 Welcome to this CUBE Conversation sponsored by Citrix. This is the third and final installment in the Citrix Launchpad series. We're going to be talking about the Launchpad series for work. Lisa Martin here with Dyon Henchcliff, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research. Dyon, welcome to the program. Oh, thanks, Lisa. Great to be here. So we have seen a tremendous amount of change in the last 18, 19 months. You know, we saw this massive scatter to work from home a year and a half ago. Now we're in this sort of distributed environment that's been persisting for a long time. Talk to me about, we're going to be talking about some of the things that Citrix is seeing and some of the things that they're doing to help individuals and teams. But give me your lens from Constellation's perspective. What are some of the major challenges with this distributed environment that you've seen? Sure. Well, so we've gone from this, you know, the world of work, the way that it was. Now we're all very decentralized, you know, work from anywhere, remote work is really dominating, you know, white collar types of activities in the workplace and the workplaces that are at our homes for most of us, even today. But that's starting to change. Some people are going back, although I just recently spoke to a panel of CIOs that says they have no plans anytime soon. But they're very aware that they need to have workable plans for when we start sending people back to the office. And there's this big divide. How are we gonna make sure that we have one common culture, we have a collaborative organization when, you know, a good percentage of our workers are in the office, but also maybe as much as half the organization is at home. And so how to make processes seamless, how to make people collaborate, make sure there's equity and inclusion so that the people at home aren't left out and then people in the office maybe don't have an unfair advantage. So those are all the conversations. And of course, because this is a technology revolution, remote work was enabled by technology, we're literally looking at it again for this hybrid work, this divided organization that we're gonna have. You mentioned culture, that's incredibly important, but also challenging to do with this distribution. I was looking at some research that Citrix provided, asking individuals from a productivity perspective for, and two thirds said, hey, for our organizations that have given us more tools for collaboration and communication, yes, we are absolutely more productive. But the kicker is the same amount of people about two thirds that answered the survey said, we've now got about 10 tools. So complexity is more challenging. It's harder to work individually, it's harder to work in teams. And so Citrix is really coming to the table here with the Launchpad series for work saying, let's help these individuals and these teams because as we think, and I'm sure you have insight, Diane, on this as well, this hybrid model that we're starting to see emerge is gonna be persistent for a while. Yeah, for the foreseeable future, because we don't know what the future holds. So we'll have to hold the hybrid model as the primary model and we may eventually go back to the way that we were, but for the next several years, it's gonna be that. And so we're trying to wrap our arms around that. And I think that we're seeing with things like the Citrix announcements, a wave of responses saying, all right, let's really design properly for these changes. We kind of just adapted quickly when everyone went remote last year, but now we're actually adding features to streamline, to reduce the friction, to simplify remote work, which does use, you have to use more applications. You have to switch between different things. You have to, you know, your employee experience in the digital world is just more cluttered and complicated, but it doesn't have to be. And so, you know, we can look to some of these announcements to Rashi, I think address some of that. Let's break some of that down because to your point, it doesn't have to be complex, complicated. It shouldn't be, and initially this scatter was, let's do everything we can to ensure that our teams and our people can be productive, can communicate, can collaborate. And now, since this is going to be persistent for quite some time, to your point, let's design for this distributed environment, this hybrid workforce of the future. Talk to me about the, one of the things that Citrix is doing with Citrix Workspace, the app personalization. I can imagine as an individual contributor, but also as a team leader, the ability to customize this to the way that I work best is critical. And it really is, especially when you have workers, 18 or 19 months worth of new hires that you've never met, they don't really feel like, this is maybe their organization, but if you allow them to shape it a little bit, make it contextual for them, so they don't just come into this cookie cutter, digital experience that actually is kind of more meaningful for them, it makes it easier for them to get their job done and things are the way that they want them and where they want them. I think that makes a lot of sense. And so, the app personalization announcements is important for remote workers in particular, but all workers to say, hey, can I start tailoring parts of my employee experience so they make more sense for me? And I feel like I belong a little bit more, so I think it's significant. It is. Let's talk about it from a security perspective though. We've seen massive changes in the security landscape in the last year and a half. We've seen some Citrix data that I was looking at, said between 2019 and 2020 ransomware up 435%. Malware up 358%. And of course, the weakest link being