 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 coming to you from our second day of coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta. We are very pleased to welcome to theCUBE the SVP of AMIA for Citrix, Sharif Sadiq. Nice to have you on theCUBE. Fantastic, thank you very much for having me here. It's great. So we have spoken the last almost two full days here on set with a whole bunch of your executives, customers, analysts, the excitement over not just Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience, but the announcements of deepening partnerships with Microsoft at Google are so exciting. Absolutely, I mean, we are very thrilled with kind of, I was actually talking to David Henshel, our CEO earlier today, and I was going, we just announced so much stuff. I don't really, I'm not sure everybody grasped everything that we announced. So it's exciting times for us, as you said, from an innovation point of view, from a speed to market point of view, and definitely partnerships. Yeah, I would love to hear, I mean, the deepening partnership with Microsoft, the Google announces, the experience, Intelligent Experience, and zero in in this announcement with Microsoft. This is like something that's been pent up demand. The ability to run desktop as a service, Citrix in a cloud, specifically Microsoft, because there's a lot of overlap in partnership. What have customers been more excited about getting this pent up demand and answering for this partnership with Microsoft, or this surprise in the Intelligent Experience, both very exciting announcements? No, I think what we're getting most excitement about is really the Intelligent Workspace, because every customer that I talk to these days has an employee experience project going on. They all call it different things, but it's really focused about that. How can we get our employees to get what they need done as fast as possible? I was talking to customers who are actually starting to measure to the nanosecond, how long does it take an employee to launch app A or app B, et cetera. So that's really the thing that customers are more excited about, the fact that they can give their employees such a beautiful consumer-like experience that guides them through their work is really, customers are seeing it as a game changer for what they can do for their employees. And that's an enabler, what's essential, for to have a great employee experience directly affects your customer experience. Absolutely, and actually what I tell many of our customers, you should look at their employees as your customers, because if your employees are happy, they're going to make your customers happy. And the statistics and the studies recently have been quite staggering about employee experience. You see the Gallup result from a couple of years ago that said companies with engaged employees have 20% higher sales, 21% higher profitability, but the reverse of that was that only 20% of their employees were really engaged, nearly 20% were actively disengaged. So companies that can really flip that dynamic can achieve growth and business results, and as you said, greater, greater customer experience. I'm also really interested in this unique balance when it comes to customer experience and employee experience. You're in the MIA, so there's a great, I think, distrust between big companies, especially big American companies, and data. In order to deliver these experience, you need data. What have been the conversations with your customers as you help to ensure them that Citrix definitely respects their data, GDPR, and all of that, but the exchange of data for value is definitely there. I mean, I think one of the key things is every customer conversation now has a deep analysis of data and the data flows and where they go, and we've taken great steps. So we've, one of the first investments that we made in the cloud was creating a plane in Europe and that's based in Amsterdam, so that we make sure that data is available in Europe within the EU, et cetera. But on top of that, we also don't keep a lot of data in our cloud environments. We just focus on what do we need to make sure that it's the right employee or the right user and that they only get access to the things that they can access to. But it's every customer conversation. They want to understand, tell us exactly which pieces of data do they keep and where do you keep them and how long do you keep them for and all of that. So we've invested a lot of resources into making sure that we comply with all of the different European rules. And as you said, I mean, there's GDPR now that's an umbrella, but in Europe, some countries have some good and, yeah, they go deeper than that, and we make sure that we work with our customers to make sure that we give them every level of comfort around privacy and data privacy. So you talked about the customers being very excited about the intelligent experience, the news, the capabilities, that it's really going to bring the actions to the user. So really what we've heard and felt in the last 24 hours is citrically pivoting towards the general user. But I'd love to get your perspective on AMIA customers influence on the development of the intelligent experience. How vocal have they been? How, especially because if you just even look at compliance and standards alone, there's so many. Talk to us about that feedback loop that your customers and AMIA have had. It's been fascinating. A couple of