 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. Coming to you from our Palo Alto studios to have a CUBE conversation with a real leader in the industry. He's been publishing for a long, long time. I've been following him in social media. First time I've ever get to met him in person in kind of a virtual COVID 2020 way. And we're excited to welcome into the studio, Bob Evans, he's a founder and principal analyst of the Cloud Wars Media. Coming to us, Bob, where are you coming to us from today? I'm in Pittsburgh today, Jeff, good to see you. Awesome, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Fricks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania because Henry Clay was there many moons ago. So that's a good town, so welcome. Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here and look forward to our conversation. Absolutely, so let's jump into it. So I know you attended today the Citrix Cloud Summit. You know, we've covered Citrix Energy in the past. This year they decided to go obviously virtual like everybody did, but they, you know, they did something a little creative, I think, and they broke it into pieces, which I think is the way of the future. There's no reason to necessarily aggregate all of your news, all of your customer stuff, all your customer appreciation, the party, the partners, all for three days in Vegas, because that's the only time you could get to Sands Convention Center. So today was the Cloud Summit all day long. First off, just, you know, your general impressions of the event. Jeff, you know, I just thought that the guys hit a really good note about what's going on in the outside world. You know, sometimes I think it's a little awkward when tech companies come in and the first thing they want to talk about is themselves, which I guess in some ways is fine, but I think the Citrix guys did a really good job of coming outside in. Here's what's going on in the outside world. Here's how we as a technology player are trying to adapt to that and deliver the maximum value to our customers in this time of unprecedented change. So I thought they really nailed that with Cloud and some of the other big topics that they laid out. Right. And you've been covering Cloud for a long time and, you know, COVID is, we're still in it. There's a lot of really bad things that are happening. There's hundreds of thousands of people that are dying and a lot of businesses are getting crushed, especially hospitality, travel, you know, anything that relies on an aggregation of people. Conversely though, we're fortunate to be in the IT industry and in the information industry and for a lot of industries, it's actually been kind of an accelerant. And one of the main accelerants is this, you know, kind of digital transformation and new way to work. And some of these things that were initiatives in play, but on March 15th approximately, it was go, right? It was light switch, no more planning, no more talking. It's here now, ready set go. And it's in, you know, Citrix is in a pretty good position in terms of the products that they offer, the services that they offer, the customer base that they have to take advantage of that opportunity and, you know, go to this, we've all seen the social media means, right? Who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CIO or COVID? And we all know what the answer to the question is. They're pretty well positioned and it seems like, you know, they're doing a good job kind of doubling down on the opportunity. Yeah, yeah. And I'd sure echo your, you know, initial point there about the nightmare that everybody's experienced over the last six or seven months, there's no way around that yet. It has forced in these categories, like, you know, that we've all heard hundreds of thousands of times digital transformation to the point where the term almost becomes a cliche, but in fact, right, you know, it has become something that's really, you know, one of the driving forces touching everybody in the planet, right? There's, and I think digital transformation isn't so much about the technology, of course, but it's because, you know, there's a couple billion people around the world who want to live digitally enhanced, digitally driven lifestyles and the pandemic only accelerated that, as you said. So it triggered things, you know, in our personal lives and our new set of requirements and expectations sort of rippled up to the B to C companies and from them back up to the B to B companies. So every company on earth, every industry has had to do this. And like you said, if they were diluting themselves, maybe you're telling themselves these different companies that, yeah, we're going fast, we're aggressive. Well, when this thing hit earlier this year, as you said, they just had to really slam their foot down. I think that David Henshel from Citrix said that they had some companies that had, they were compressing three years into five months or he said in some cases even weeks. So it's really been extraordinary and Cloud has been, you know, the vehicle for these companies to get over into their digital future. Right. And let's talk about that for a minute because, you know, Amara's law is my favorite law that nobody knows, which was, you know, we tend to underestimate or excuse me, we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term of specific technology and underestimate the longterm impact. You know, Gartner kind of uses a similar thing with the hype cycle and then, you know, the thing goes at the end. You know, it had COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, the ease in which the information workers were able to basically just not show up and turn on their computer at home and have access to most of their tools and most of the security and most of their