 From theCUBE 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 theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios. The calendar has turned to late September. I still can't believe it. We're still getting through the COVID issue. And as we've seen in the news, companies are taking all different types of tax and how they're announcing kind of their go forward strategy with the many of them saying, they're going to continue to have work from home or work from anywhere policies. And we're really excited to have our next guest from Citrix, he's Tim Minahan, the EVP of strategy and the CMO of Citrix. Tim, great to see you. Yeah, Jeff, thanks for having me. Yeah, so love having you guys on. We had Tamara on and Amy Hayworth is back in April and this thing was first starting. And we had this light switch moment and everyone had to deal with a work from anywhere world. Now, it's been going on for over six months. People are making announcements, Google, Facebook, Twitter, I'm out in the valley. So a lot of the companies here locally, you know, saying we're probably not going to have you back for a very long period of time. You guys have been in the supporting remote workers for a really long time. You know, you're kind of like zoom, right place, right time, right market. And then suddenly this light switch moment, it's a whole lot more important than it was before. We're six months into this thing. What can you share that you've seen from your customers and kind of the transition that we've gone from kind of the shock and awe back in March to now we're in late September, almost to October. And this is going to continue for a while. Yeah, Jeff. Well, if there is any silver lining to the global crisis that we're all living through, it's that it has indeed caused organizations to, in all industries really to accelerate their digital transformation and to rethink, you know, how they work. And so, you know, at Citrix we've done considerable, you know, crisis scenario modeling, you know, engaging with our own customers, with government officials, with influencers around the globe, really to determine, you know, how, how will the current environment change, cause companies to change their operating models and to prioritize their IT investments. And it really boils down to, while there's variations by geography and sector, you know, our modeling points to three major shifts in behavior, you know, the first is looking for greater agility in their operations, companies are adopting more variable operating models, literally in everything from their workforce strategy to the real estate strategy to their IT strategy, you know, to allow them to scale up quickly to the next inevitable unplanned event or opportunity. And for IT, this typically means modernizing their application environment and taking that kind of one to three year cloud transition plan and accelerating it into a few months. The second thing we're seeing is because of the pandemic, you know, companies are realizing the prioritization, the need to prioritize employee experience to provide a consistent and secure work experience wherever work needs to get done, whether that's in the office, whether that's on the road or increasingly whether that's at home. And that goes beyond just traditional virtualization applications, but it's also for delivering in a secure and unified environment, your virtual apps alongside your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, et cetera. And then finally, as companies rapidly move to the cloud and they adopt SaaS and they move to these more distributed IT operating models, you know, their attack surface from a security standpoint expands and they need to evolve their security model, you know, to one that is much more contextual and understands the behaviors and the access behaviors of individuals. So it can apply security policies and you'll keep your company information and applications secure no matter where work is getting done. That's a great summary. And you know, there's been lots of conversation about security and increase attack surface, but you had a blog post that you published last month, September 15th, really interesting. And you talked about, you know, kind of COVID being this accelerant in work from home. And we talk a lot about consumerization of IT and apps, but we haven't talked a lot about it in the context of the employee experience. And you know, you outlined some really great, specific vocabulary, you know, people need to be able to sit and think and create and explore the way they want so they can become, you know, what they can be free from the distractions. At the same time, you know, you go through the plethora of, I don't know how many business apps we all have to interact with every single day from Salesforce to Asana to Slack to Outlook to Google Drive to Box to et cetera, et cetera. And as you point out here, you know, the distractions and I think you said, people are interrupted by a text, a chat, or application alert every two minutes. So that, you know, there's this real, you know, battle between trying to do higher value work and less minutia versus this increasing number of applications that are screaming for my attention and interrupting me anytime I'm trying to get something done. So how do you guys, you know, look at that and say, hey, we've got an opportunity to make some serious improvements so that you can get to that and cut employee experience so they can deliver the higher value stuff and not just, you know, moving paper down the line. Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. To your point, you know, a lot of the tools that we've introduced and adopted and the devices we've used and the like over the years certainly provide some advantages and helping us collaborate better, helping us execute business transactions and the like. However, there's such a, they've also added a lot of complexity, right? As you said, you know, typical employees use more than a dozen apps to get work done, often four or more just to complete a single business process like submitting an expense or a purchase order or approving time off. They spend another 20% of their time searching for information they need to do their jobs across all of these different applications and collaboration channels and they are interrupted by alerts and texts and chats, you know, every few minutes and that really keeps them from doing their core jobs. And so, you know, Citrix is committed to delivering a digital workspace solutions that help companies transform employee experience to drive better business outcomes. And we do that in three ways. Number one is leveraging our heritage around delivering a unified and secure work environment. We bring all of the resources that employee needs together, your virtual apps and desktops, your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, your information and your content into one unified experience. We wrapper that in a contextualized