years ago, I was visiting one of the largest French banks and big part of the conversation, they were actually talking to me about, okay, how are you thinking about virtual assistants in some workplace and kind of how are you going to bring that in? And where does that fit with your focus on giving customers choice? Are you giving us choice on that? How will you integrate that? So customers, as I said, are very, very focused on how to take advantage of that. And the big difference in AMIA, I guess, is always that balance between, okay, how do we make sure that we're continuously to enhance the experience that we provide our users with the capabilities? And at the same time, making sure that we are compliant. However, some of our, the other interesting thing is the speed at which some of the customers themselves changed. Again, I met a particular customer two years ago and they were like, we are in a regulated industry, we are never going to do BYOD, we are never going to allow our users to work from home. And I met the same person 12 months later and it was BYOD is our new standard. We've even allowed our traders to do something, some work from home so that shift in perceptions and actions that the European customers are taking has been phenomenal over the last 18 months. That's a pretty fast turnaround from no BYOD. Everybody needs to be on site too. We have got to deliver an experience our employees need. What do you think were some of the catalysts for shift of that magnitude in the course of 12 months? I think the biggest thing is probably the war for talent if you like among organizations. And everybody is thinking whatever data you look at again, there are employee shortages, there are skills shortages. So with Generation Y and Generation Z coming into workplace, they are very demanding. It's interesting how many customers I say now that one of the questions that employees or potential employees ask when they're coming in is what are the tools that you're going to give me? Can I choose whatever device I want, et cetera. So that's the first thing. The second thing has been things like pragmatic things like costs of real estate and kind of how do we optimize that? And that drives certain things. And if you can get them comfortable around the security and the privacy aspect, then they start focusing on these other business benefits that they can get. But I would say talent attraction is number one. So let's talk about kind of your role, your sales role, as you have AES account executives and SE sales engineers out in the field having these conversations, this is very volatile. I visited this account three months ago, six months ago, and they said no to the, they were at Citrix. They said no to the intelligent workspace. They were, you know, there's no to BYOD. How do you prepare your staff for the volatility in conversation? I think one of the first things other than the staff is I think we have a very unique position around that enabling the customer choice. So because we are definitely very, very much on that, it's going to be hybrid cloud. Customers need to get the choice of deploying the technology in the cloud or on premise, et cetera. So regardless of the customer position, we always have a solution that we can offer. And as long as we are very clear on, okay, if you go this option, these are some of the capabilities you're going to miss about. So that enables a continuous conversation with the customer. However, the other thing that we are driving with our team is really focus on the business outcomes that the customer is driving for. And as you focus on that, then you can get customers to change their view, but just make sure the other thing is we want all our employees to really understand deeply the security and privacy concerns that the customers have and be able to respond to these. Because once we, in here, actually yesterday, we had a meeting with one of the large European telcos. And the meeting started with, okay, we're not going to do cloud, et cetera. And once we explained to them, okay, let's walk you through our data flow. Let's walk you through what we keep. And then we, ah, we didn't realize it was like this. Then maybe they didn't say, yes, we're going to go for it straight away, but it opened the conversation. And that's the key of what we need our teams and sellers. Focus on the customer, focus on the business outcomes. And within those customer conversations, employee experience, we're hearing more and more is being elevated to a C-suite imperative. Are you starting to see more meetings with CIOs, chief people officers, chief marketing officers? Is that opening up opportunities for your sales guys and gals to really educate the executive management team at a company rather than traditionally IT? Yeah, I think absolutely. It's interesting because particularly when we start to talk about the intelligent workspace and saying general purpose and being able to, many of our CIOs can say, that's great, but this is not a decision that I can take on my own if that's what we're talking about. So let's, we have to bring our HR teams into play. We have to bring our business owners into play. And there's now becoming this, let's go together. So they are now becoming opening the doors for us to go and talk to the business leaders because that is what is required to make a decision that impacts every employee, not just a small traction. Wow, so that's a huge cultural shift internally to your