 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE PJ Hawke, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Citrix. PJ, it's great to have you on theCUBE. I'm delighted to be here, thank you. Really enjoyed your keynote yesterday morning. The excitement, the energy that you guys kicked off everything with yesterday, with intelligent experience, people get it. We're all employees, we all want to have an experience where I would love to have a whole day back in a week. Yes. By just making, bringing the apps and the actions to me, rather than me having to go and find and interact with all these different apps. What's been the feedback that you've heard over the last 24 hours with intelligent enterprise? Yeah, so the intelligent experience features, people are really liking it because I think as you say, they recognize it. It feels already somewhat familiar. I think sometimes when you introduce new products, I've introduced brand new products in the past where you really have to explain the use and why it's built that way. We are not having to explain very much about it. We show it to people and they identify with workflows, the tasks. They recognize the challenges that they face today with getting access to that same information in the systems that they use. And I think there's a need right now for us to solve this problem. I think customers are really feeling a sense of pain around the number of applications that they have. And I think IT knows that they have actually burdened their users with actually doing a lot of human workflow themselves. So, since the wind frame days, Microsoft Citrix, synonymous with each other, huge partnership over the, huge and deep partnership over the years. Satya Nadella appeared to be a video yesterday to say that Citrix and Microsoft has announced something. It's kind of a big deal and it got lost. I think in the excitement of the intelligent experience, which is a lot to say, can you help explain that partnership, the deepening of that partnership a little bit better? Sure. I think, as you know and probably most of the audience know, the foundation of the partnership was in virtualization. That really is at the heart of what we do. Application delivery, particularly Windows applications and Windows delivery, over all types of networks and to all kinds of devices. But maybe what's more important about our relationship right now is if you look at the announcements we made yesterday, yes, at the heart of it was new announcements around Windows virtual desktop on Azure and our desktop is a service that both run on Azure. That's at the heart of it. But then if you look at the continuing set of announcements we made, improvements in the delivery of Microsoft Teams, in order to do that work, we actually partnered really closely with that Microsoft Teams group at Microsoft. And then the Office 365 networking initiatives that we have, that of course required partnership with all of the teams in Office 365. And then finally the Intune partnership we have, which of course is with Brad Anderson who was on stage with us. So across the whole delivery from cloud hosted applications, the applications themselves, the network over which the applications are delivered and helping to secure the endpoint devices. We had innovation announcements in all categories and every single one of them required a pretty deep partnership and co-development in many cases with Microsoft. So PJ, Citrix has over 400,000 customers globally. It's a lot. You've got I think 98 plus percent of the F100, the F500. As chief product officer, if we look at the Microsoft, the deepening of that partnership, where are customers in terms of influence maybe shed some light on some of the conversations that you have with customers that help dictate, for example, the deepening of that Microsoft relationship with Citrix. I think that's a really important point. It's not like our relationship with Microsoft is just for ourselves. It's actually spurred by many of the things that our customers are trying to do, primarily with their technology and then with us as an enabler to help really deliver great experiences on that. Windows 10, kind of a big deal in the marketplace. I heard about that from all enterprise customers and you combine Windows 10 with Office 365. Pretty much every customer I get to speak to has either initiatives around one or both of those technologies as part of their broader digital transformation. And so the announcements we made yesterday align very well with these initiatives that Microsoft is driving into the enterprise and I think customers see the promise of what Microsoft is offering with Windows and with Office family of products. But they need to put that in everybody's hands, not just those who happen to be in the headquarters and on a great network and running on a top-class device. You really have to get that out to your branches, to your mobile workers and that's really where we come into play, really helping really deliver that great experience to all of those employees. We were just talking to Dana Gardner right before your conversation with you and he said Citrix has been pretty modest over the years. You guys are kind of the original cloud. To be frank, a lot of SaaS services are built on Citrix. With that, you looking into the intelligent experience, you guys are positioning yourselves once again to be at the forefront of innovation when it comes to employee experience. With that comes cultural change. I think you guys have experienced over the past 30 years of kind of saying, you know what, we can do cool stuff too. And talking to a new audience. Talk to us about that new audience you're going to have to go after with these products because these are not just IT products where you're talking about changing processes. Now you're getting into the wheelhouses of the PWCs, the ENYs, the big four of the world. Yeah, I think that's a really important point and one that's certainly not lost on those of us at Citrix who know that this pivot to broaden our opportunity in the market and broaden our perspective on what we can do to help customers. It requires us to actually think about our go-to market in a slightly different way. And you mentioned some of those very large companies out there that I now look to for partnership in helping deliver those solutions to customers. I think we have great technology but we really are going to need people who understand deeply the industries of these customers. If you're in finance or oil and gas or healthcare you want your partner to understand the processes and the structure of your market. And while we'll have great technology to help deliver oil and gas solutions we're going to look to oil and gas solution partners and system integrators to really help build I will call it the customized intelligent experience for those industries. We've always had a very strong partner network. I mean we have over 10,000 partners today at Citrix and I think we're going to leverage that partner channel again potentially in new ways to deliver this intelligent experience to customers but you do raise a very important point. We do not have and never have had a go-it-alone strategy either from a technology point of view with our partnership with Microsoft and the announcements we made with Google and the past we've made with the other clouds, et cetera. But it's also true from a solution delivery perspective we absolutely rely on really great partnerships in the marketplace. You mentioned developing potentially customized solutions and I think of customization, think of personalization. You talked a lot about that yesterday. As all of us are consumers, the consumerization the influence that we're bringing into business is we want things personalized. We want experiences to come to us that have enough intelligence to know show PJ this, not this. So talk to us about how Citrix is distilling apps into what you called yesterday these personalized units of work. Yeah, I think fundamentally there's a initial set of those units of work that I think everyone recognizes and would say oh yes, I understand how that works but they would also presume that it works pretty much the same way for all of us. The way that we book time off from our companies or the way we submit our expenses other employees are going to do that the same way. I think what's much more interesting is using our analytics and our artificial intelligence to really figure out what's the pattern of work that PJ has and how that difference from the pattern of work that Lisa has. Now we may both have similar responsibilities but I expect that over time and this is sort of one of the asset tests for me for the workspace is that even if we are in the same organization after several months of use, my feed should look different to yours just like on our social feeds. Even if we more or less have the same friends and we more or less have similar interests still no two feeds are identical and they're driven a little bit by our preferences but they're also driven by our habits the way we work with the software and so we're building all of that intelligence into the workspace. So we don't get the chance to talk to people who are at the forefront of these products often. So I'm going to try and get a little peek into the future here. When the iPhone was created what 10 years ago it was an amazing thing. You give me a 10 year old iPhone today and we'll have a conversation. So you guys are innovating, employee experience, customer experience is the output of digital transformation. What is the output? You look at analytics, what is the output of the employee experience and the customer experience? What is Citrix looking at like, you know customers are not quite ready for this but we have it in our back pocket. It's a really good question. I'm glad you brought up an example like the iPhone because I think the flip side is that if you were to go back 10 years ago I don't know that Apple knew what it would look like today. I think they had the broad brushstrokes of where they were going but I don't know then would have known exactly how to navigate the last decade in advance and I feel the same way about the journey that we're on but that's probably what makes working at those forefront technology projects so exciting. I just did an interview where somebody asked me what do you think of the future of work looks like and I said well in some ways I'm already living it because I'm experiencing these products inside Citrix before they get released to customers. So we already have a little glimpse of what might be next. I think some of the biggest opportunities for us are really to take the assistance and the learning capabilities of the workspace in a different direction. Yes, we will add more applications. Yes, the micro applications will get richer. Yes, the user interface might change a little bit but really what's the fundamental technology shift that's going to drive innovation for the next decade and I think it's analytics and machine learning and we're already I think at the very early stages of seeing some of the ways that that impacts the work experience but my hope for the decade is that all of the workspaces that we work in and all of the tools we have get a little smarter about me and some of the things that we've come to trust with regard to software in other environments and other places that we get to trust our work tools to the same extent, which I don't think we're there yet. In terms of the messaging to customers we've talked to your three innovation award finalists from different industries, financial services, education, global technology, all really helping to make big impacts to their employees, their customers and those two things I see is absolutely tantamount. They're inextricably linked. You have to have a great employee experience to deliver great customer experience. If there's a problem with employee experience it's going to manifest because in some form or fashion as employees we all in some way are interacting with customers and have the opportunity to influence their loyalty or churn. So we've heard a lot about how these customers are really leveraging what Citrix is enabling this modern workforce. Let me do what I need to, where it helps me be most productive but also drive these big outcomes. When it comes to AI and machine learning we talk about them at every event that we go to. Where are your customers in terms of being receptive to understanding it's not big brother looking in at PJ's productivity it's really working to understand like you said before how differently you and I might be using the exact same software application to make our jobs far more productive. Where is that appetite for AI and machine learning for that kind of productivity? Well I think a concern that all customers have set aside our technology and just talk about the industry in general I think as an industry we have to really continue to earn the trust of customers both in the consumer lives as well as in the professional lives with regard to the governance that we put around information that they share with us and how we treat that for their benefit not just for ours. And I think those same concerns exist broadly speaking whether it's a Microsoft or a Google or a Facebook or a Citrix maybe to some extent less to us because I think customers have historically not entrusted that a lot of that type of information to us they have entrusted that to our customers who are delivering solutions whether it's a financial solution or a healthcare solution et cetera. But I think so that's one thing for us to continue to prove is that we are good custodians of that information and that we're using it to I will say for good and for the purposes of improving experiences that matter. I think in general our customers understand that there is a value exchange that our ability to deliver new value to them requires them to exchange insight with us so that we can turn that into value for them. And so I think that is pretty clear to most customers right now. And in some ways we're at the forefront of what we're trying to do for intelligence in a workspace but many of the core technologies have been proven in other fields and we're certainly trying to leverage that and the comfort that customers already have achieved with some of those technologies. Excellent. All right, we have had just a great couple of days here. The excitement is palpable. The impact that you guys are having on a wide variety of customers in every industry is palpable. And I also really liked the fact that as an individual contributor you guys showed this is how Citrix Workspace can impact your lives in a way that is really going to be a driving force of the workforce of the future. So PJ, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Thank you. Joy being here at theCUBE and thank you for your coverage of the event. It's been really great. We've had a great time. Thank you. Thank you so much. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.