 Hi, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Christian Riley, the VP of Technology Strategy at Citrix. Christian, welcome back to the program. Thank you, Lisa and thanks for having me. Great to see you again. I'll be virtually this time. Great to see you too. It's been a couple of years and quite a few things have changed since we got to sit down and let synergy a couple of years to go together. Citrix has an exciting new announcement. Let's unpack that. Talk to me about what you're announcing and what it's going to deliver. Sure, you know, as you said, actually, I can't believe it's been a couple of years since we last saw each other. And I think, you know, times kind of just disappeared within the pandemic. So, you know, actually as a result of some of those things that we've seen, you know, people getting so tired of being stuck in the same place and tired of being on this constant stream of video. Now, one of the things that we wanted to do was actually on Veil Citrix launchpad, which is kind of a new announcement series that will be delivered via LinkedIn Live, but is really intended to be kind of a short burst approach to providing updates to some of the really important things that we're working on at Citrix. So, you know, hopefully people will love the series and get some rich information from them. And it's going to be a series of three launchpad programs. Now, we've seen so much change on the rapid pivot to work from home. Now, this work from anywhere hybrid environment, we've seen the massive adoption of cloud and SaaS. We've also seen the threat landscape, the attack surface just expand and expand. Talk to me about why Citrix is doing the launchpad series and then we'll go through each of the three series. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe I think just to set a little bit of context, you know, we were working on some pretty interesting things pre-pandemic, you know, as a result of the kind of the evolution of Citrix as an organization, but perhaps more importantly, the journey that our customers were on globally. You know, every customer that we had in any industry across the world, we're all at various stages of their own digital transformation. And I think what the pandemic has done, apart from all the really bad things, actually, if you look at it as a, perhaps one gleaming bit of light in the whole thing was that we've given organizations, whether we realized it or not, the opportunity to try this huge remote work experiment. And I think what it has done above anything else is showing that remote work actually works. And so as a result of that, what we've seen coming out of the pandemic is that organizations are really going to use that as a springboard to implement some, you know, new strategies, new technologies and really drive the next generation of their business. So with one eye on that, I think if you were to categorize the three big things that we're looking at from a Citrix perspective, it's really about how to help or continue to help our customers with their accelerated IT modernization to really help them understand what it takes to have secure, flexible work in this new post-pandemic world. And then also to think about productivity. You know, what does productivity mean in a world of ever more distributed teams? And so the events that we're talking about and specifically the cloud one will focus on some of the new offerings from Citrix, some of the new technologies and talk about the trends that we see within our customers. So, you know, one of the big things that Citrix has always been very proud of is our market leading position in virtual application and virtual desktop delivery. And even that itself has now begun to emerge into what we call desktop as a service. And there's a ton of new innovations that we've been working on in that space as well. But also if you think about what's happening in cloud as you talked about, you know, the evolution of applications being from traditional on-premises worlds to SaaS applications. What we're also seeing is things like the network services that used to support those applications when they looked slightly differently from a deployment perspective and now all moving to cloud services. The security that you alluded to in terms of how complicated that is, but how important it is for IT organizations, those services also moving to cloud as the applications begin to look very differently in the future. Extremely excited about the cloud launch pad. You know, we're going to talk a lot about those things that we're doing both in the public cloud, you know, in the hybrid cloud. And I think it will resonate well with customers around the world. I think it will as well. And you mentioned there are glimmers of hope that we've seen in the last 18 months. And one of the things that this has proved is that work from home can be productive, can be successful. Employees need to be empowered to be able to do that. Let's go ahead and talk through the first program, accelerating IT modernization. This is Tuesday, September 28th. Let's talk about some of the Citrix innovations that you're going to be announcing. Yeah, so I mean, as I mentioned, we think about sort of accelerating IT modernization in various parts, you know, tend to start with the classic infrastructure. And we've seen over the years that lots of infrastructure, you know, is leaving the building. And by that we mean the traditional realms of on-premises data centers or co-location facilities. This constant evolution and migration of those services to infrastructures and service providers from the huge cloud companies that are out there. And we can continue to see that as a huge trend, of course. And one of the things that off the back of that, of course, is our move from the traditional world of virtual desktops, which was a very on-premises concept into desktop as a service. So really the key around desktop as a service is the simplification, some cost optimization. You know, the things that IT are looking at in terms of how they can really bring things to the party for their organizations going forward. And of course, as we move into that world of everything being delivered as a service, you know, things like network services, security services, they all must follow. So some of the things that you'll hear about there is really around our application delivering security and also our