 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend coming to you live from Atlanta, Georgia. Our first day of coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I are very pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Bob O'Donnell, the founder and president of Tech Analysis. Bob, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here. I really appreciate it's my first chance to do theCUBE. I'm so excited because you are no stranger to TV, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, SquawkBox, now theCUBE. And now theCUBE, it completes the circle. He's a friend of Leo Loporte, which makes him a superstar. Well, there you go. We're sitting in the presence of greatness. I don't know about that. But anyway, no, it's a pleasure to be here. It's nice to chat with you guys. It's a very interesting time that we're in, right? I mean, when we think about what's happening in the world and everybody, you know, for years we've seen this move to cloud-based computing and SaaS and everything else. Everybody's excited about all this stuff and there's all these tools. And then on top of that, we have all these devices, right? We've got this amazing range of different devices we can use. But ironically, what it is, is we're in a state of too much of a good thing, right? It's too much, even though that if you think about it, you'd say, well, objectively, there's so much that we could potentially do here. I mean, you've got these tools can do this and this and this. But all of a sudden you were like, well, except I got this one and this one and this one. And oh, by the way, if I want to send a message, I can send it five different ways to Sunday, you know? And therefore, if I want to read a message, I have to be able to read it five different ways from Sunday. And so the challenge that you face is, and Citrix talked about it, I thought quite nicely in their keynote this morning, is people get overwhelmed and they just can't get productive with what they're trying to do. And so, you know, what you need to do is figure out ways to turn that chaos into structure and order. And that's what they're trying to do with the workspace and, you know, it looks pretty cool. Yeah, one of the offline conversations I had was like, you know, you get all these tools. It's like somebody took a box of 10,000 Legos and just dumped it on your desk and say, build a masterpiece. Right. And what I heard this morning was the equivalent of what was like a Star Wars kit of like, this is what you can build. Here's the directions. And now you can start to deviate and customize it for your environment. So one of the things that I love to get your input on is like this concept of AI, ML, you know, this ideal of taking tasks and automating them. There's nothing new. We've tried this with macros in areas, but the thing that was missing with these tools were pretty dumb. Right. So the promise of ML AI should make these tools become real. What's your impression of like the state of the technology versus what was presented today? Well, look, we're in very early days of AI and ML. There are some fascinating things out there, right? There's a lot of the high profile things that we hear about the, you know, ImageNet and the ability to recognize every kind of dog known to mankind and all the demos we've all seen at every other trade show. But, you know, it really is the fascinating part exactly to your point is that the goal with AI and machine learning is to actually make things understand. And it's fascinating because, you know, I'll take a bit of a sidetrack, but bring it back. When devices started to be able to recognize our words, we assumed because we're human beings that they recognized what we meant. But no, there's a big jump between the words that you can transcribe and what you actually mean. Yeah, that context. Context is everything. And context is something that, again, as human beings, we take it for granted, but you can't take that for granted when it comes to technology and these sort of products. So the beauty of AI, you know, as it starts to get deployed is how do we get the context around what it is that we're trying to do and what we meant to say? You know, of course, we all want that in real life. What I meant to say was, but what I meant to do was this, or, you know, the task I want to do is that. So if you, you know, taking that back to what, you know, Citrix is talking about is, you know, there are a lot of rote procedural things that people do in most organizations, you know. And they gave the classic examples of proving the expense reports and this and that. And so clearly some of those things they can pre-build it. The micro-raps in a lot of ways, they really are macros, right? It's kind of a fancy macro. And that's fine, but the question is, are they smart enough to kind of deviate, oh, well, there's a conditional branch that it automatically builds in a macro that I didn't have to think about because it realizes in the context of what I'm doing that it means something else or something like that. I want to get the account balance. However that translates as opposed to take this column from row A and put it in row B. Sometimes row A won't be the correct destination. I want the account balance. Right, and the other truth of the matter is we're still getting used to actually talking to our devices, right? We do that at home to some degree for people who have Alexis, unless they've decided to stop recording everything, then that's a whole different subject. But it worked, we don't, right? I mean, interestingly, I remember when I first sought Cortana, for example, on a Windows machine. I thought, you know, in a weird way, Cortana makes more sense because I should want, but it hasn't really happened. It hasn't played out. So people, there's some level of discomfort of talking to our devices and recognizing these things. So I think there are cultural issues you still have to overcome. There are physical issues in the workplace now. I mean, now when you have these open office environments which, you know, doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that that was going to be a disaster. Whoever thought that was smart. Man, let's take a look at where their degree came from. But that's the reality that people are in. So you've got that, the physical environment challenges. You've got the cultural, how do I work with this environment? And then just starting to realize what it can actually do. And then of course, you have the problem that it didn't