 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, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're in Atlanta, Georgia, welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle at Research. Lee, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So we were jattin' away all day yesterday with Citrix execs and analysts. We talked to one of their customers from the Miami Merlins, excited about day two today. We've talked a lot about some of the key tenants that Citrix addressed yesterday, digital workspace, the intelligent experience, analytics, security. We want to talk about networking with you. I was looking at a stat the other day that said over 80% of businesses believe the ability to migrate apps to the cloud is hindered by network infrastructure complexity. Talk to us about that and what Citrix is doing to help reduce that complexity. Sure, so now an environment where data is everywhere, employees are everywhere, partners are everywhere, data is flowing. You're going to be using in-house applications, you're using SaaS-based applications, you're using applications on AWS or Azure or Google, and there's no good control of that information, but there also isn't a good way necessarily to deliver the appropriate quality of user experience or quality of service that those applications need. So the network, that's where the network sits. It's handling all the traffic, it sees the traffic, it can help with security, so that's why the network becomes so important here. Slowly, SD-WAN has come so far, remember back when I managed networks and trying to come up with policy-based routing to send voice traffic one-ways and FTP traffic another way, and now we have a robust market. I thought the market would collapse. 20 plus, last time I looked, 20 plus significant SD-WAN solutions out on the market. Where's Citrix and the customer mindsets when it comes to SD-WAN. Right, so I'll start with SD-WAN in the broad picture, which is, you know, SD-WAN is a great technology at the right place at the right time. It's the example of SDN broadly that's had very good adoption, and it solves a real problem, which is that you need to link the user and the application with each other, and that application can be in a variety of places, so you're no longer just simply going from the branch, the MPLS to the data center, great. Now you're going to Amazon, now you're going to Salesforce, now you're going to Microsoft, and the idea of having a hybrid WAN with internet connections, MPLS, 4G, LTE, cable, like whatever you want, so SD-WAN technology sits at that nexus and providing the intelligence and the management and ease of use to enable the remote workforce and the remote branches. So you keep on a really interesting combination, identity, Citrix is really into identity management, SD-WAN, what's possible, talk to us about the what's possible when you can tie identity to your network. Right, yeah, so Citrix is a solid SD-WAN supplier, they're able to identify the traffic, they have partnerships with all the major cloud guys, and one of the critical aspects of SD-WAN is how you tie in the security aspect. So you have network security and partnerships maybe with a Palo Alto or C-Scaler or some other folks, but then you also have the identity because there is no fixed perimeter anymore, right? There is no more four walls. The bad guys can get access at any different point, so authentication and understanding the identity is a critical aspect and Citrix has some excellent partnerships and programs to help that out. I'm sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. Especially when you think of like Office 365 and these services where when I think of Office 365, I think about my consumer version of Office 365, I can share data with anyone in the organization, I can access it from anywhere in the world. Right before we started recording, we talked a little bit about the ability of Citrix with this partnership with Microsoft and Office 365 to improve access to Office 365. When we think about that from a consumer perspective, that kind of, it kind of doesn't register, wait, I need to, when I use Office 365, it just works. What are some of the challenges enterprises are facing as they adopt solutions like old 365 and SaaS in general? Right, so you've got the quality of experience, quality of a service issue, and making sure that the remote user or remote office is hitting the right path in the internet to the right on-ramp is sort of one aspect of it, right? So identify that it's old 365, get me to the right on-ramp, they have a nice, seamless, quick experience. The other is from a security standpoint, understanding that who the user is, what data are they accessing, what data are they sending around? Is that part of the normal behavior, or is that something that looks a little strange and maybe we should flag that? I mean, clearly, people do do a lot of sensitive things on Office 365. When you're out in the field talking with customers who have to transform digitally, there's so many steps involved in that. We talk about cultural transformation and security transformation, network transformation. How do you advise, especially like, people say, legacy organizations, maybe like a peer of Citrix who's been around for decades, how do you advise them to start that network transformation process so that they can deliver, for example, facilitate collaboration via 365 globally? What is that process like to transform a network? Right, it's obviously very complex and very highly dependent on where you are and where you're starting, but there's no question that these organizations are not going to throw away the network that they have today. They've got switches and routers and Wi-Fi and application delivery controllers and all sorts of different things. So one of the reasons why SD-WAN has been successful is it's able to slide into the network relatively seamlessly as an overlay so you don't have to rip and replace. And then gradually, as you bring up new sites or smaller locations or temporary sites, you may find that the actual router isn't as important over time. And then you can start to evolve that to a more simplified branch network operation instead of having five different boxes at a given branch. You can move to two or three and ultimately I think we're going to a more unified SD branch type solution but that might be a few years out still. And as we talk kind of the few years out, one of the great benefits productivity-wise from using the SaaS services destroying the walls so to speak, the perimeter is that we can get frictionless transactions. The Citrix is touting the employee experience. If I need to share a document with you, there shouldn't be a ton of friction in that. But in that comes the scare of employees. We've been talking all week or both days about employees are the weak link in