 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Chownes and the CTO advisor. Keith, it's so great to see you. Lisa, good to be on the show with you again. So we're going to geek out the next two days. Oh, and it's so good. We've been geeking out already, just coming from the keynote. This is, it was really good. There was meat, there was announcements, there was news, partnerships. Citrix is a 30-year-old company who's done a lot in the last 12, 18 months to transform from rebranding, product names, et cetera, lots of launches and announcements. And something that really peaked my interest as a marketer this morning is hearing the influence of consumerization. Them talking about leveraging Citrix Workspace and the things that they have done to beef it up, which we'll talk about, to deliver a stellar employee experience to delight the users. And those are words that we hear often in the marketing space, a customer lifetime value. They talked about the employee lifetime value because employee attraction, talent attraction and retention is critical for every business. Really meaty stuff. What was some of your take on some of the announcements? So, you know, it was really interesting because I'm coming off of SAP Sapphire where I'm accustomed to hearing terms like customer experience, employee experience, you know, the kind of ex data versus old data conversation. We heard a lot of that here today. And it's weird coming from an infrastructure company. Citrix, in the past, I like to put into a box is about VDI, application virtualization and networking. And that's pretty much the conversation it stayed at the IT infrastructure leader perspective. Today, we heard a lot that broke out of that and it was, you know, going into the C-suite and delivering not just technology results, but business results. It was a lot about making transformation real. You're right. It was about making it real. And if you think at the end of the day, I think I heard a stat the other day that by 2020, which is literally around the corner, 50% of workers are going to be remote. You and I are great examples of that. We're on the road all the time. We have multiple devices. We need to have connectivity that to all of the apps, SaaS apps, mobile apps, web, that allow us to be productive from wherever we are, done in a way that our employers are confident there's security behind us. But delivering that exceptional employee experience is absolutely business critical. They gave some stats today about the trillions of dollars that are spent or rather work that's lost with employees that have so many apps each day that they're working with that really distract from your actual day-to-day function. Yeah, I think one of the stacks that they gave from an ambitious perspective, they want to give one day back to every employee, 20% of their time back. I think the stack you referred to, some $7 trillion of productivity is lost from just hunting and packing inside of applications. Both of us work remotely. You work from your tablet. I work from a tablet or my phone a lot because it's low power that it lasts the day. But yet, I still need to edit video. I need to sign invoices. I need to create statements of work. I need to be just as creative on the road as I am at home. It helps me to compete against larger competitors, but more importantly offer a different customer experience. And this is what Citrix was talking about today was more than just VDIs about picking up any device, asking basic logical questions like what is the status of the latest big deal and getting that status from Salesforce without again hunting and packing from whatever device you're on. Which is critical, especially to have that seamless experience going from desktop to mobile. I think they also said there was a lot of stats this morning which I really geek out on, but that the average person is using seven to 10 apps a day. And I loved the video that they showed this morning that really brought that to life, looking at a senior marketing manager for some enterprise company who, as she starts her day, there's 10 minutes that goes by which is like, oh, I forgot I got to log into Workday and request my PTO. Oh, one of my employees needs me to approve an expense report. And oh, my boss wants to know about this big deal that's closed. And the time that is spent logging into different applications is really, as you mentioned that number, seven trillion dollars lost. What they're doing with Citrix, with the intelligent, the workspace intelligence experience is bringing all of that to the end user. So it's much more in an activity's focus rather than an app focused experience. And I loved what you said that they're very ambitiously aiming to give each person back one day a week. Yes, please. I will take that in any organization. So I was at a government conference a few weeks ago and they talked very much about this. CFO of GSA presented to a crowd of fellow government workers. And they were talking about eliminating waste. They were talking about automating processes, taking the PDF. I mean, taking a document, scanning it into a system and then kicking off a workflow. And this has done, the industry has been working on this problem for the past 10 years. It's called RPA, Robotic Process Automation. One of Citrix's partners and I guess now competitors in that space just received $568 million in funding in the single round to enable artificial intelligence to do this. What I thought was interesting is that Citrix didn't use the term bots, I think other than one time on the stage. But these are essentially bots that take redundant processes, automates them to ultimately add value. I'm anxious to dive in and talk about how Citrix is taking stuff like, they mentioned mainframe, AS400 applications. Integrating that in Salesforce without having this huge multi-million dollar project to rewrite these core business applications and processes. So it's a really exciting time in the industry. Citrix has really stepped up and saying, you know what, we won't settle for just having a good business in this application virtualization and network space. We're going to go all in. So one of the things I saw on Twitter this morning is you and I are both tweeting during the keynote which we just came from is you talked about RPA right away on Twitter. And it's something that you heard instinctively with what they were saying. What are your thoughts as to why RPA as a term wasn't discussed? Do you think it's the type of audience that's here? Is it just not a term that