recognize what I actually said. It does something stupid. And you know, the original Siri problems that we all have. But all of these things tie together because they're all different takes on what machine learning has the potential to do and what we think it should do and what it can actually do. And the one thing I will say is as we enter, as we head towards 2020, I think we're going to start to finally see some of these things do what we thought they were going to do. You know, they're going to start to have the context. They're going to start to have the intelligence. So in the workspace, it's going to have the ability to know what I mean when I say I need the account balance or, you know, I need to know where, you know, in the sales pipeline, this particular project is or whatever task it is that I've got to deal with. And so understanding that and then building the plumbing, you know, to do that is critical. And, you know, one of the interesting things, if you look at what Citrix does, they're really all about plumbing. They're really, they have this ability to pull together all these different elements, right? From the beginning, what we started talking about. All these different applications over different types of network speeds and connections and make them all work. So, and yet they present this very simplified, beautiful, nice little, you're like, oh, this is great. But man, buried beneath there is a lot of stuff. And that's, you know, to give them credit, that's what they're really good at doing. And companies now, the challenge is, a lot of companies have really old applications that they've got to kind of modernize in some way, shape or form. And some of them are doing it on their own. You know, they're doing the containerization and all the things we hear about as well. Some of them are wrapping them, you know, Citrix, some of their original business, ZenApp was about app virtualization. Taking an old app and giving access in a modern way. So again, it's doing that. But the other problem you have to bear in mind, excuse me, is that every company has a different combination of apps, right? They said 500 apps is normal. A lot of companies have more than that. The problem is it's not the same 500 apps, right? This company has this set of 500 apps. This company has this set of 500 apps. This company has this set of 500 apps. And maybe 150 of them overlap, which means the long tail of 350 per company has to be dealt with and figured out. And that's, you know, that's again, those are the problems that they're trying to solve and bring into a unified, you know, environment. And also manage these growing expectations that all of us, that are workers, have from the consumer side of our lives. You mentioned Alexa and Siri. And we have these growing experiences that whether I'm talking to a device or I'm going on Amazon, I wanted to know what I want. Don't show me something I've already purchased. And we have these expectations as humans and consumers that we want the apps when we get to work to understand the context. And of course, we're asking a lot. In your opinion, where is Citrix and starting to help manage, helping their customers rather, manage those growing expectations? I think there, you know what? I think Citrix has done a lot in that area. I mean, even many, many years ago, they were the first to come up with the notion of an enterprise app store. In the early days of the app store, they came out with this concept of, we want to do an enterprise equivalent of that. When I download an app that I need to, you know, install on a work PC, make it easy to get at. So from way back when they've been building on that. And then the examples they gave today, you know, the notification from the airline that your flight has changed or whatever. Those are all the experiences that we're now used to, thanks to cloud-based services. And their point is like, hey, why shouldn't we have that at work as well? And so that's exactly what they're trying to work towards is that notion of cloud-based notifications and services and things, but related to the specific tasks I have to do. Because at the end of the day, they want to drive productivity. Because we all waste stupid amounts of time. And truth be told, the bigger the company you're at, the more time you waste because of just keeping up. I used to work at a big research firm of 1,200 people and literally half my day, every day was like just procedural stuff. I didn't actually work on the stuff that I thought I was hired to do, except for maybe half the day. And with a lot of people, that's very common. So anything that can be done to reduce that and allow people to get through the procedural stuff a little bit more efficiently and then actually let them do the work that they were hired to do and that they'd like to do. And by the way, gives them more satisfaction. I mean, all of these things tie together. People tend to say, oh, well, that's nice to do, this consumerization of IT. That's nice. It's not just nice. It's actually practical. It's actually a real productivity enhancing capability. And I think Citrix has done an excellent job of driving that message. It's hard to do, because again, the complexity of the plumbing necessary is super difficult. But their head and the heart are in the right place in terms of trying to achieve that. Well, it sounds absolutely not a nice tab but business critical. One of the stats that David Henshaw, their CEO said this morning and Keith's been mentioning a number of times is that he said there's $7 trillion wasted on output because employees are not able to get to their functions that they were hired for in a timely manner. So there's a huge addressable market there of opportunity but also the consumerization that's personalization expectation huge to, not just making me, Lisa Martin, as an employee happy but my business as customers that I'm dealing with, I think of like a salesperson or even a call center support person that they don't have access to that information. She already called in about this problem with her cable ISP. That person is going to go churn and go find another option that's going to feel their needs much better. Absolutely right. And that was the interesting point that they made and that's what they're trying to do with the intelligent workspace is to move beyond just providing these apps but actually personalizing it to each individual and being able to say, all right, each of us are going to have a workspace, it looks kind of