security. If I can't trust my employee to not have their post-it note with the password on their monitor, then all the security in the world can't, won't help. How is Citrix making security easier and frictionless so that one, we're ensuring Alderman Mout Albright talked about we need to be able to trust who we're talking to. So at the beginning, we need to be able to trust who we're talking to is actually who we intend to talk to. How has Citrix gone about enabling that? Right, so it goes back to identity and endpoint management. So is that the device that we expect it to be? Is it the person we expect it to be? Or are they doing the things that they normally do, right? And then the network can analyze, well, is that a strange traffic? Is there something being inserted? Is there malware? Is there an attack? So you have security can not only can degrade the performance of the network, but it also can be used to take out data that you don't want to have leaving the premises as it were. Or even if the data hasn't been opened and peaked at. So, you know, with the SSL security keys that when it left the premises, the same as when it was received on the other end, are those things still intact? Right, very complex though. It's not a, we haven't solved the security problem yet, but Citrix is certainly making some good headway. I wanted to get your opinion, speaking of Citrix and headway, as I mentioned, 30 year old company, maybe they consider themselves 30 years young. I noticed last year at Synergy 2018, rebranding, messaging changes, positioning. One of the first things David Henshel showed the audience yesterday in his keynote was a big, great eye chart that just showed how much they've been focused on delivering and they've delivered new solutions faster than they ever have before. We're hearing now about, they've really elevated their technologies to not just be for power users, but for the general user, which is most of us. Love to get your perspective on not just the last year of Citrix Evolution, but over the last few years and how you think where they are now is a competitive advantage to their business. Right. So, I focus mostly on the networking side of what Citrix is doing and they've rebranded the networking. They've made some very significant enhancements both in SD-WAN and the ADC and intelligent traffic management. And I think the next evolution for Citrix is really integrating these solutions together and moving even to easier to consume bundles. What they've done in this cycle of announcement is given a lot of different options in terms of ways to consume. You can consume it on the major cloud platforms. You can consume it as a box. You can consume it as a license or as a usage-based. Over time, I'm interested to see how Citrix migrates to more network-as-a-service offerings, which will make it even easier to consume. And as a workspace user, those tools might be in the background. You might not even know that they exist. And in some cases, that's already here today, but there's a lot more that the industry and Citrix can do there. Do they have the foundation to eventually get to network-as-a-service? Maybe the right ecosystem of partners to do that, in your opinion? Yeah, I mean, I think that's where they're headed, and I think they have some good technology and good partners and obviously always more work to do. So as you talk to combined Citrix and your own customers, I'd like to get some insights. We've heard several times over the past couple of days, me and Lisa, that there's five generations of workforce and the workforce, which also means there's five generations of leadership. So when I saw the stat in yesterday's show, when all the changes that happened in a year at Citrix, one part of me was like, oh, that's great. That's the consumerization of IT, enterprise IT. Then another part of me was like, whoa, that's a lot of change. You know, if I set up a, if I spend a year and a half, two years deploying a network, I want that network to be there and stable for the next five to seven years. How have customers embraced the consumerization or the pace of change inside of Citrix and industry as well? Sure, I think the network issue is a little bit separate because it's not really a consumerization of the network. And so that's still, you still need network professionals and that being said, Citrix SD-WAN is very easy to install and has good operational tools and improved management. So network management is now back in vogue and making life easier for IT administrators. The whole consumerization, I mean, that's just like there's so many tools and so many channels and the issue of being overwhelmed by the seven different ways that we might communicate with each other is a very real challenge. And I'm glad to see Citrix addressing that because each generation or types will have their own favorite ways to go about it. Oh yes, even you can think about it, in your family, somebody might be an email person, somebody might be a text person, somebody might be a WhatsApp person. That's hard enough to manage to try to meet everybody. So somebody might be a phone person. I know, like real-time communication. Right, creepy. But in terms of, you're saying, we talked about consumerization, not consumerization of the network, but those network experts that you talked about are influenced as consumers at home and we all as consumers have these expectations that if everything on demand, I want to be able to use the tools that I'm most familiar with to become the most productive. So how are the network engineers and their own concern of consumerization potentially going to impact consumerization of the network? Right. I might really look at the two things of, is the network, is my application available and is it responsive, right? Obviously the first one's a deal breaker. The second one is incredibly frustrating and then of course the third area from an IT or SecOps standpoint is, is it secure, right? And then from an IT or network professional, I need to enable those things. So give me more tools. So I think the buzzwords of machine learning and artificial intelligence as applied to networking are still a little early for that, but there are, you know, Citrix is using its vast intelligence that it gathers through its traffic management system to look at where to best route the traffic. It's deploying new tools to make things easier to deploy and easier to troubleshoot. So anything that the industry and Citrix can do there makes the life easier for the network guy and the IT guys. Making life easier, I think that's what we all want, right? Right. Thank you so much for coming back to theCUBE and talking with Keith and me at Citrix Synergy. We appreciate your time. Thanks. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Atlanta, Georgia, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.