other software companies like SAP with HRM. I thought it was interesting that a lot of the executives that we talked to yesterday had an experience with SAP. So Citrix is absolutely going about this in a prescribed manner and injecting this culture into their company. I agree with you. We talked to their chief people officer and EVP Donna Kimmel about and with a number of other guests about the employee experience being a C-level, not just a conversation topic, but an imperative because all of the COGs need to be functioning in the same direction for this company to move forward. And as I mentioned earlier, as every product and service has competition, as consumers, whether we're consumers of commercial products or technology buyers, we have choice. And so an organization needs to bake into their culture the employee experience in order to ensure that its survival rate and its competitive advantage can go out because we actually did talk about talent attraction and retention as a competitive advantage. And Citrix has done a good job of, you're right, not producing technology for HR, but really being able to speak to that business case being horizontal across any type of organization. And I thought it was a really interesting point or at least something that I thought about yesterday. You know, as Citrix, again, we have a bunch of network administrators, system administrators, VP of infrastructures. That is the traditional audience. And a lot of times we can feel abstracted. That audience can feel abstracted from the business. You know, when you're a call center, when you're in sales, when you're actually touching customers employee experience obviously makes sense then. But I thought the demonstration with the marketing manager really helped this audience connect with the, you know, more of those frontline employees and helping to improve their experience and bringing meaning to that traditional network or system, Cit's admin job. You know, when you feel like you're absolutely moving to productivity ball forward, this is, you know, generational. Adam Jones of the Marlins said that he's in a generational opportunity that to affect change, administrators will find themselves in a generational opportunity to affect change to go move more than just, you know what, we're gonna turn knobs to actually impacting business processes. You talk about generational opportunities. One of the things we talked about yesterday is not just that there are five generations in the workforce today who have differing levels of technology expertise, but this morning in the super session, we got the opportunity to hear from Dr. Madeleine Albright, the 64th Secretary of State of the United States, the first female Secretary of State. And I loved how she talked about diplomacy and democracy and all of the experiences that she's had in relation to how technology can be an enabler of that. And I wicked heard that she's 82 years old and there's Madeleine Albright who is still professing at Georgetown University. I thought that was pretty outstanding. You know, you made the point in our pre-discussion about, you know, she started at Secretary of State, didn't have a computer on her desk to riding in a driverless car. And obviously speaking at a technology conference, I thought it was a great testament to where technology has moved, her ability to embrace change, but more importantly, what it will take, I think she was a model of what it will take. Another interesting point that she made today was trust and knowing whom you're doing business with. We talked about security a awful lot yesterday and just from a practical tactical sense, being able to trust that the person that I'm talking to on the other end of the phone is actually who they say they are or on the other end of a transaction as we start to share data, make the flow of data, allow frictionless sharing of data, we need to be able to trust who we're talking to on the other end. She said, anytime something happens in the world, the first piece of information she gets is always wrong. It's her approach to validation, trust, but validate. I thought there was a lot of great parallels on that to technology. I did just well and on the security front, we talked yesterday about not just the digital workspace of Citrix, but what they're doing on the security and the analytics front to really understand and ensure that the data that they're getting off of users interacting through workspace is ensuring that, okay, this person is authorized to be in this application and this particular area of this application. What were some of the things that you heard with respect to security that you think, Citrix is getting it right because as we know people, number one security threat anywhere. Well, Citrix has traditionally been a leader in products like single sign-on, the ability to make the technology frictionless. There's a reason why we have a post-it note right here with the ID. For our username and password, 13 characters has to be Alfred, numeric, et cetera, and then it expires every 30 days. That's not frictionless security. Citrix has made waves in single sign-on and making sure that the user experience is frictionless so that security, as users, we don't try and bypass that security. I think that's just a simple concept that organizations should follow. Then even on the side of analytics, we had Kevin Jackson of GovNet on and he talked about how monitoring employees changes their actions. So as we're collecting analytics and data to automate processes, how Citrix is making it seamless in the course of that anonymizing the data so that employees don't feel like big brothers watching. Yeah, I thought the more exposure I get through theCUBE to different technologies, the more I've changed my perspective on that is it big brother watching me? Even in call centers when this call may be recorded and you think, oh, great. Actually, they're using that data to your point, as Kevin talked about yesterday. It's anonymized, but the goal is to make the product and service and communications better. And another thing that it can facilitate where Citrix is concerned is making that workspace and that employee experience personalized, which is what we all expect as consumers. When we go on Amazon and we want to buy something, we don't want them to show it. Again, we expect that they know, I've already bought this, maybe serve me something to me that would be a great addition to whatever I bought. We want that personalized experience to make our lives easier and that personalization is another big element that they talked about delivering yesterday and the security and the analytics I think are two pieces that can be facilitators of that. Could just also be sort of a messaging to make sure more of the users understand the anonymization and how that data about their interactions are actually going to make their experiences better. You know, I bought a new laptop by Microsoft a week ago and I was on Facebook and all of a sudden I got a ad from Microsoft on Facebook about laptop and laptop accessories. And at first I thought, wow, that's weird. But that may be the first Facebook ad I've ever clicked on because that actually added value while I felt a little strange about them knowing that I bought a new laptop. Facebook gave me the option to find out how did the ad get served up while Microsoft uploaded a hash set of email addresses and my surface purchase came up and actually added value. Like, okay, I can find out what other materials. So at the end of the day, when you're transparent about what you're doing and you inform users and you add value, at the end of the day, it's the key part. You have to add value. It doesn't help to advertise surface laptops after I already bought one. Now until that next stage to show me accessories and make my experience and my relationship with Microsoft even better is a great example of that. Exactly. Jeff Frick calls that sort of the line between being creepy and being magic. But I like how you kind of add that part of that magic is adding value. Exactly. 100%. Well, Keith, I'm excited for today. We have, you mentioned PJ's on today, Calvin Shoe is also on today. We're going to be talking with the three Innovation Award nominees. That's a very cool kind of American Idol-style voting process where the public can vote on the Innovation Award winner, which will be announced tomorrow. So excited about everything we're going to talk about today and as you mentioned, we're capping things off today with Christian Riley CTO who we already see through Twitter. He's very excited to be on theCUBE with us. Yeah, right. All right, have a great day, yeah? Yes, let's get to it. That's a deal. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. Again, we are live at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. Keith and I will be back with our first guess after a break.