like a newsfeed kind of a thing. Each one is going to be different though based upon obviously the different tasks that we do but the order with which we do them, the manner with which we do them. So it does get personalized. The notifications, I may want certain notifications that you don't really care about as much but that's fine. We can each create that level of personalization and customization. And again, what Citrix is trying to do and it was a key point that PJ made is look, we're not just building an application, we're building a platform. And that's the significant that is big and remember he came from Microsoft, he worked on Windows, he worked on Office. So he's got a long history of working on building platform-based tools that have tools that you can build on, that have APIs and ways for other people to add to. So all of those are critical parts of how, they tell that story and how they get people enthralled enough to say, hey, I'm going to make the commitment to do it. Because look, it's a lot of work, right? Let's not kill ourselves. If I'm not a Citrix shop, but I go, damn, that's cool. There's a fair amount of effort to make all this stuff actually happen. So it's a commitment, but once they get them hooked, it's a pretty sticky type of environment, especially as they continue to deliver value and personalization and customization that at the end of the day drives productivity and it's a pretty straightforward message. Hey, we can save your workers time and make them happier. Well, who doesn't want that, right? So let's talk about engaging your customers. Like, I can look at this and that can easily say, I can come to a conference like this and say, wow, I really want the output, but I don't want any of that employee experience stuff. That stuff just sounds hard. But the output I definitely want. Talk to me about the evolution of your customers. You walk them through. If you want the output, here's what you have to do. And talk to me about the, specifically the success stories of where they didn't get it and then after you've engaged them, they got it. Well, you know, like it, it's, there's so many different variations out there, but at the end of the day, you know, every company out there is dealing with the fact that they have workers that work in a lot of places on a lot of devices and they have to allow them to get stuff done. And so it's, it's about, you know, how much are they willing to do to make that happen? But there's also, there's the psychology of it. There is the whole, you know, how much of this am I willing to outsource versus I really want to keep it inside. And so you have, and it depends on the industry and the level of, you know, if they are a regulated industry and all those things have an enormous impact on how they do this. But you know, if you think back, Citrix original business was, a lot of it was again around desktop virtualization and actually trying to get really old school stuff. I'm talking mainframe green screen stuff to actually run on an old Windows PC, right? And that was kind of what, a lot of what they did initially. And then of course they built on from there. So all along the way you see different organizations Citrix has been thought of more as sort of more of the old school kind of enterprise software along with, you know, an SAP or an Oracle or something like that. But I think they've done a particularly good job of being cloud native, cloud aware and working with these cloud based tools. Cause, you know, early on when we think about what happened with SaaS applications, people thought that was going to dramatically change how anybody did software. And it did, but not in the way people expected. So I'm trying to get an answer specifically to your question, but I think what it is, is what they've, what they're doing and what companies who deploy it find is that they can take even these completely different types of software and services and service now and Salesforce and Workday and all these kinds of things that are dramatically different, but still again have overlapping functionality if I use all of them and conflict or counteract or interact or need to interact with other tools I already have that I'm working to change. So I mean, again, what I think that what Citrix has done a good job is they're able to look at the wide range of stuff that people have in that 500 group of apps or whatever it is and be able to say, all right, well, 10 of those are cloud based services but we got 490 other ones we got to do it and they have different levels of technologies to deal with those. And so what companies can do is they can also pick and choose, they can say, look, we're not going to get all 500 apps in our workspace. Maybe they just decide, but we're going to do, these 12, five of which are SaaS based and then we've got a couple of the critical ones that we have to do. And that hits 80% of our workers and they can tackle it that way. So the bottom line is companies who, look, it's a big investment up front, right? So the process is you have to psychologically say I'm willing to make an investment in not obviously just now but their roadmap and what they're doing, what they're talking about. That's why they talk a lot about the future because if I buy into this ecosystem, I'm committed, right? Again, I talked about that earlier, the stickiness question. So companies who are doing this kind of thing, companies who are trying to make sense of all these applications have to be willing to make those big investments. And then it used to have huge Citrix server farms as well. Obviously with the development of the cloud and Citrix cloud, that's all changed. But it's still a big investment and they have to work to figure out ways to do this. And if they do to finally get to, they do see productivity savings, right? I mean Citrix is, I don't remember the numbers, but they can qualify actual time saved when their solutions are installed and that's the benefits that these companies get. So they have to measure how much is my employee time worth versus the cost of getting these things deployed. Well, and I think that's going to be a differentiator for them. I wish we had more time because we could keep talking to you for a long time, but you got to add the cube to your list of TV, mobile, C-squawks, now the cube, Bob, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the cube. We appreciate your time. Thanks so much, appreciate being here, thank you. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.