 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 day one continues. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend in Atlanta, Georgia. And we're pleased to welcome the SVP of Sales and Services from Citrix APJ, Colin Brooks. Colin, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me, Lisa. It's great to be here. So Keith and I have excited to have you here as well. This has been a really exciting start to our day. The keynote this morning kicked off with David. PJ was there, Microsoft was there, there was some customers featured. Employee experience is so critical to a business's digital transformation. But we often, and theCUBE covers tech innovation all over the world, we don't hear it as a kind of a leading edge for companies really can't transform digitally and be competitive and identify new products and new services if the employees don't have access to the apps they need, whether they're SaaS, mobile, web. Talk to us about employee experience and particularly as it relates to customers down in APJ as a critical factor in business's success. Yeah, sure, it's a great question. And the employee experience is just as you've described, it's almost overwhelming the amount of technology that's thrown at people, which initially is all there to try and make life easier, but it's just adding on top of existing applications and existing systems and it isn't really making life easier. So what we've found is that the employee experience is actually getting more and more frustrating, which means less productivity. So which doesn't help the bottom line and the production of the organization obviously. So our solutions are all around trying to enhance that employee experience, make sure that people have got absolute choice of anything they need, such as the applications that you mentioned on any device that they're using and also wherever they happen to be. So it's normally around the future of work when we're talking about employee experience and we're trying to make sure that no matter where you are, not just the office, which is the traditional workplace of the past, if you're at home, if you're in the library, if you're on a plane, in the car, you should be able to work exactly the same way. And those are the types of solutions that we're bringing to the market to make just that thing happen. So Colin, talk to us about your team is the tip of the spear. They are the first to hear the customer success stories. They're the first to hear the frustrations. We're in an environment that Citrix is trying to solve a $7 trillion challenge of becoming more efficient. IT is a huge part of that. Your frontline, your sales engineers, your AEs are having these conversations. Talk to us about their experience of moving the conversation beyond IT into these new areas that Citrix has entered. Yeah, again, another great, great question. And that's one of the pitfalls that we normally fall into, talking about products all of the time, rather than the outcome, which is what we're trying to help our customers with. So perhaps if I give you an example of some of the places that I travel around in APJ. So I look after the APJ region, Asia Pacific in Japan. It's a huge, vast geography with multiple cultures, obviously, very heterogeneous. An example, say, for Japan, where I was in Japan last week. The Olympics are coming there in 2020. People have seen Japan or been to Japan. You'll know about the huge commute that people have to do. There's millions of people in Tokyo, for example. And their business day is long anyway. But when you add on to that, one to two hours is a commute in the morning and then the same at the end of the day. The normal everyday stresses are just magnified exponentially. And then with the Olympics coming along, you can imagine an extra few hundred thousand or an extra couple of million people being in Tokyo, that commute is just going to get worse. So the government have actually launched something, I think it was actually in 2017, whereby we're trying to enable employees to work more remotely, which might not sound too new, but it's amazing how many organizations still feel the employees need to be in the office to work. So we're helping them to make sure that people can work just as efficiently at home as they can in the office. And it doesn't just have to be at home. We were talking earlier, Lisa, that traditional office used to be a place and work, a place you went to. Whereas now it can be at home in the library, traveling in the car, it can be on the plane, on the way to countries, I'm in a plane most of the time, every other week at least. But I'm still able and lucky enough to be able to work extremely productively no matter where I am and on any device. So that's the other thing that we're trying to bring to our customers. It's the ability to have access to any application that we want. So we have complete choice on any device that we want. So whether I'm on my phone, whether I'm on my tablet or I'm on my iPad, it should look and feel the same and I should be able to get the same types of productivity levels. Now you can with the solutions that we provide. So in answer to your question, our customers are trying to find solutions to enable their employees to feel they have the best possible experience and stay productive anywhere they are in the world. Well, and really Citrix is taking it farther than that. Is it just delivering the same experience on mobile versus desktop versus tablet and ensuring that you can do your job calling from anywhere in the world in the airline seat, whatnot? It's also making that the productivity apps so much more connected. And the video example that David Henshaw showed this morning, I thought was fantastic. It was showing a