move from VDI to Das. And you know, you'll hear a lot about what we're doing with the world's leading cloud providers to really add more Citrix value, you know, build on what we've already done with them, but lots, lots more and really support the notion of that every customer is on a journey to cloud one way or the other. And of course Citrix will be ready to help at any stage of that journey. Every customer is on the journey to cloud and we've seen that accelerate so much in the last 18 months. Talk to me a little bit about, if we think of desktop as a service as an evolution of VDI, is that what you're saying? Yeah, you know, you think about sort of the traditional VDI scenario was that, you know, virtual desktops were, we're using instead of physical desktops, you know, inside the usual office location. But during the pandemic, you know, we saw so many customers rely on moving to VDI to cloud for reasons of scalability and reasons of security, but then also needing to still, in many cases, provide access to those sort of traditional physical PCs. And of course Citrix has had solutions for that for many, many years. But what we're also seeing is that organizations are striving for simplicity, you know, the kind of the value of the desktop is being able to deliver it on demand to the end user securely from wherever they are in the world on whatever device they're on. And as we see the sort of establishment of these new working norms, and I'm not a great fan of the phrase, the new normal, I think we have a new now, and that now will evolve, you know, they almost daily as we come through the other side of the pandemic. So the real key drivers for us there are obviously flexibility, reliability, security, and also cost optimization, which of course is the bread and butter of most conversations we have with CIOs and CTOs around the world. That's critical. And I'm going to borrow that, the new now, if you don't mind. I'll cite you credit, but I like that I agree that I hope this is not the new normal. But one of the things that we've seen in the new now on the security front is we've seen this massive increase in ransomware. Everybody went to work from home almost overnight. Suddenly you have millions of devices, IoT devices connecting to corporate networks. Security became, the acceleration of security became a huge challenge for customers in any organization globally. Let's talk about now the second announcement. This is going to be Tuesday, October 5th, Empowering a Security Distributed Workforce. Yeah, and I think, you've hit the nail on the head there. I think the one thing that was perhaps completely staggering to everybody was the speed in which organizations were forced to lock their employees out of physical office locations. And by force, I mean, for all the right reasons around the health and wellbeing. And if I think back to my earlier career, before I joined Citrix, I was in a large organization and we would perform these fire drills every so often where we would go through our disaster recovery business continuity plans and really, you know, play scenarios out like the office in London was unavailable or the office in LA was unavailable. But never once do I remember us doing every office in every location is offline from tomorrow and there's no negotiability. If you have a device at home, please use it. You know, we can't provide laptops quick enough, especially with a global chip shortage now as well. So whatever device you have, we'll do our best to make that secure. And I think there was an expectation that the employees would sort of play nicely in that scenario. But of course, you know, if you have your home device, you probably don't update it as much as a work device. So it really does require a new set of thinking. And of course, Citrix has been at the forefront of the zero trust evolution. You know, the technologies that we have in place actually do permit remote work and have done for many years. But I think what we're seeing now is a slightly different type of remote work, you know, with different types of applications and devices, as you said, different locations, you know, needing to knit all of that together in a sort of a more contextual way so that we can understand, you know, combinations of the end user, their location, the types of applications that they're using, the state of their devices and sort of bring all that together to really understand, you know, just exactly how much security needs to be applied. I think the traditional challenges are still there, you know, too much security and end users will find a way around it because it's not a good user experience. And, you know, perhaps too much user experience without the security leaves big holes and big problems for organization. So, yeah, I think this balancing act is really key. And of course, as we go through the launch panel security, we'll talk about some of the great innovations and solutions that are coming from Citrix. You're right with the fact that, you know, this rapid pivot security, the changes, the things that people are saying, the workforce needs to be empowered. You know, we saw this sudden dependence on all these SaaS applications to communicate and to collaborate. We also saw, with that rapid pivot to work from home, ransomware, I was doing some research recently Christian and it's up almost 11X. Just in the first half of 2021, DDoS is massively up. People are working from home in environments that are just suddenly a bit chaotic and it's challenging from a security perspective when you have so many distractions to be able to make sure that you're following all the right steps as an employee, that you're not clicking on the various links and that you're really doing your own due diligence. So having that zero trust and help from folks like Citrix is really key to this new now, as you say. It is, you know, and the unfortunate thing is that while ever no end user or certainly I would hope that no end user would willingly cause a problem from a security perspective, I think just by the very nature of the way that end users think and they interact with links in emails or the, you know, interact with attachments in emails, unfortunately relying on the human is always going to be the weakest link in the chain. And I think that's why we have to have new approaches to how we address the user behavior, you know, can we actually, you know, guide