security model that doesn't get in the way of employees getting their job done, but understands that employees, their behavior, their access protocols and assigns additional security policies, maybe a second level of authentication or maybe turning off certain features if they're behaving a little bit differently. But the key thing I think is that the third component, we've also over the past several years infused within this unified workspace, intelligence, machine learning, workflows or micro apps that really remove that noise from your day, providing a personalized work stream to that individual employee and only offering up the individual task or the insights that they need to get their job done, really guiding them through their day and automating some of that noise out of their day so they can really focus on being creative, focus on being innovative and to your point, giving them that space they need to succeed. You know, it's a great point, Tim. And you know, one of the hot buzzwords that we hear all the time right now, right, is artificial intelligence and machine learning. And people talk about it, it's kind of like big data where it, you know, that's not really where the opportunity is in kind of general purpose AI as we've talked to people in natural language processing and video processing. It's really about application specific uses of AI to do something. And you know, you guys commissioned, it looks like a report called work 2035. There's a nice summary that I was able to pull off the internet. And there's some really positive things in here. It's actually, you know, got some good news in it about work being more flexible and new jobs would be created and productivity will get a major boost. But the peeps I wanted to focus on which piggybacks on what you're just talking is the application of AI around a lot of specific tasks, whether that's nudges, personal assistance, wearables that tell you to get up and stretch. And you know, and as I think, and what Trigito G said, you know, as this person is sitting at their desk trying to figure out what to do now, you've got your calendar, you've got your own tasks but then you've got all these notifications. So the opportunity to apply AI to help me figure out what I should be focusing on, you know, that is a tremendous opportunity and potential productivity enhancer, not to mention my mental health and positive attitude and, you know, engagement. Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. And this work 2035 project that we undertook is from a year long effort of research, quantitative research of business executives, IT executives supplemented with qualitative research with futurists, work experts and the like to really begin a dialogue together with governments, with enterprises, with other technology companies about how we should be leveraging technology, how we should be changing our operating models and how we should be adapting our business culture to facilitate a new and better way to work. And to your point, some of the key findings are, you know, it's not going to be Skynet out there in the future, you know, AI is not going to overtake, you know, all of our jobs and the like. It is going to actually help us. It's going, you're going to see more of the augmented worker that, you know, really not only offers up the insights and the tasks like we just talked about when they're needed, but actually helps us through decision making, helps us actually assess massive amounts of data to, you know, better engage with customers, better service up healthcare to patients and the like. To your point, because of this, you know, some jobs certainly will be lost, but new jobs will be created, right? And people will need to be the coaches or trainers for these bots and robots. You'll see things like advanced data scientists becoming, you know, more in, you know, in demand, virtual reality managers, privacy and trust managers. And then to your point, work is going to be more flexible. We already talked about this, but the ability to allow employees to perform at their best and give them all the resources they need to do so wherever work needs to happen, whether that's in the office, in the field or, or at home, but importantly for businesses and even for employees, this actually changes the dynamic of what we think about as a workforce. We can now tap into new pools of talent, not just in remote locations, but entire segments that had, you know, because of our traditional work hub model where I build a big office building or a call center and people have to commute there now they can work anywhere. So you think about recent retirees that have a lot of domain expertise can get back into the workforce, stay at home parents or stay at home caregivers can actually, you know, engage and use their skills and expertise to re-engage in that workforce. These are really, really exciting things. And then the last thing is it will help us, you know, improve employee engagement, improve, you know, improve wellness and improve productivity by having AI help us throughout our day, guiding us to the right decisions and automating tasks that typically add a noise to our day so that we can focus on where we as humans are great, which is some of the key decision-making, the creativity, the innovation to drive that next wave of growth for our companies. Yeah, it's really interesting the kind of divergence that you're seeing with people in this opportunity, right, the, you know, one of the benefits is that there is no script in how to move forward today, right, this has never happened before, especially at this scale. So people are trying all kinds of things. And, you know, what you're talking about is a lot of positive uses of technology to get blockers out of the way and help people do a better job. Unfortunately, there's this whole other track that we hear about, you know, monitoring are in front of your desk, monitoring how many Zoom calls are you on a day, monitoring, you know, all these silly things that are, you know, kind of old-school management of activity versus kind of new school managing of output. And, you know, we've done a lot of interviews on this topic. One of Darren Murph from GitLab's great comments, right, is that now as a boss, your job should be removing blockers from your people to help them do a better job, right? That's such a different kind of mentality than managing their tasks, right? And managing the minutia. So really a lot of good stuff and we could go for a very long time and maybe we'll have a follow-up, but I wanted to shift gears a little bit here and talk about the other big Delta that impacts both of you and I pretty dramatically and that's virtual events. The fact that on, you know, basically March 15th, there's no more gatherings of people, period. So, and you guys, we've covered Citrix Energy in the past, but this year you guys have gone a different kind of tact and again, I think what's so interesting about it is there