senior marketing manager who's a marketing manager who's responsible for rockstar marketing campaigns who might be a people manager and she logs in and got a check email and then all these other things pop up over the course of a couple of minutes and she's in and out of seven to 10 apps, not connected. Tell our audience a little bit more about how Citrix Workspace intelligent experience is really transforming that experience allowing those workers to get back to their daily responsibilities. You need to come and work in APJ. That was perfect. Okay. Got a job just for you. Yeah, so the day-to-day activities that we all go through, the lady in the video was the head of marketing, I believe it was, but most of her days spent being distracted. I think the statistics that David gave was that something like 85% of the workforce are distracted throughout the day. If you flip that around, that means only 15% or so are actually being productive. It's frightening, isn't it? So the examples that you saw were her signing some simple expenses, but that isn't as simple as it sounds. She needs to be almost an expert in the application that signs off the expenses. What we do with the intelligent workspace from Citrix is we pick out the bits that actually she only ever really needs to use, which are probably a small percentage, one, two, three, maybe 5% of the full wonderful application that that expense report may be. She doesn't need to use all of that. So what we do with the intelligent workspace is we just bring forward onto her workspace the buttons that she needs, a summary of the expense, and accept or approve or reject, and she can carry on straight away. And what you saw was about a 10-minute session within an application to approve an expense reduced to less than 30 seconds. When you do that across the whole day, I think the numbers that David gave was our ambition is to probably give people one day back of their week. That's 20%, that's a huge amount that we'll be able to find. Almost thinking of it like a time machine. We're going to give you some of your time back to actually be productive and do the things that you've been employed to do. She's been employed to be creative in marketing, and now she can. So you gave us the use case of the remote worker in Japan, great use case, but APJ, huge region. Yes. You're not IT, and IT vendors are not the only ones that have APJ regions. So talk to us about the importance of the relationship with Azure. In Google, David shared one study said we're entering the Yodabyte, which is a new word for you and me. I'm a geek. The Yodabyte error, and as data sets grow and the need to perform analysis against that data, but yet we're in a very dispersed region. How important is the relationship with Microsoft and Google to enable that type of analysis of data? Yeah, sure. So look, the relationship with all of our partners is extremely important, especially within the APJ region. As you mentioned, it's such a vast geography, and I think people that have not actually lived in the APJ region just don't realize how vast it is. I'm often asked if I can go from where I am, where I'm based in Singapore to nip over to Japan or down to Sydney to go and sort out some problems. It's 10, 12 hours, but it's also a different time zone, and when you talk back to the UK or to the States, you lose a day with the time zone there, so I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong, but it is a vast, and it's not just a geography, it's such a diverse culture area as well, so everybody behaves slightly differently. Coming back to Microsoft and Google, we're not a database company, we're not a data center organization. Our solutions are going to provide these wonderful experiences for people, but we need the help and support, and we're very lucky to have it, of the likes of the Microsoft and the Google and all of our other partners that have this infrastructure in place, and that effectively shrink that geography for us. Does that make sense? It does. So let's dig into the Citrix Workspace intelligent experience a little bit further, because you talked about something that really struck me, saying, with this video example that which David shared, and we were both talking about it here, so for our audience, it was this great video of marketing managers daily activities, as I kind of mentioned that a minute ago, but you mentioned that with intelligent experience, you're going to surface, say, I'm a marketing person, and I need to get into Salesforce, because like in this video, my boss has asked me the status of a deal that may be marketing influenced, and I don't want to have to know a ton about Salesforce. What, how is Citrix using AI and data to evaluate per user what components of each of those applications should be shown to, say, me, that marketing manager? Yeah, I think he gave the great example of the photocopier, didn't he, whereby you walk up to these machines these days, and they've a hundred different buttons on them, and we basically just want to take a photocopy, and they make it simply one large green button, and that's probably the one that we always use. It's the 1% of the functionality on the photocopier. It's the same with the applications that you and I are not super users, but these applications are wonderful applications, but they're built for the super user a lot of the times with every part of the functionality within them, which makes it quite complicated for you and I to use, when we want very simple tasks. So the artificial intelligence and the machine learning is used to, each time we go into one of those applications to figure out what do we do on a day to day basis, what's normally the thing that we're trying to process, and the more and