resonates as well as AI and machine learning, which are buzzwords at every event we go to? And I think a good portion of that is a mix. We're at a conference that's very IT-centric. Citrix is one of the core IT infrastructure vendors. So when you throw out a term like robotic process automation, you constantly, you instantly think, gain in productivity from me and your level maybe, but from a IT infrastructure practitioner perspective, robotic process automation has a resonance with being equal to eliminating jobs. If you're going to automate the integration between VMware vSphere and Citrix desktop virtualization and that administration piece, which these solutions definitely can do that, what's left for me to do the work on. If you're going to automate the provisioning of DNS and IP addressing and all these mundane tasks that administrators probably spend 50 to 60% of their day doing, you know what, that's threatening. To say that, you know what, we're going to give you the same tools that we give to make the workspace available today from an application perspective and tackle that from the concept of this is just extending that ideal in your job and what you do today to adding true business value. Think it was smart on their part to kind of avoid the bot conversation. Okay, I'm glad that you shared that insight, that makes perfect sense. So PJ Huff was up there, the chief product officer who's going to be on tomorrow, talking about what Citrix is doing to distill apps and make this experience much more personalized. And of course he was joined on stage with the big Microsoft announcement today. I think I've been to so many shows this year, I've lost count, but I think Satya Nadella has either been on stage, he was at Dell Technologies World with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger, or in a video like he was today. So the partnership with Microsoft, expanding here a little bit of a teaser at Microsoft Ignite a couple of months ago. Give me your thoughts on what Microsoft, well I should say what Citrix is doing to facilitate their users being much more proficient at using Microsoft Teams, which I believe the gentleman from Microsoft said there's over 300,000 active users already. Fastest growing product Microsoft's history. So when you talk about collaboration, you can't collaborate without these tools, whether it's Teams, Slack, whatever, it's become an integral part of how we communicate, how we interact. I know a lot of friends that I have are moving from Slack to Teams. Just because of the integration with Office 365, they can collaborate around, and I think here on theCUBE, we talk about data as being the key. You have to talk about data. One of the things I was prepared to go kind of head on with Citrix today and tomorrow about was about data. You know, it's great to present applications, but how are you helping to help users collaborate and use and access data? And the combination of RPA with the intelligent experience, it's going to take us some time to get used to this. I keep wanting to say enterprise, intelligent experience. Experience product with Teams, with the Azure announcement, integration with Azure and full support of the Citrix platform inside of Azure will just make the employee experience at least potentially a lot seamless, a lot more seamless. I'm super excited about, you can't tell in my voice, I haven't gotten excited about Citrix in a long time. And this is the first time they had theCUBE at Synergy since 2011. I think it was a great time to reignite that partnership in this coverage. It's going to be an interesting two days. It is, so we talked about digital workspace, the other two areas of Citrix's business that you touched on a little bit, security and analytics. Let's talk about the security piece first as it relates to Microsoft Teams and Azure. SD-WAN is becoming more and more absolutely critical to ensure that because as people, we are the number one threat vector in any organization, not that we're all bad actors, but because we just need to get things done as frictionless or seamless, as you said, as possible and efficiently as possible. What did you hear today with respect to security that might really make some of those IT folks take notice? Well, we want to work from any device. Like, I want to be able to, ideally, if I say, you know what, I want to pick up a new surface tablet when I go to Atlanta. I don't want to pack my iPad. I want to be able to pick that up and work. If I go to a Kiox, I want to be able to, even if it's running Windows XP, I want to be able to do my work. I want to be able to do my work from any device. This is a nightmare for system administrators to say, how do I control security while making the experience frictionless? Those two things don't seem to go together. So Citrix, whether it's with this new announcement where Microsoft with Teams, it's traditional applications around SD-WAN, enabling access from remote locations at a, and Citrix is kind of, this is their bread and butter, offering remote access to applications securely and fast. This is, you know, Citrix is starting to formulate a really great end-to-end story about making applications data, and more importantly, business answers and capabilities available anywhere securely. So it's a great story. It really is. So if you're excited, you already know how excited I am. I think we're going to have a fantastic day today and tomorrow. We've got a whole bunch of the C-suite from Citrix on. We're also going to be talking with some partners and customers. And interestingly, as a marketer, this piqued my interest as well. They have the Innovation Awards. There are three finalists. We will be talking with all three over the next two days. And this is a customer awards program that anybody can vote on. So I haven't seen that before, so I'm excited to understand how Citrix is enabling them to have this great employee experience, which is more and more critical as the shortages and the gaps are becoming more and more prevalent. And also how these customers are reacting to some, just some of the news announced today with Microsoft, the Intelligent Enterprise, and how they see their employees and attracting and retaining top talent as actually really mission critical. So we're going to have fun, Keith. I agree. All right. You're watching Keith Townsend and Lisa Martin live from theCUBE. We are on the show floor at Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Stick around, Keith and I will be right back with our first guest after a short break.