sales team. You know, I'm used to engaging Citrix's sales team talking about, well, this VDI capability is available and this product, this isn't available and this product checklist, checklist, checklist. The conversation of shifting to having a business outcome conversation is very different. You know, one day your team may go in and talk to HR, another day they may go in and talk to marketing. It is a skillset beyond any single team. How are you guys adjusting to that business outcome conversation and preparing your team and giving them the tools from an employee experience to go out and have this multitude of conversations? We're doing a number of things. We're doing a lot of training and enablement. So one of the things that we do is we're doing training around talking to business people. And what we do is we actually bring business owners from the customer to educate our team. Sorry, my voice is gone. No problem. What is important for them? What's the priorities? What are the languages that they use? But the other thing that we're actually doing is we're encouraging our teams to talk to their colleagues because we have HR professionals in our organization. We have finance professionals. We have marketing professionals. Go talk to them and bring them to your customers with you because they will really be talking the business language. So these are a couple of the key initiatives that we are doing to enable our teams to have these conversations. That's brilliant. We had a conversation yesterday with your chief people officer, Donna Kimmel, kind of just about that in terms of looking at the employee experience, not just as the apps I'm interacting with to do my job, but starting up the chain to even recruiting and needing to have the right, I can even think of a job description that's attractive. But like you were saying, and I've been doing this to some of my clients, what kind of tools am I going to have? Can I bring my own tools? So the employee experience kind of starts up the chain of you more so than I thought. I kind of really narrowly focused it on once I'm on board and the onboarding process. And then getting to making sure that that seamless and me knowing beforehand as a new employee, these are the tools that you're going to have. And knowing that a company, like what Citrix is doing with intelligent experience, is going to be able to look at my behavior and my interaction with the different applications and help tailor that experience is game changing because the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. They are inextricably linked. We all know Discord employees can be, especially with social media these days, very vocal and very impactful and wanting them to be impactful in the best way possible. So really smart to hear that you're bringing in more of your line of business leaders to articulate that value just makes perfect sense. Yeah, and it's actually broadening the horizon of everybody because I mean, we've told our HR people and you need to be able to talk about our technology and how it enables you to do your best work. And at the same time through these interactions, our sales teams who kind of, as you've said, come more from a, we understand the technology background are learning about all of these different parts of the business and it's even driving more closer working relationships within our own organization as well. So it's benefiting every aspect of what we do. I can see that. And also, I mean, you know, we've talked to so many companies and one of the challenges that they have that they probably don't even address very often is how many of our people that work for us can actually articulate what it is we do and the impact that we have to customers. The voice of the customer is so potent. We've talked with all three of the Innovation Award finalists, all different industries, but all making huge strides to make that experience for end-user employees and customers so much better. So even just having those three examples alone. Two of them are from Europe, by the way. Yes, yes. Shoders and Zed, we spoke with them. Yes, but it's really, that's it, I would think a differentiator even from Donna Kimmel's perspective of attracting talent because people understand and are able to articulate the value as Citrix employee of this is what we do. We use our own stuff and let me tell you how much more efficient and easy it's made in my life. And we've also done something else as well, which is now whenever we come up with a new offering in the market or a new capability in our product, we actually now ask our teams to certify themselves that they can tell the story. And what we do is we say you get one of your colleagues to certify. So you go and you pitch the story to employee and if they said it's good enough then you'll get certified and that's becoming a requirement. So we are doing so many things to make sure that everybody in the business is capable of telling the story and articulating it from a customer perspective not from a Citrix out perspective. I think we've definitely heard that articulated very well over the last few days. Shuri, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on the queue this afternoon. Very cool that two of those three finalists are from Amia. I'm very excited about that. We'll be excited to hear tomorrow who the winner is. Looking forward to that. Thank you very much for your time. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.