 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. One of the cool things that Citrix does is recognize some of their most outstanding customers and we're very pleased to welcome one of their innovation award nominees from Schroders, Paul Bear, Global Head of Communications, IT. Paul, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, thank you for having me today. So you and I were talking off camera and I was mentioning this to Tim Minahan yesterday, their CMO that the way that Citrix is doing their innovation awards program is a bit like Britain's Got Talent, American Idol, where they narrow down finalists and then the public gets to vote and they've created a very cool video that describes a little bit about just a tip of the iceberg about what you guys are doing. But tell our audience a little bit about Schroders and what it is that you're doing with Citrix to really transform the employee experience. Okay, so Schroders are a financial services company. We're based in London, although we've got offices in 27 countries globally. We deal with asset and wealth management and we've been around for over 200 years. Over the past couple of years we've started collapsing our London office footprint from multiple, multiple, little, small, desperate offices into two large buildings within London. What we tried to do was really put technology on the forefront of everything that we did for that, whether or not it was IOT right the way through to our end user desktop experience and just creating the best digital experience for our users that we possibly could. Excellent. Can you talk to us about how Citrix has helped empower that move to the future of work there? So Citrix's VDI solution was key to everything. It was the fundamental building block where our desktop came into play and then we layered on top of our applications and our access to our data. And one of the fantastic things as well was our solution is called S3, which is Schroders any time, any place and from any device. And it really empowered us to be able to fulfill that. It wasn't a kind of empty mission statement, it really was what we believed. So people can access their desktop from iPads, from their computers they have in the house, whether or not they're in one of our offices globally. You can access Windows desktop from your iPhone, although my eyesight tends not to be good enough for that. But it really did form that real linchpin of what we would do. So you mentioned that Schroders has been around for a couple of hundred years. So when I hear that, I think, wow, there's a lot of history, there's a lot of culture. Cultural transformation is hard to do, but it's also a catalyst. It's really essential for a business like Schroders to digitally transform. As consumers, we have these devices, multiple devices. I think yesterday they mentioned some stats that were really kind of staggering that in the next few years, there will be 65 billion connected devices and each person's going to have around eight connected devices. So we have this experience with devices, we have our expectations, but you also have a culture that's pretty steeped in history at Schroders. How has Citrix been an enabler of evolving that culture as the workforce now is so distributed, but also so sort of demanding of these, let's have the same experience that I have in my personal life that I can have at work. I think one of the big pushes that we tried to do was to enable collaboration for absolutely everyone in the company. Citrix again helped us with that because we have an agile desk environment, we have flexible working, and fundamentally what we needed to do is not impinge on anyone's ability to work and to collaborate. Everyone needed to be able to access their data, their applications, their services, from wherever they were in order to properly digitally collaborate with each and every one of their colleagues. Otherwise we'd just have done our users of this service. It was a big change. We took the decision as well to roll out a virtual desktop environment to our existing users in our old offices prior to moving in, which proved to be an absolute godsend because moving from an office for some people who'd been there for years and years, moving into new offices, it's a sea change. It's a difference to people's working environment and what we endeavored to do was to give them the new technology solutions that we came up with prior to the move so that all that actually changed was the desk and the furniture and the view. You know, was a lot better, you know, but ultimately they'd been used to the technology. We dined out an awful lot of problems, you know, here and there just with the scale of deployment and things and these people were in and working and ready to roll within minutes of actually walking in the new building. So, talk to us about the competitive landscape. 200 years of wealth management, you know, you have established Kent clients, but you're always looking to expand and get into, let's call it new money. Talk to us about the customer experience, how Citrix has enabled you to become hopefully a little bit more agile and meeting the demands of wealth management clients. They have high expectations. They have traditions that they like to follow. You know, I'm a little old school. I still like to go physically into the bank, see a person, whereas my wife, you know, what if she can just do all her banking and wealth management mobile? She doesn't have to see a person at all. So, talk about kind of that range of clients that you serve. So, we have a variety of clients. We have a variety of clients globally, really with the solution that we put forward, you know, being able to meet those client demands almost instantly in terms of accessing their data, is accessing CRM tools, accessing whatever systems we needed to do was essential with that. The issue, not the issue, the really advantage that Citrix gave us in terms of the solution as well was that we were able to fulfill those clients' needs from wherever our dealers were, wherever our fund managers were, wherever our sales force were, if that answers the question. Yeah, and you know, in any industry, as consumers of anything, we have choice, right? Whether it's your ISP or a retailer, if you're not having a good experience as a consumer of that product or service, you can easily churn. I'm going to find somewhere else that's going to meet that need. And I imagine that was part of the concern for Schroders that, yes, we may have, as Keith said, some very long-standing clients, but if we're not able to meet a range of their expectations, then they have choice to go to one of your competitors. Talk to us about how enabling the employee experience that you have done, employees can access their desktops seamlessly from switching devices. If they're going from their desk into a conference room, their desktop essentially virtually follows them. How has that been an enabler of retaining clients and maybe even attracting new clients? I think having the ability to collaborate with their clients is key to everything that we do. Having to have that almost seamless workflow of, you know, I can sit at a desk, I can come and sit beside your desk, I can log into my machine, I can show you what I'm working on, I can have an ad hoc meeting. You know, we can pull together because fundamentally our biggest strength as a company is our people. And actually pushing that forward and making those people work better and in a more collaborative way together. Whether it's in a meeting room with clients in a video conference call when people still haven't access to their desktop without all the messy meetings that everyone's been in where people are trying to find cables and leads and presentations, right down to extending the solution across so that people on their mobile devices could still access that data and service the needs of their customer. And ultimately, our staff working better together, you know, gave us a