more that we do that, the smarter and smarter the application becomes, and it also, instead of just guiding us along the way, it's almost starting to think for us and put the things in front of us that we only need for that day, which is great. So rather than me having to now look at my to-do list, it's there for me already in the intelligent workspace, and I can just go through things, skim across the applications where I need to be with them without going deep four, five, six different layers in and wasting time on things that I'm not really being paid to do. So that's how it works. The more I go in, the more it learns about me and my behaviors, and if I go in one particular application, it probably means that I'm also going to be looking at another application that's connected moving forward, and that's the sort of intelligence that we're built into the system. So going from that marketing person being reactive or staring at the copier, that brought back to the memories today. I'm like, whoa, I haven't seen one of those in a while, but being reactive to proactive, to eventually predictive. Absolutely, that's a great way of pointing it. You definitely need to come to APJ. I need to start writing these sound bites down. Yeah, that's exactly it. And not only that, she's using the example of the lady. She's feeling less stressed. She's able to have more time being creative, which is what she's been employed for. So this is what turns around into the employee experience, which equates to better productivity, which is the bottom line for the organizations. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day. The organizations want to be more efficient, and they want to be more productive, and they want to make more profit, and we're enabling them to do that via enabling the user experience to be the absolute best that it can possibly be. Whilst at the same time, making sure that everything is extremely secure. Oh, sorry, Keith, go ahead. I wanted to get into a question around culture when it comes to APJ. You know, we have, to your point, very different cultures. There's Japan who's embracing the concept of robots. So we've seen like software robots in different industries in Japan embracing the ideal of automating and making these tasks simpler. But yet culturally, Australia is very different. There's maybe a little bit more hesitation than breaks robotics. How is your sales force bringing along the two different cultures so that you can pull experiences from one region and bring that to bring the best of class to another? Yeah, that's another great question. We, I think we have 57 different nationalities in our Australia and New Zealand team. The culture within Australia is multinational as well because of that. So although it's Australia, it's not just Australians that are there. And you find that across the whole of APJ. Every office that I happen to work into has got a multitude of different nationalities. A bit less so in Japan and South Korea, but all of the others are very, very mixed. So it helps that you're bringing people from different parts of the organization, even from the States or from Amir, into the APJ region so that they can cross culture and learn from other people. But it is one of the fascinating things of living in APJ, the diverse cultures. And one of the reasons why I choose to live down in that part of the world. I have to act sometimes as the buffer between the North American mentality of everything's the same and everybody speaks the same language and why can't they do it this way? And how I then have to translate that for the boys and girls in Japan and the same in Australia and New Zealand. So it's a thing that you're learning about every single day and every single year. It is a fascinating place to live. Fascinating place to live. Well I imagine that really can be used as an internal engine for Citrix in the APJ region because you mentioned what 57 nationalities in two countries alone represented on your team about leveraging that as an opportunity for even maybe the rest of Citrix. And your partners too to understand the nuances why it's important to understand cultural differences as they relate to how technology is used, different security and compliance regulations. It's got to be an advantage. It is an advantage and you also find that depending on the country that you're working when there are different stages of that journey. So moving to the cloud for instance, it's people have been moving to the cloud for many, many years but you'll be amazed how many of the largest organizations in the world are still on that journey. And it's not a journey of you suddenly have an on-premise application on a Friday and now we're in the cloud on a Monday. It just carries on going. I think there was a statistic that David mentioned this morning that something like 95% of the applications that we currently have today are still going to be here in four or five years plus all of the new applications that we're building every single day. So it is an advantage to be in such a melting pot of cultures and different personalities. You're absolutely right. And I'm sure having a boy from Manchester is a facilitator of all of that, right? There you go. There you go. I slot straight in. I think I'm the 58th nationality to go in there from Manchester. There you go. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE at Synergy. We're excited to hear about what you guys are doing down in APJ and excited to hear more of what's to come from Synergy 2019. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. So for Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching us on theCUBE Live on day one of our two-day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.