humans. Talk to me from a Citrix workspace perspective about some of the things that they've done to ensure that those security policies can be applied. Well, and the part that I really liked about the launchpad announcements around work in terms of security was this much more intelligent analysis. One of the most frustrating things is you're trying to get work done remotely and maybe you're in crunch mode and all of a sudden the security system clamps down because they think you're doing something that you might be sharing information you shouldn't be and now you can't get your deadline met. I really liked how the analytics inside the new security features really trying to make sure they're applying intelligent analysis of behavior. And only when it's clear that a bad actor is in there doing something then they can restrict access, protect information. And so I have no doubt they'll continue to evolve the product so that it's even more effective in terms of how it can conclude or exclude bad actors from doing things inside your system. And so this is the kind of intelligent security increasingly based on AI type technologies that I think that'll keep our workers productive but clamp down on the much higher rate of bad activity we see out there because we do have so many more end points. There's a thousand more times more end points than today's organizations because of remote work. Right. And one of the things that we've seen with ransomware I mentioned this numbers that Citrix was sharing it's gotten so much more personalized. So it's harder and harder to catch these things. One of the things that I found interesting, Dianne that from a secure collaboration perspective that Citrix is saying is that, you know we need to go security needs to go beyond the devices and the end points and the apps that an employee is using which of which we said there are at least 10 apps that are being used today and it needs to actually be applied at the content level the content creation level. Talk to me about your thoughts about that. I think that's exactly right. So if you know the profile of that worker and the types of things that they normally do and you see unusual behavior that is uncharacteristic that worker because you know their patterns, the types of content the locations of that content that they might normally have access to and if they're just accessing things periodically that's usually not a problem when they suddenly access a large volume of information and appear to be down when those are the types of issues and especially of content they don't normally use for their work then you can intervene and take more intelligent actions as opposed to just trying to limit all content for example so that knowledge workers can't actually get access to all that great information in your IT systems you can now give them access to it but when clearly something bad is happening the system automatically does it and steps in. I was looking at some of the data with respect to updates to Citrix analytics that it can now auto change permissions on shared files to read only. I think you alluded to this earlier when it detects that access sharing is going on. And inappropriate access sharing. So sometimes it's okay for a worker to access documents but the big fear is that a bad actor gets access they get a USB key and they download a bunch of files and they get a whole bunch of IP or important knowledge. Well when you have a system that's continually monitoring and the unblinking gaze of Citrix security capabilities are looking at the patterns not just the content alone or just the device alone but at the usage patterns and saying I can make this read only because that's clearly, we don't want them to be able to download this because this activity is completely out of bounds or very unusual. Right, one of the things also that Citrix is doing is integrating with Microsoft Teams. I was listening to a fun quiz show the other day that said what were the top two apps downloaded in 2020? And I guess one of them correctly TikTok though I still don't know how to use it. And the second one was Zoom and I'm sure Microsoft Teams is way up there. I was looking at some stats that said I think as of the spring of 2020 there were 145 million daily users of Microsoft Teams. So from a collaboration perspective something that a lot of folks are dependent on during the pandemic. And now within Teams I can access Microsoft Workspace? Yeah, Citrix Workspace. Yes, well, and it's more significant than it sounds because there's a real hunger to find a center of gravity for the employee experience. Where do I put that? Where should they be spending most of their time? Where should I be training them to focus most of their attention? And obviously workers collaborate a lot and Teams as part of Office 365 is just a juggernaut. The rise of it during the pandemic has been incredible. To show this, I have a Digital Workplace Advisory Board. It's companies who I think are the farthest along in designing digital employee experiences. And 31% of them said this January that they're planning on centralizing the employee experience in Teams. Now, if you're a Citrix customer, you have Workspace, you go, how do I, I don't wanna be left out. This announcement allows you to say you can have the goodness of Teams and its capabilities and the power of Citrix Workspace and you have them in one place. And really creating a true center of gravity and simplifying and streamlining the employee experience. You don't have this fragmented pieces. Everything's right there in one place in one pane of glass. And so I like this announcement. It brings Citrix up to parody with a lot of their competitors and actually eclipsed several of them as well. So I'd really like to see this. So then from within