people in different ways? There are plenty of technologies that are out there now and then many, many from Citrix that actually allow us to what we've lovingly said is to save the users from themselves. You know, we can't simply rely on every user to be diligent for every single email or every single link that they see. So, you know, being able to actually understand, you know, where the threats are as it relates to the end user and the likely interaction they have and then being able to combat those threats in the technology in a seamless way, it is really part of the exciting evolution of what we're doing with Citrix. And again, you know, lots of great things to come as we go through this security launchpad. And the third announcement is around worker, boosting worker productivity. That's been a challenge that we've all faced in the last 18 months of having, like I said a minute ago, you know, people that have suddenly kids learning from home, spouses working, people competing for bandwidth. Talk to me about some of the things that Citrix is doing to help those workers be more engaged, be plugged in and really be able to get their jobs done from anywhere. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I can give you the benefit of my experience, you know, being in a home office for almost 20 months has been completely the antithesis and the opposite of the rest of my career. You know, I've always been very mobile, you know, kind of picking up different devices and using them for different things, just purely from, you know, the perspective of what's most convenient to me. And I think, you know, if you take that and extrapolate it to every employee and every organization around the world who has, you know, had to invite work into their home, you know, another soundbite that I use quite often now is that, you know, for the last 20 months, we really haven't been working from home, we've been living at work, you know, and it's a fact, you know, we've probably done more hours than ever before, we've run the risk of burnout more than ever before. And, you know, prior to the pandemic, and in fact, you and I talked about this very thing at Synergy, you know, we talked about the notion of needing to focus on employee experience and employee productivity, you know, we saw plenty of examples in customers with huge initiatives around employee experience and employee productivity, you know, CIO's partnering with HR leads and really trying to figure out and map the employee journey. You know, what is it that they do every day? You know, how can we make their life easier? And perhaps interestingly, how can we reduce some of the mundane overhead, you know, approvals or requests or things that we see in our everyday life but actually give the employees more time to be valuable and do great cognitive work, which is of course, what humans do best. And so, you know, you remember, we talked about the micro apps back then, we'd completed the acquisition of Sappho as you and I talked last time when we unveiled micro apps and micro workflows as a way to really help end users interact within Citrix workspace to the systems that they use every day but provide a new way to do that. And just earlier this year, we completed the acquisition and integration of Rike, which was a fantastic addition to the Citrix portfolio. And so we've really begun to think about, you know, how can we actually help employees to do their best work? You know, what are the new capabilities that we need within Citrix workspace? What are the new capabilities that we need in Rike? How do we bring all that together with some of the other solutions that we have, Citrix Podio? There's a really interesting suite of productivity applications that we have really aimed at that number one problem, which is how can I get people to be productive to stay engaged, to lower the burnout and help them do their best work. And I'm really, really excited because there's some fantastic things to announce at the work version of the launch pad, which is on October 12th. All of those are so critical. You know, I've always said employee productivity, employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. I've used Rike myself before for different projects and being able to have productivity tools that allow the employee to engage, to be able to empower them to move projects forward, especially in a time that is still somewhat chaotic is critical as is to your point, ensuring that there are the proper tools to facilitate folks so that they get what they need when they need it to help reduce burnout. That's been a big challenge. You're right that the living at work thing is real. It's persisting and we're gonna be in this hybrid environment for some TBD amount of time longer. So having the ability to be empowered and productive in a secure way, leveraging cloud capabilities is really key and it's exciting to hear what Citrix Launchpad is going to announce over those three days and deliver. Yeah, I would just say in sort of summary, we're really excited about the three areas and they really do sort of all come together in some of those challenges that we talked about, specifically around how we can help organizations to address that accelerated IT modernization, to drive secure, flexible work in the new now and also to really reach that goal of having extremely productive distributed teams as we come out the other side of the pandemic. So lots going on, fantastic time to be here and to talk to you and to be at Citrix, of course, with so many huge customer issues that we have to solve and we're really excited for the challenge. Excellent and we all are looking forward to that. The Citrix Launchpad series, Christian, where can folks go to register for these different programs? Yeah, sure, so it's pretty simple. So if we just go to http bit.ly, b-i-t dot l-y, forward slash Citrix Launchpad and we can sign up through that. Excellent, I've already signed up. I'm looking forward to this series to learn more about what you guys are doing and kind of dig in, double click on some of the things that you spoke about. Christian, thank you for joining me today, talking about the Launchpad series and letting folks know where they can go to register. Thank you, Lisa. Great to be on and great to see you again. Likewise, for Christian Riley, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a CUBE conversation.