applications, that wasn't even possible. So it's a really interesting, you know, just validation on the enabler that we were actually able to not go to work on Tuesday the 16th or whatever the day was. And for the most part, you know, get most of our work done. Yeah. Yeah, Jeff, you know, I've thought about it a lot over the last several months. Remember, there's big consulting companies used to try to do these measures of technology and they'd always come out and say, well, we've done all these studies and despite the billions of dollars of investment, we can't show that IT has actually boosted productivity or, you know, delivered an ROI that customers should be happy with. I was always puzzled by some of the things that went into those, but I would say that today over these last six or seven months, to your point, we have seen extraordinary validation of these investments in technology broadly, but specifically I think some of these things that are happening with the cloud. You know, as you've said, how fast some companies have been able to do this. And then that remarkable thing, Jeff, right? About human nature. And we hear a lot about in, and when companies change that relative to changing human behavior, changing technology is somewhat easy, but you try to change human behavior and it's wicked. Well, we had this highly motivating force behind it of the pandemic. So you had a desire on the part of people to change. And as you pointed out, there's also this corresponding thing of, you know, the technology was here, it was right. You've got a vast number of companies delivering some extraordinary solutions. And, you know, I thought it was interesting. I think it was Kirsten Cliphaus from Google Cloud, one of Citrix's partners who said that we're too best to breed companies. Citrix and Google Cloud. So I thought that coming from Google, you know, that is very high praise. So again, I think the guys at Citrix are sort of coming into this at the right time with the right set of outside in approaches and having that flexibility to say that we're moving into territory nobody's ever been in before. So we better be able to move as fast as possible. Right, right. And just to keep going down the quote line, you know, once everyone is taken care of and you deal with the health and safety of your people which is A number one, right? The other thing is the Great Winston Churchill quote which has never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think, you know, David talked about in that in his keynote, that this is an opportunity said to challenge assumptions, challenge the models of the past. So, you know, get beyond the technology discussion and use this really as a catalyst to rethink the way that you do things. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting moment because there is no model, right? There's no formula for how do you reopen? There was no playbook for how do you shut down? You know, it was everybody's figuring it out and you've got kind of all these concurrent processes happening at the same time as everyone tries to figure it out and come to solutions but clearly, you know, the path to leverage as much as you can is the cloud and the flexibility of the cloud and, you know, the ability to expand, add more applications. And so, you know, Citrix again, right place, right time, right solution but also, you know, taking an aggressive tack to take advantage of this opportunity both in taking care of their customers but really, it's a real great opportunity for them to change a little bit. It is. And Jeff, you know, I think if I could just piggyback on, you know, your guy there, Winston Churchill, one of his other quotes, I love it too. And he said, if you find yourself crawling through hell, keep going. And I think so many companies have really had to do that now. It's not ideal. It's not maybe the way they plan it but this is the reality we're facing here in 2020. And a couple of things, right? I think it requires a new type of leadership within the customer companies, right? How the CEO gets engaged in saying, I'm not going to relegate this to the CIO for this to happen and something else to the CMO. They've got to be front and center on this because people are pretty smart and in the heightened sensitivity that everybody in every business has around the world today. If you think your CEO is just paying lip service to this stuff about digital transformation and all these changes that everybody's going to make, the people aren't going to buy into it. So you've got the leadership thing happen on the one side and into that, it's not a vacuum, but into that void or that opportunity of this unprecedented space that you mentioned, come the smart, capable, forward-looking technology companies that are less concerned with the stuff that they've dragged along with them for years or decade or more, but instead are trying to say, what is the new stuff that people are going to be desperately in need of and how can I help these customers do things that they never did before? It's going to require me as a tech company to do stuff that I've never done before. So I've just been really inspired by seeing a lot of the tech companies doing what they are helping their customers to do, which is take a product development cycle, look at all the new stuff that came out around COVID and back to work, work spaces and so on, what Citrix, you know, others are doing like this. The product development cycles, Jeff, you studied this stuff closely, it's almost unimaginable. If you had said to somebody within three months, within two months, we're going to have a new suite of product availability, you would have said it's just, it's not possible, it's a nice idea, but it can't work, but that's happening now, right? Yeah. Isn't it interesting that had you asked them on March 10th, they would have told you it's not possible. And by March 20th, they were doing it at scale, huge companies. And to your point, I think the good news is they had kind of their own companies to eat their own dog food and get their own employees working from home and then bake that into the way that they had their go-to market. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about work from home or work from anywhere or the new way to work. And it's funny, because that's been bantered about for way too long, but now it's here and most indications are that for many people, many companies are saying you're not going to go back for a while. And even when you do go back, it's going to be a lot different. So the new way to work is really important and there's so much that goes into that. And one of the big pieces that I'm encouraged to hear is how do you measure work? And there's a great line, I heard work is an output, it's not a place to go. And I had Martin Mikos on early on in this thing and he had the great line, it's so easy to fake it at work. Just look busy and walk around and go to all the meetings where with a work from home or work from anywhere, what the leadership needs to do is a couple of things. One is measure output, right? Not activity. And it's great people can have dinner with their family or go see the kids baseball game or I guess they're not having baseball games right now. But measure output, not activity, which doesn't seem to be that revolutionary, but I think it kind of is. And then the other thing is really being an enabler and be an unblocker for people in terms of a leadership role, right? Get out, help get stuff out of the way. But unfortunately, the counter is how many apps does a normal person have to interact with every day and how many notifications do those apps fire off every day between Slack and Asana and Salesforce and texts and tweets and everything else. I think there's a real opportunity to take a whole nother level of productivity improvement by removing these silly distractions, automating as much of the crap away as we can to enable people to use their brains and have some quiet time and think about things and deliver much better value than this constant reaction to nonstop notifications. Yeah, yeah, Jeff, you know, I loved your point there about the difference between people's outlook on March 10th versus on March 20th. And I believe that all limitations are self-imposed. We tend to form constructs around how we think and allow those then to shape and often restrict or confine our behavior. And here's an example. The CEO of Novartis, pharmaceutical company, he said, we have been brought up in the pharmaceutical industry to believe that it is immutable law of physics that it's gonna take 12 and a half years and two and a half billion dollars to get a new drug approved. And he said, in the past with the technology and the processes and the capabilities, that was true. It is not true today yet too often the pharmaceutical industries behave like those external limitations are put in there. So, flipped that over to one of the customers that was at the Citrix Cloud Summit today, Jim Noga, who's the CIO at Mass General Brigham. I thought it was remarkable what he said when you asked about, how are things going with this work from home? Well, Jim Noga, the CIO there said that we had been averaging before COVID, 9,000 virtual visits a month. And he said, since then, that number's gone up to a quarter of a million virtual visits a month or it's 8,000 a day. So they're doing in a day what they used to do in a month. Like you said, if you tell them that on March 10th, they're not gonna believe it, but March 20th, it started to become reality. So I think for the customers, they're gonna be more drawn to companies that are willing to say, I see your need. I see how fast you wanna move. I see where you need to go and do things you never did before. I'm willing to lock elbows with you and go in on that. And the tech companies that sort of sit back and say, yeah, well, I'd like to help you there, but that's not what I do. They're gonna get destroyed. They're gonna get blown out. And I think over the next year or two, we're gonna see this massive forcing function in the tech industry that's gonna separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers versus those that are trapped by their past or by their legacy. And it is gonna be a fascinating talk. I just want to follow up and make sure I understand that number. Those are patient visits per unit time? Yeah, at Mass Brigham. So he said 9,000 virtual visits a month is what they're averaging before COVID. He said, now we're up to 250,000 virtual visits per month. Wow. So it's 8,000 a day. Wow. I mean, the thing that it highlights to me, Bob and the fact that we're doing this right now and none of us had to get on an airplane I think when people think back or sit back and look at what does this enable, right? What does digital enable? Instead of saying, instead of focusing on what we can't do, like we can't go out and get a cup of coffee after this is over and we can't. And it would be great and we'd have a good time. But conversely, there's so many new things that you can do, right? And you can reach so many more people than you could physically. And for like events like the one today and we cover events all the time. So many more people can attend if they don't have the expense of flying to Vegas and they don't have to leave the shop or whatever the limitations are. And we're seeing massive increases in registrants for virtual events, massive increase in new registrants who've never attended the events before. So I think you really bring up a good point, which is focus on what you can do and which is a whole new