Teams, I can access Citrix Workspace. I can share documents with team members and collaborate as well. Is that kind of the idea? Yes, that is the idea. And of course, they'll continue to evolve that. But now you can do your work in Citrix Workspace and when documents are involved and you wanna bring your team in, they're already right there inside that experience. That ability to streamline things so critical given the fact that we're still in this distributed environment. I'm sure families are still dealing with some amount of remote learning or there's still distractions from the, do I live at work? Do I work from home environment? One of the groups I really felt for when this happened, Diane was the contact center. I thought these poor people, more people now with shorter and shorter fuses trying to get updates on whatever it was if they had something ordered and of course all the shipping delays. And the contact center of course went scattered as well and we've got people working from home trying to do their jobs. Talk to me about some of the things that Citrix is doing to enable with Google this contact center workers to have a good experience so that ultimately the employee experience is good so was the customer experience. The contact center worker has it the toughest of all of the different employee profiles I've seen. They have the most, they have to learn the most number of applications. They're typically not highly skilled workers so they might only just have a high school of education yet they're being asked to cram all of these technologies each one with a different employee experience. And they don't stay very long as a result of that. You might train them for two months before they're effective and they only stay for six months on average. And so both businesses really want to be able to streamline onboarding and provisioning and getting them set up and effective. And they want it too. If you want happy contacts and workers making your customers happy and staying around. And so this announcements really allows you to deploy pre-configured Citrix Workspaces on Chrome OS so that if you need to feel the whole bunch of workers or you have a big dose A you're a relief company and you have a lot of disaster care workers you can suddenly just issue them these devices very easily that are ready to go with their employee experience and all the right things in place so they can be effective with the least amount of effort. So I think it's a big step forward for a worker that is often neglected and underserved. Right, definitely often neglected and you brought up a good point there. And one of the things that peaked in my mind is you talked about the onboarding experience the retention. Well these contact center folks are the front lines to the customer. So from a brand reputation perspective that's on the line for companies in every industry where people with short uses are dealing with contacts and our folks. So the ability to onboard them to give them much more seamless experience is critical for the brand reputation customer retention for every industry I would imagine. Absolutely. Especially when you're setting up a contact center or you have a new product launching and you got to bring on board all of these new workers you can do it and they're gonna have the least challenges. They're gonna be ready to go right out of the box be able to receive their package with their device and their Citrix employee experience ready to go. Just turn the machine on and they're off to the races. And that's the vision and that's the right one. So I was glad to see that as well. Yeah, fantastic. One of the things also that Citrix did the Citrix Workspace app builder so that Citrix Workspace can now be a system of record for certain things like collaboration surveys maybe even COVID-19 information that system of record talked to me about why that's so critical for the distributed worker. So we've had this longstanding challenge in that we've had our systems of record you know these are our CRM systems ERP things like that which we use to run our business and then we've had our collaboration tools and they're separate even though we're collaborating on sales deals and we're collaborating on our supply chain and so like the team's announcement was in the same band we say let's close that gap between our systems of record and our collaboration tools. Well, this announcement says, all right well we still have these isolated systems of record how can we streamline them and build and start connecting together a little bit so that we have processes that might cross all of those things, right? So if an order comes in from the CRM system then you can complete it in the ERP system you know ordering that product for them so they actually get it. And that's probably overkill that scenario for this particular example but for example collecting data from workers saying let's build some forms and collect some data and then feed it to this process or this system of record you can do it much more easily than before before you would have to hire a development team or a contractor to develop another system that would integrate CRM ERP or whatever. Now you can do it very quickly inside that builder first simple basic applications and get a lot of the low hanging fruit off your plate and we're automated inside of your of your Citrix workspace. And automation has been one of the keys that we've seen to streamlining worker productivity in the last 18 months. Another thing that I was looking at is you know the fact that we have so many different apps and we're constantly switching apps context is constantly changing. Is this sort of system of record going to allow or reduce the amount of context switching that employees have to do? Yeah, almost all of these announcements