is no right answer and everyone is trying to experiment and we're seeing all different ways to get your message to the market, but then the other really important part of events is getting leads, right, and getting engagement with your audience, whether that's customers, whether that's partners, whether it's prospects, whether it's press and analysts and everything else. So I wonder if you can share with us kind of the thinking you had the benefit of kind of six months into this thing versus, you know, a couple of weeks, which a few people had in early May. You know, how did you kind of look at the landscape and how did you come to the conclusion that for you guys, it's this three event, you've got Citrix Cloud on October 8th, Citrix Workspace Summit on October 22nd and Citrix Security Summit on October 29th. How did, what did you think about before you came to this decision? Yeah, it was a great question, Jeff, and certainly we put a lot of thought into it and to your point, what helped clarify things for us is we always put the customer first and so like many other companies, we did have our big user conference scheduled for the May timeframe, but considering the environment at that time and companies were just figuring out how to get their employees home and working securely and safely, how to maintain business continuity, we felt the inappropriate time to be able to be talking about future innovations and so on and so forth. So we made the decision to kind of put an end to our Citrix synergy for the year and instead we went through all this scenario modeling, as I mentioned, and we've accelerated our focus and our investments and our partnerships to develop new innovations to help our customers achieve the three things that they prioritize, which is accelerating that cloud transition, that hybrid multi-cloud transition plan, advancing their digital workspace and employee experience strategies and embracing a new more contextual security framework. And so when we thought about how do we bring those announcements to market? How do we help educate our customers around these topics? It became very clear that we needed to design for digital attention spans, which means it's not everything in the kitchen sink and we hope that we're bringing a whole bunch of different buying segments together and customer segments together and hope that they glean out the key insights we want. Instead we want it to be very focused around the cloud acceleration, the workspace and employee experience strategies and the security strategies as we created three separate summits. And even within the summits, we've designed them for digital attention spans. No individual segment is going to be more than 20 minutes long. They'll be very descriptive. So you can almost choose your own pathway as you go through the conference, rather than having to commit a whole day or the likes, you can get the information you need. It's supplemented by a knowledge center so you can go deeper if you want to and talk to some of our experts if you want to. And it's certainly something we'll use to facilitate ongoing dialogue long after the day of event. Really interesting. 20 minutes is the longest session. That is really progressive. And again, I think it's great to hear you say that you started from the perspective of the customer. I think so many people have basically started from the perspective of what did we do for the Sands Convention, May 5th through 8th in 2019. And then try to replicate that, kind of almost one-to-one in a digital format, which isn't really doing justice to either of the formats, I think, and not really looking at the opportunity that digital affords that physical doesn't. And yeah, we miss getting together and grabbing a coffee or a drink or whatever in those hallways, but there's a whole lot of things that you can do on a digital event that you can't do in a physical event. And we're seeing massive registration and more importantly, massive registration of new people that didn't have the ability, couldn't afford it, couldn't get away from the shop, whatever the reason is, that the physical events really weren't an option. So I think instead of focusing on the lack of hallway chatter, spend your time focusing on the things you can do with this format that you couldn't before. And I think removing the space time bounds of a convention space availability and the limited number of rooms that you can afford, blah, blah, blah, blah, in the budget. This really does open up a very different way to get your message to market. It does, Jeff. And what I'm excited about is, what does it mean for the future of events overall? I think there's going to be some very valuable lessons learned for all of us in the industry. And I expect just like work won't be the same when we return back to the office, a post pandemic. I don't think the events approach that companies take is going to be quite the same as it was previous. And I think that'll be a good thing. There'll be a lot of lessons learned about how people want to engage, how to reach new segments, as you mentioned. And so I think you'll see a blended event strategy from companies across the industry going forward. Yeah, and to your point, event was part of your communication strategy. It was part of your marketing strategy as part of your sales strategy. So that doesn't necessarily all have to again be bundled into one week in May and can be separated. Well, Tim, really, really enjoyed the conversation. I have to say your blog post has some really kind of really positive things in it in terms of the way people should be thinking about their employees, not as resources, but as people, which is one of my pet peas. I'm not a big fan of the human resources word. And I really was encouraged by some of the stuff coming out of this 2035. I think you said it's going to be an ongoing project. So it'll be great to see what continues to come out because I don't know how much of it was done prior to COVID or kind of augmented after COVID, but I would imagine the acceleration on the Delta is going to go up dramatically over the next several months or certainly over the next couple of years. Yeah, Jeff, I would say, I think Winston Churchill said it best, never waste a good crisis and smart companies are doing that right now. I think there's going to be a lot of lessons learned. There's going to be a lot of acceleration of the digital transformation and the work model transformations and the business model transformations that companies have had on their radar, but haven't really been motivated to do so. And they're really accelerating those now. I think the world of work and the world of IT is going to look a heck of a lot different when we emerge from all of this. Yep, yep, I agree. Well, Tim, thank you again for sharing your insight, sharing your information and it's great to catch up. You too. All right, take care. I know. He's Tim, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.