better user experience and a better customer experience. So essentially were you able to create an experience for the employees that was transparent to your customers? Yes, I believe so. I don't think our customers noticed anything but benefit coming through. I think the new head office building has over 112 meeting rooms, you know, and they're booked morning, noon, and night, you know, and people are on client calls. People, you know, are interacting with our customers. They're acting with, you know, other companies that we've acquired, they're accessing, you know, other customers' data, you know, and they're able to fulfill all the needs of their job. So Paul, talk to us about the legacy of combining legacy IT, traditional services in systems with this new, frontward-facing capabilities, you know, mobile apps, but then as a 200-year-old company, I'm sure you guys have some legacy technology sitting around. Citrix has, and other companies such as SAP have talked about what comes after digital transformation. So we've given employees mobile devices. We've given them new applications, way to access accounts on the go. The next level is the employee experience, the customer experience. From yesterday's keynote, when they talked about automation, the ability to use Citrix to automate workflows and make the marketers' job easier, what do you see potential advantages in your industry to being able to automate things that, you know, eat up that one-fifth of your work week? What do you think some of the innovations that will come out of your business as a result? That's a very good question. I think yesterday's keynote was fascinating. It definitely resonated, you know, the idea of, you know, everyone having almost archaeological IT and it just layers and layers. And everyone has slightly older systems. Everyone has systems that are essential to their business. I think moving forward, having some, I can essential tier that people access so that all their day-to-day repetitive tasks, you know, just become simpler and it just becomes a whole list of tick boxes to run through is an absolute godsend. You know, as a manager myself, I spent a significant amount of time, you know, going through HR approvals and going through purchase requests and doing this and that constant jump from system to system to system, anything that can actually be done to, you know, improve that flow as it is beneficial to all of us. Yeah, they talked about their aim yesterday, Citrix did about being able to streamline this employee experience with intelligence, that they're aiming to give back users one whole day a week, which is Keith and I were saying, that's two months a year. Absolutely, I would sign up for that. They also talked yesterday about historically enterprise software being designed for power users, which only makes up 1% of the user base. How have your, you mentioned, I like how you talked about that in terms of the cultural shift, not just to a brand new facility in London, but we started them on this new software powered by Citrix first, so that by the time they got to this new location, from a change perspective, it was a lot more manageable. But as it relates to software being designed now by Citrix for the general users, what was adoption like across Shroters once you rolled out this new solution? Was it something that just went, ah, okay, I get it. So the adoption was very carefully managed. We're big believers in having user change champions. They were consulted all the way through it. We did a whole piece of work to determine which departments went first, you know, and move forward with them. We tried to move at pace, because as we talked about before, one of the big benefits that we had with the solution was actually being able to deploy the solution to our users before we move into the new office so that we could actually make a more seamless transition for something that's a big thing for a lot of people. But moving to geography is, you know, people don't like change, you know? And being able to do that and roll that across with a constant feedback loop that we were getting from our users and those change champions was really essential to the success. So talking about change champions, you're in the business of IT communications, getting out kind of the message for change, making sure that users understand the changes that are taking place, whether it's systems, environment, et cetera, and that they adopted. So getting early champions on board. One of the challenges I found when I managed IT communications is that getting people to repass the first line of an email, saying that there's change coming, people don't like change, and you send an email about change, they're not going to read it. So what have been some of the effective ways that you've been able to communicate and prepare people for change? You know, it's really important that, because I agree entirely, that whole email delivery of information really doesn't work, and people put it just down a spam and, you know, they wouldn't engage properly. Like if they could put corporate email in the spam form, they'd put IT communications there. And what we did is, we did everything from poster campaigns, there was leaflet campaigns, and it wasn't just global technology. We worked with all areas of the program who were pushing forward to get our staff in our new head office. So there was road shows in our old canteen that could come in for a whole week at one point and log into the new technology, and we had, you know, exact mock-ups of what the new desks were going to look like, and that had really, really positive benefits. We had videos behind our genius bars that we had set up so that people almost wherever they went were actually seeing what that new technology journey was going to look like for them as well, and that really gave us a lot of benefits as well, because people became more engaged, they understood where we were going. You know, it wasn't just, we're going to send an email and I'm going to come into work in a Monday morning and everything's changed in front of me and what just happened, you know? Very methodical, very strategic roll out what you did, which is really impressive, but it also sounds like from your perspective as the head of global IT communications, that you were liaising with the other heads of other functions, this was a business imperative, this wasn't just being driven by IT, that's what it sounds like, is that correct? Yeah, and we have become very, very collaborative. My role in terms of communications, I actually run networks and communications, it's not traditional kind of communications and marketing, but everyone pulled together, everyone worked together, both from right the way across global technology, we tried to remove, you know, as many silos as we found, you know, and we really did succeed in that, and we really engaged with our user communities as well, which I think was pivotable to the success as well, you know, and even I'm sure you've seen in the video that Citrix did with us, you know, it's not just technology people that are involved in that video, we've got our global heads of human resources, you know, who is a huge big champion of the solution that we've actually deployed, and I think that really sets us apart as well. I think so too, I think what you guys are doing for the employee experience is very differentiating, the strategic approach within the organization, not just to get the right decision makers together, but also how you've really thoughtfully rolled this out for users for adoption is pretty unique, so we congratulate Schroder's on being an innovation award nominee. You can vote, I think it's just go to Citrix.com or the Synergy website, you can vote, and we wish you the best of luck as the winner is revealed tomorrow. Thank you very much. Thanks for your time, Paul, we appreciate it. Nobody's at all, thank you. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy, 2019, thanks for watching.