have some flavor to that saying can we start bringing more systems together in one place? You're not switching between applications you don't have different and disconnected sets of data that if you need to and that they are disconnected you can connect them, right? That's what the app builder announcement again is about saying, all right if you're always using these three applications to do something and you're switching between them maybe you can just build something to connect them into one experience and you know maybe a low level IT person or even a business user can do that that's the big trend right now. That's so important for that continued productivity as things will continue to be a little bit unstable I guess for a while. One more thing that I saw that Citrix is announcing is integrations with write. I've been a write user myself. I like to have program project management tools that I can utilize to keep track of projects but they've done a number of integrations one of them with write signature which I thought was really cool. So for the secure e-signature within write based on a program or a project that you're working on talk to me about some of the boosts to write that they've done and how do you think that's going to be influential in the employee experience? Well, first let's just say that the write acquisition was a really important one for Citrix to go above just the basic digital workplace and simple systems of record. This is a really a mass collaboration tool for managing work itself. And so this is taking Citrix up the stack in the more sophisticated work scenarios and when you are in more sophisticated work scenarios you want to be able to pull in different data sets so they have the Citrix share file support. You want to be able to bring in really important things like signing contracts or signing sales deals or mortgage applications are all sorts of exciting things that actually run in your business and so write signature support is really important so that when you have key processes that involve people putting signatures on documents you can just build collaborative work management flows that take that all that into account without having to lead the experience. Everything's in one place as much as possible. And this is the big push that we need to have all these different systems. We don't have too many apps. What we have is too many touch points. Let's start combining some of these and so the right integrations really help you do that. Well, ultimately it seems like what Citrix is doing with the work launch pad series all the announcements here is really helping workers to work how and where they want to work which is very similar to what we say when we're talking about the end user customer experience when tech companies like Citrix say we have to meet our customers where they are. Sounds like that's the same thing that's happening here. It is and I would just add on top of that and to make it all safe. So you can bring all these systems together work from anywhere and then you can feel confident that you're gonna do those so securely and safely. And it's that whole package I think that's really critical here. You're right, I'm glad you put up that security. All right, Diane, take out your crystal ball for me as we wrap things up. You're saying, you know, going into the future we're gonna be moving from this distributed workforce to this hybrid. What are some of the things that you see as really critical happening in the next six to nine months? Well, there's a real push to say we need to bring in all the workers that we've hired over the last year maybe not bring them in in person but can we use these collaborative tools and technologies to bring them, hold them closer so they get to know us. And so, you know, things like having Microsoft Teams integrated right into your Citrix workspace makes it easier for you to collaborate with remote workers and inside any process wherever you are. So whether you're in the office or not it should bring workers closer especially those remote ones that are risk of being left out as they move to hybrid work. And it's really important. And so the things like the app builder are gonna also allow building those connections. And I think that workers and businesses are really gonna try and build those bridges because the number one thing I'm hearing from business leaders and IT leaders is that we're worried about splitting into two different organizations. The ones that are remote and the ones that are in the office. And any way that we can bring all of them together in an easy way in a natural way situate the digital employee experience. So we really, we're back to one company one common culture. Everybody has equal access and equity to the employee experience. That's gonna be really important. And I think that Citrix Launchpad announcements around work really are a major step in the right direction for that. There's still more things that have to be done. And all vendors are working on that. But it's nice to see really like what Citrix is doing here to move the ball forward towards where we're all going. It is nice to see and those connections are critically important. It happened to be at an in-person event last week and several folks had just had been hired during the pandemic and just got to meet some of their teams. So in terms of getting that cultural alignment once again this is a great step towards that. Diane, thank you for joining me on the program talking about the Citrix Launchpad series for work. All the great new things that they're announcing and sharing with us some of the things that you see coming down the pike. We appreciate your time. Thanks Lisa for having me. For Diane Hinchcliffe, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation.