 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are live in Atlanta, Georgia for Citrix Synergy 2019. We are pleased to welcome Jack Gold to theCUBE. President and founder of Jack Gold and Associates. Jack, it's great to have you join Keith and me this afternoon. Thank you for having me. So we had a great day. We've talked to eight or nine folks or so. Lots of really relevant, exciting news from Citrix this morning talking about the employee experience and how I kind of interpreted it as a catalyst for digital transformation, cultural transformation. You've been working with Citrix for a long time. I'd love to get your perspective on not just what you heard today from Citrix and with Google and Microsoft, but in the last year or so since they've really kind of done a rebrand effort, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, it's interesting from a Citrix perspective. Citrix, the old Citrix I guess I would put in quotes, right? It was always known as the VDI company. I've got the screen that we'll talk to the server that we'll talk to, whether it ever apps I need to talk to and I can have a nice thin client sitting on my desktop and I don't have to spend a lot of money and I also don't have to worry about if I'm in a bank, people stealing stuff off the hard drive or whatever. They made a pretty significant transition. That was the old workspace, if you will. The modern workspaces, which is where Citrix is really moving is one where, look, we've all grown up with smartphones for the last 10 or 15 years. Our kids don't know anything different. They're not going to deal with anything that's complex, anything where I have to log in and out of applications, anything where I have to switch between screens. It just doesn't make any sense to them. And so what we're seeing Citrix do is move into an environment where, as I said, it's about the modern workspace. It's about being able to help me do my job, not getting in my way of me doing my job. And that's really the transition. It's not just Citrix. The industry's moving in that direction as well, but Citrix is really at the forefront of making a lot of that work now. So Jack, talk to us about the new promise of the new Citrix. The, I remember, it had to be maybe seven years ago, I did a blog post of running Windows XP on your iPad. It was taking the Zen desktop solution and running it on your iPad. It was a cool trick. But we talked about today, we would hope by today that mobile technology would have forced companies to rewrite applications for the mobile first experience, but that simply hasn't happened. So presenting a bad application onto a mobile workstation or a mobile device doesn't work. We end up packing in and squeezing and trying to get our work done. How is Citrix promising to change that experience even versus their competitors? Sure. Well, first of all, so two bads don't make a good, having a bad app on a bad device doesn't make it good, doesn't make it easy to use, doesn't help me get my job done. What we really are talking about now is the ability to build a workspace, something where I sit and look at that helps me get my job done as opposed to getting in the way. Which means that instead of having to punch 14 different holes or icons and sit at my keyboard and type 48 different commands and do 38 different logins because each one is different. And by the way, I couldn't remember them, so I just called the help desk in between and that's another half an hour of my time that I didn't want to waste it. You mean my word perfect templates? There you go, there you go, word perfect. I remember that, not so well. I remember it well, not so nicely. What we're really trying to focus on now is user experience, right? What we're really trying to focus on is if you want to get your work done, I want to make it easy. Think about it as going to a grocery store. If you've got a list of groceries and you can't find what you want in five minutes, you leave, you go somewhere else. You go to another grocery store where things are much easier to find. It's the same at work or should be the same at work. Now that said, a lot of apps and organizations, especially big enterprises where they have, some can have literally thousands of apps are not going away. The notion that everything is going to go into the modern workspace where everything looks like a phone. It's a nice idea. It's probably not going to happen. Legacy apps will be legacy apps for a very long time. It's like mainframes are dead. Guess what? They're still around. That said, that doesn't mean that you can't take some of those legacy apps and make them easier to use with the proper front end. And that's really what Citrix is trying to do with the work spaces and others. Again, it's not just Citrix and industry. We have to be fair. There are lots of people working on this space. But if you can make the front end workspace more attractive, easier to use, easier to navigate, even if I've got old clunky stuff in the background, for me as a user, you can give me back 15, 20, 30 minutes a day, an hour a day. That's real productivity. Look, if you're paying me $100 an hour and you save me an hour a day, you've just made $100 every day that I'm working at that company. That sounds like a lot, but there are people who make that kind of money or even a 50 or $25 that all adds up. And so what we're really doing is trying to move into an environment where if I can make you more productive by making things easier for you to navigate and getting in and out of applications more quickly, getting information to me more quickly, which makes the overall organization more productive because I'm sharing information with you, then that's a real win-win. And that's where I think Citrix is really trying to position itself and doing a fairly good job of doing that. Clearly they don't have all of the components yet, but then no one does. This is an ongoing process. So employee experience is table stakes for any business. As we look at the modern workforce, it's highly distributed. It's composed of five different generations who have varying expertise with technology. It is also demanding because we're all consumers and so we have this expectation or this, yeah, I'd say expectation that I want to be able to go in and have this personalized experience. I don't want to have to become an expert in Salesforce because I might need to understand, can I talk to that customer and ask them to be a reference? Go in and sell. How much time are you going to take? But this personalization is becoming more and more critical as we see this influence from the consumer side. With some of the things that you heard today from Citrix, what are your thoughts on how they're going to be able to improve that more personalized employee experience? So people think of personalization, I think sometimes too narrowly. For some people, personalization is, you know, I get my phone out and I have the apps that I want on my phone and that's personalization. I think of it a little bit differently. We need to extend personalization. When I'm at work, what I want is not just the apps I want, clearly I want those, right? But also the ability to get help with those apps as I need it, right? And so where Citrix is going is trying to put intelligence into the system so that when I'm interacting with backend solutions or my neighbors or with teams, collaboration, I get the assistance I need to make it easier for me to do that work. It's not just the apps, it's also help with the apps. And if we can do that, that's really what we want. We go, you know, if I have a problem with my laptop, I'm going to come to you and say, hey, you did this yesterday, what was the result? Can you help me for five minutes? Five minutes is never five minutes. It's usually an hour and a half, but still, I'll come to you. Why can't I have an app on my desk that does the same thing? I'm having trouble, help me, fix it. Let me know what I'm doing wrong or let me know how I can do it better. And that's where Citrix is trying to go with the analytics that they've got in place, which is huge. I think they're underplaying that because I think the whole analytics space in making things easier for people to use because understanding where my problems are is huge and that's going to pick up. The notion of having a nice, I was going to say pretty, pretty, might not be the right word, but attractive at least, workspace for me to go in doesn't get me frustrated. Frustration is a killer on productivity, as everyone knows. There are examples, I've heard multiple people telling me now that they go out and hire, especially with millennials, to go out and hire 20 or 30 new employees and half of them quit within a week because their systems are so bad that they get so frustrated they're not going to work there. So the notion of having a modern workspace where I get the applications I need, I get the assistance I need because of the analytics at the backend telling the assistance what I need and making it easier for me to do it and then allowing me to be productive, not just for myself, but for the organization, is where we all need to go and I think Citrix is making some real progress going that way. So Jack, we're talking about products that haven't quite been released yet, so I'm trying to get a sense or where's the right build versus buy stage in complexity Citrix should be. You know, I can make an apple pie by going out and picking the apple and making my own crust or I can go by filling or I can just go by end of my pie and stick it in the oven and warm it up. Three very different experiences, three different layers of investment and outcomes, frankly. In this world, I can go hire application developers to write these many apps, to write these customizations, to write these integrations, but I think that's a key into picking the apple and that just simply doesn't scale. But also, while end of my pie is okay every now and again, I want some high-quality. Where do you think Citrix is on the kind of range of build versus buy with this intelligent experience? So build versus buy is a very interesting phenomena and it's interesting because a lot of it has to do with where you think you are right now in the world, right? You know, you mentioned going out and getting developers and building your own, that's all well and good. It doesn't scale and by the way, in today's market, you can't find them to begin with. So you often don't even have a choice. So that's number one. Number two is that there are companies out there that still think for competitive advantage they have to do everything from scratch, like building your pie. Yes, you probably make the best pie in the world, but guess what, sometimes a good enough pie is good enough, right? And if you're in business, sometimes good enough is the only way you survive. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect. 90% is okay too, people can deal with that. So that's the other piece. The third piece of it is from an end user perspective, right? If end users are accustomed to having an interaction in a certain way and then you go out and get developers that come in and do something completely different, which they're apt to do because each will have their own kind of flavor to it, then you just force them to learn one, two, three, four, five different interface interactions. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get frustrated as heck and I'm going to go call the help desk or I'm going to go get my admin and say do this for me, both of which are counterproductive to the company and to me. So it really depends on where you are in the stage of where your company is. I would say build versus buy. It's not a one or a zero. There's lots of shades of gray in between. It's also not all or nothing. So some applications might be built internally. Some you may want to buy externally. Some you may have a hybrid. And the nice thing about where workspaces are going now is that you can plug all of those into the same environment. That's really the ultimate goal is to make it as easy and transparent for the organization as possible and also for the user because the user ultimately is the end consumer. And if it's not good for the end consumer, it's not good for the company either. So delivering this great game changing customer experience for this, as we talked about for this distributed modern workforce that wants to be able to access mobile apps, SaaS