opportunity, a whole new space, if you will, as opposed to continuing to whine about the things that we can't do, because we can't do anything about those anyway. No, no. And that old line of wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first. You know, one of the other guests that was on the cloud summit today, Jeff, I don't know if you've got to see him, but Steve Schude from SAP who heads up their entire 40,000 person customer success organization. He said this about Citrix, that Citrix Workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud-based access for this new generation of remote workers. So you get companies like SAP and you want to talk about somebody that has earned its way into the, you know, the biggest companies in the world and how they go along. You know, it's pretty powerful there. And your point, Jeff, about how things have changed, focus on what we can do. The former CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott, he recently said, we think of phones as, you know, devices that help us be more productive. We think of computers and devices that help us be more productive. He said, now the world's going to start thinking of the office or the headquarters. It's a productivity tool. That's all it is. It's not the place that measures, hey, it was only at work four days today. So, you know, he didn't really contribute. It's going to be a productivity tool. So we're going to look at a lot of concepts and just flip them upside down. What they meant in February, isn't going to mean that much after this incredible change that we've all been through. Right, right. Another big theme I want to touch base with you on, it was very evident at the show. Today it was multi-cloud, right? And hybrid cloud. And, you know, I used to work for Oracle in the day. And, you know, Amazon really changed the game in public cloud. The greatest line, one of Jeff's best lines is, you know, we had seven year head start and nobody even was paying attention to the small bookseller in Seattle and they completely changed enterprise technology. But what came across today pretty clearly, right, is horses for courses and really focusing at the application first, right? The workload first and where that thing runs and how that thing runs can be any place in that in a large organization, you know, this is pick an airliner or a big bank, right? They're going to have stuff running at Oracle. They're going to have stuff running at AWS. They're going to have stuff running on Google. They're going to have stuff running at Azure. They're going to have stuff running in their data center, IBM cloud, Alibaba. I mean, there's restrictions for location and data sovereignty and all these things that are driving it. And really, you know, kind of drives this concept where the concept of cloud is kind of simple, but the actual execution day to day at the enterprise level and managing and keeping track of this stuff, it is definitely a multi-cloud hybrid cloud. Pick your adjective, but it's definitely not a single cloud world. That's for sure. Yeah, yeah. And Jeff, you know, the Citrix customer that I mentioned earlier, Jim Noguz, the CIO at Mass General Brigham. One of the other points he made about this was he said he's been very pleased about some of the contributions that cloud has made in his hospital organization's transformation, what they've been able to do today and all the new things that they're capable of doing now that they were not capable of before. But he said, you know, cloud is a tool. He said, it's not Nirvana. It's not the place for everything. He said, we have some on-premises systems. He said, they're more valuable now than they were a couple of years ago. And then we've got edge devices and we have something else over here. He said, so I think his point was it's important to put the proper value on cloud for all the things it can do for a specific organization, but not to think that it's a panacea for everything. So big fan, but also a realist about it. Right. And so from that to the hybrid stuff and multi-clouds, and I know all the big tech vendors would love and say, oh no, it's not a multi-cloud, but just be my cloud. Just use my stuff, everything will be easier. But that's not true. So I think Citrix positioned itself really well. Big emphasis on security, big emphasis on the experience that employees need to have. It isn't just sort of cut Mike a road war. You're loose five or seven years ago as long as he or she can connect for email and sending sales data back and forth. They're all set. Now it's very different. You've got people sitting in wildly different environments for six, eight, 10 hours a day and chunk of an hour or two or three here or there. So that seamless experience, always dependable, always reliable is just, it can't be compromised. And I just thought, Jeff, one high level thought about what happened today. It was impressive for me to see that Citrix, certainly a fine company, but it's not one of the biggest tech companies in the world. But look at the company tech, Microsoft, SAP, talking about Google Cloud, AWS up and down the line. So I just thought it was really impressive how they showed their might as sort of a part of a network effect that's undeniable right now. And I think it's driven, we hear over and over, right? I mean, co-opetition is a very Silicon Valley thing. And ultimately it's about customer choice and the customer is going to choose kind of by workload, even if you will, or by budget as to what they're going to do where. So you have to be able to operate in that world or you're going to get left out unless you're just super dominant and it's a single application and they built it on you and that's it. But that's not too realistic. I want to shift gears a little bit, Bob, since I'm so