 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is an episode in the remote works Citrix virtual series. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work, of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone, working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So really happy to welcome to the program two of our CUBE alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hawke. He is the executive vice president and chief product officer with Citrix and also joining us Maribel Lopez. She is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. Thanks, Stu. All right, so let's talk. We've been in this pandemic now for a good chunk of time. Many months, some of us are back in the office. Some we are talking a lot about. Maribel, I think you talk about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now what you're hearing from your customers and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say how generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers and that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology but using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions but it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned, Stu, we now have some set of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back, but I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full-time there. Many people will be remote work and in fact, you might even hire some people and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody that might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration and then they'll go back and work from home. So those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work and nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with have been giving their employees the option. It is, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? It's going to be the ripple effect on real estate, on Maribel, as you were saying, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they have before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is customer experience is so important, but of course it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that employee experience look like in today's environment? Well, I think this is a really important area for I think organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience and I would say the digital customer experience and maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year, in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system in this movement of employees from the office to the home is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices and now we somehow came home with a laptop or a Chromebook and the reality was, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix is really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience and you're right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home, maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops so that application delivery was really important the security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So we have to make sure that A that that's accessible and that B that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience and now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. Yeah, a good great point. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors they need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit. What are some of those services? It's not the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? Well, I can certainly tell you for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops. And for many organizations, they still are critical applications. But the application portfolio that employees use today is much broader than that. And includes web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service-based applications, et cetera, as well as their mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications they needed to do their job. But remember in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to fill out an expense report or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security, because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience, no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products, providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. I think one of the things that you brought up, PJ, sorry to speak, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. The workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu, than it does for PJ. And it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that I'm in the contact center and I want a BDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything, I don't do anything, I just open up the device and everything comes down to me and then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on personal, identifiable information on someone's home device. So I think we're really gonna be sophisticated about what a workspace means. Yeah, no Maribel, I was just commenting off, PJ made a comment. There's this thing he talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But Maribel, I'm curious, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm gonna have a couple of months and then we're just gonna go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? What are some of the challenges that you hear out there that people are saying, oh geez, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you might be a developer in which case you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe asynchronously versus somebody that was like, oh, hey, wait, every day I can have a stand-up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural, some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices. While that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the, say, right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam as the webcam in the right place? So the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. We had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely but then we sent everyone home and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio of services and do I have the right portfolio of services? I actually purchased something to deal with COVID but is that the right thing? And now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote light where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs, what style of services, how scalable those services and then culturally I think we have issues like how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for say Europe and Asia for everybody to be on a call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So a lot of interesting challenges ahead. Yeah, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use and think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say at least on Orthodox and maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future, but I know in the meantime we're gonna onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So I think your people processes starting with onboarding but all the way through to training and everything else, especially for managers I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication as you pointed out Stu being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely. And then that last part is of course, what's the technology that we bring to varying these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home. And then how do we reconfigure shared spaces, office spaces so that they make even more sense when we're back in the office. Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done, but I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I previously thought about in the past. PJ, I like what Maribel talked about, setting up remote work right. The promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s, it was going to be, well, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything wherever we are. 5G, come on, we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So help us understand, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility so that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office and are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving as small, what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity, clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure, clearly not perfect. And those of us that are working from home in remote locations, occasionally experienced the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So that's the second one that I think is really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that are built on top, not just the technologies from Citrix, but you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software or collaboration tools, many of them were designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as personal computing devices, they're no shared computing resources, accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud-based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. While all of these will continue to require investment, I once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said is, I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So when we think of employee experience, my experience is a summation of the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really instead of us looking at managing just a few, this floor, the Wi-Fi on this floor, this building, we're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organizations. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are on whatever devices are available. So if you want to go in the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or a hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. Maribel, I want to come back to you. As companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy, which we've touched on a little bit. Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID, the type of discussions we're having with people is, oh, I don't know if I can go to the cloud or only this type of data can go to the cloud and I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we're need and managed three to five year transition plan and I plan on having X% of my apps this year and Y% of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window. If you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So many of the safer cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services makes sense? How do we actually do business process transformation not just technology transformation? So very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty and now they're going back and they're saying, okay, part of that remote light to remote right concept is just in general, did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So they're going full guns. Like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? I think, Marble, one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly, either unimaginable or impossible to build when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who've made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that the cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry, whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet. And now this transition, which I think is really, I think in progress is the transition to cloud, that's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. Yeah, PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies, they were dipping their toe in and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you've both pointed out though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do and hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink the way you think about security in this aspect. I think the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day-to-day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint and then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic and you can secure access to the applications on the backend. In fact, in some ways that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the I think easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is though, that many enterprises have relied on employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device to the workspace itself to the experience really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple end points and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization you have access to everything that employee had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are real technologies that are in the market today that are available to customers to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed and now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that that really minimize the security risk and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. You know, I actually want to pick up on this because I think this is such a critical point for organizations. And this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote rate VPN is not enough if you've given somebody access to the kingdom what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened as PZ said yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Django tower same concept but basically you have to secure at every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you know, you can start as an organization everything from what computing hardware do you buy? You know, does it have a safe heart secure root of trust on it? So that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment and then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies and all of those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, there isn't a silver bullet but we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. The last technology area I want to poke at is we haven't talked about data yet. There's the opportunity for analytics and it's a little bit Mayor Bell maybe start with you there's the opportunity to really understand are people leveraging things or their problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me but you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing and there's concern about that. So what are you seeing out there and any emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance that's great. If it turns out to be, you know every application they've entered and how much time they spent in that application maybe yes, maybe no maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. Maybe it's something that says if this application hasn't been used in period of time because that's an issue around licensing do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending 30 hours a week in Outlook there's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should but what you really should be talking to your vendors about is how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? Is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there's a slowdown in the network I need to know that that's gonna impact users. If there's an outage in a service I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics and balance the privacy and the experience? So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck and so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers the point that Maribel alluded to is have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who were inside the office and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system whether or not they're occurring inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The second area is to do with actually the quality of that experience the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level what their experience is like and we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not they've actually delivered a usable high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course they're relying on remote response from remote employees with networks that they don't manage. So really can you get a handle on what that experience is like? So both of those are actually analytics services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality reliable secure service. The other area where we're exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and share that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics and understanding of user behavior can get used, you could see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employee's own experience inside the workspace. And personally that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. I think this contextual concept is great, right? So understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity, that's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So it learns about me, it predicts things, but it also creates, helps me create new better employee experiences. Yeah, I think my phone keeps asking me if I wanna uninstall the entire folder of travel apps because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they've built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, we did two years worth of transformation in two months. So I wanna just give you both the final word, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. Well, thank you, Stu. I mean, the first thing I'd say is once again, how I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like and to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long-term decisions that they've got to make over the next six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two-year project through two months or two weeks, that's a journey that we've been on with those customers and we're excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things still to figure out ahead of them and we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. So for me, when I talk to customers, I say, this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy, build for the things that are gonna create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots of things for people to think about and looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thank you for watching theCUBE.