apps, web apps from tablet, PC, phone, desktop. Your car, your refrigerator, anything with a screen on. Different refrigerators, wherever you are. But I think, okay, people, we're people and we are the biggest single security threat there is. So in your perspective, how is what Citrix is talking about balancing security as an essential component of this employee experience? So there are a few things. Number one is a lot of companies think that if they limit the end user experience, they're more secure. The truth of the matter is yes, I mean if you don't let me get into an app, I can't steal information or lose it somehow. But I also can't get my work done. So there's a balance between security and privacy, which many companies don't talk about, which is not exactly the same thing. There are two unique things. More and more privacy is becoming as big or bigger an issue than security. But we can get that in a minute. But the notion of security really relates to what I was talking about earlier, which is analytics. If I know what you're supposed to be doing, you're here at Synergy. If someone just got your credentials and logged in from Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or Denver or wherever, I know it's not you. I can shut that thing down very quickly and not have to worry about them stealing information. Also, if I know you're not supposed to be in a certain version of SAP, you're not supposed to be doing some ERP system and you're in it. Again, the analytics tells me that there's something going on. There's something anomalous going on that I need to investigate. So having a system that protects because there's a kind of a front end to everything that's going on in the back end and a realization of what's going on behind that screen gives me a much higher sense of security from a corporate perspective. It's not perfect. There is no such thing as perfect security, but it's a lot better than just letting us kind of do our own thing and putting loading, Symantec, or McAfee or whatever on your PC. And that's where the industry ultimately has to go. That becomes part of the new modern workspace. It's not just about more productive. It's about more secure. It's about more private. It's about not letting information escape that shouldn't be there to begin with. So last question on data gravity because we haven't talked about data and data is probably the most important thing in this topic. The importance of the Azure and Google announcement. The Yodabyte, first time I've heard that term, Yodabyte of data, that data's going to be spread across the world. And this ideal of centralized compute and us being able to present compute into a data center is no longer going to work. The applications are going to be spread all across the world. Whether you see Citrix advancing that discipline of providing apps where they need to be with these relationships. So it's an interesting phenomenon, what we're going through right now. If you look back a couple of decades ago, everything was centralized. People were centralized, they all work in one building. Computing was centralized, it was all in the data center. IT was centralized, it was all working around the servers. The cloud is the opposite direction, although I would argue that the cloud isn't new. Cloud is just timeshare in a different environment. For us old people who remember the old IBM timeshare computers. But everything is becoming distributed. Data is distributed, people are distributed, applications are distributed, networks are distributed, you name it. The key critical factor for companies in keeping them productivity, keeping up the productivity is to make sure that distributed environment doesn't get in the way of doing work. So you've got things like latency. If it takes me, if I'm in, they're having a party behind us. They agree with you. Yes, apparently. If I'm here in Synergy, but I have to work back and my office is near Boston, I can't wait five minutes for information to come back and forth. It was like the old days. Latency now has to be within five microseconds or people get frustrated. So that becomes a network issue. Applications, same way. If I have to go to a data center, the data isn't local to my server here. It has to go to London. I'm not going to wait three minutes for it to come back like we used to for 10 minutes or an hour and a half or come back the next morning. You know, you went to book a flight on an airline. Are you going to wait 30 minutes for them to find you a seat? You're going to go to another airline. So the whole notion of distributed means that it's very different now. Even though it's distributed, everything is local. And by local, keeping it local, it means that you have to have latency below a certain point so that I don't realize that it's distributed or I don't care that it's distributed. Yotabaita data means that we're going to have data everywhere, accessible all the time. And we're going to produce data like crazy. You know, a typical car, autonomous car will produce a gigabyte of data every minute. Hundreds every hour. So the amount of data is going to be fantastic that we have to deal with. Then the question becomes, okay, so I can't personally deal with all this data. It's impossible. I have to have the assistance, the intelligence within the system to go off and make something of that data so that I can actually interact with it in a meaningful fashion. That's where Citrix would like to go. That's where others like to go. They can't do it alone because the problem is just too darn big. But we will get there. Companies will get there eventually. Not all of them perhaps. Only the ones that are going to be successful long-term are going to get there. Well, Jack, I wish we had more time to chat with you. This is, I just feel like going dot, dot, dot, to be continued. And I want to say, coincidence, I don't know. There were two rounds of applause when you talked about latency. There we go. They're just waiting for the bar to open. Taking too long. You think that's what it is? Probably. All right, well, we'll get you over there. Thank you again for joining Keith and me this afternoon. Thank you very much. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.