happy to be talking to you on another topic that's a big mega trend and we're slowly seeing more and more applications. That's machine learning and artificial intelligence and the generic conversations about these remind me of the old big data conversations. It's like, okay, so what? Who cares? It doesn't really matter until you apply it. And with all these new applications and even just around the work from home that we discussed earlier, there's so many opportunities to apply machine learning and AI to very specific functions and tasks to again, help people prioritize what they're going to do, help people not have to deal with the crap that they shouldn't have to do and really at a whole nother level of productivity, really, based on a smarter way to help them figure out what am I going to do in my next marginal minute? Because ultimately that's the decision that people make when they're sitting down getting work done and how do they do the best work? And I think the AI and machine learning opportunities here are gargantuan. Jeff, the points you made a few minutes ago about we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate it a little bit over time. Somebody could say, well, we've been doing that with AI for the last 40 years but this is going to be sort of the golden age of it. And one of the reasons why I have been also bullish on cloud is it presents like the perfect delivery system for it. This is we see in medicine, there's sometimes breakthroughs at the laboratory level where they've got the new breakthrough medication but they don't have the bullet, they don't have the delivery system to get it in there. Cloud's going to be an accelerator for that and it gives the tech companies, which, and this is going to be very good for customers, every big tech company now is a data company. Every company says it's an analytics, everybody says I'm into AI, every company says I'm into ML. And in a way that's real good for customers because the competitive level is going to soar, it's going to bring more choice, as you said, to more customers, more types of solutions, more sorts of innovation. And it's also going to be incumbent on those tech ventures, you got to make it as easy as possible, as fast as possible for these customers to get the benefit of it. I think it was Thomas Currie and the CEO of Google Cloud said, hey, you know, if a shoe company or a retailer, or a bank had fantastic expertise in data science, they could go out and hire 200 data scientists, do this all themselves. He said, but that's not what they do and they don't want to do that. So he said, come to the companies who can do it. And I think that we will see changes in how business works driven by ML and AI unlike anything that we've ever seen before. And that's going to happen over the next 12 to 18 months. Yeah, baked into everything. Well, Bob, I really am excited that we finally got to catch up in person COVID style. Like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I'll just give you the last word before we sign off. You know, you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen lots and lots of waves. You know, this is just another wave with this, with this, you know, gasoline thrown on the fire with COVID in terms of the rate of change and the, you know, there's no more talking if the time to move is now. Share kind of your perspective as to kind of where we are. And, you know, we're not that far from flipping the calendar to 2021, which is a good thing. You know, as you, as you look forward a little bit, you know, what's in your mind, what's getting you excited? What's getting you up in the morning? Yeah, Jeff, I guess it comes down to this thing of, we I think here late in 2020, everybody's got a reason to be pretty proud of what we have done not only in the last six months, but over the last several years, if you look at the improvements that have been made in healthcare and making it available to more people in education, the things that teenagers or young teenagers or even three teenagers can do now to learn and explore the world and communicate with people from all over the globe. There's a lot of great things going on, but I think we're gonna look back on this point and say this was, this was a pivot point here in mid and late 2020, when we stopped letting in some ways, as you described it earlier, worrying so much about the things we can't do it instead, put more time into what we can do, what breakthroughs can we make? And I think these things we've talked about with AI and ML are gonna be a big part of that, the computer industry or the tech industry, maturing and understanding, they're not in charge. It's the customers who are in charge here and the tech companies have to reorient themselves and reimagine themselves to meet the demands of this new fast changing world. And so I think those are some of the mega trends. And more and more, Jeff, I think these tech companies are gonna say that the customers are demanding that the tech companies give them the gift of speed, give them the gift of engaging with customers in new ways, give them the gift of seeing the world as other people see it, rather than just through the narrow lens of, sometimes the tech bubble that can percolate somewhere out, sometimes out in the Palo Alto area. So I'm incredibly optimistic about what the future's going to bring. Well, thank you. Thanks for Bob for sharing your insight. You can follow Bob on Twitter. He's got podcasts, he's a very prolific writer. And again, really, really great to meet you in person and thanks for sharing your thoughts. Jeff, thanks so much. You guys at theCUBE do a fantastic job and it's been a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. All right, he's Bob Evans. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.