 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I have been geeking out for two full days now. And speaking of geeking out, I think it's going to continue because Christian Riley is here back on theCUBE, the Vice President and CTO of Citrix Christian. Welcome back. Thank you so much, it's been a while. It has. It really has. Well, we hope to make it fun. We have had, like I said, such great conversations with your executives, customers, analysts, everybody is so excited about this obvious pivot that Citrix is making towards the general user. The power users being that 1%, and what you guys started off yesterday showing resonates with everybody. I get it. I want my work day to be far more productive. I want apps and actions brought to me so I can actually get down to the business of what I was hired to do. And we also are hearing over and over again how employee experience is now elevated to a C-suite imperative that is so critical because it directly affects the customer experience. Yeah, it's super exciting, isn't it? You know, it's great to watch it all come to life because we've been working on this for a number of years behind the scenes, and it's just so great to see all the effort that goes in come out on the big stage. And you're right. I mean, we've been very calculated about the approach here. We do a lot of research in trying to understand these problems and these challenges. And quite frankly, customers are looking for more innovation from Citrix, looking for better ways to work. And I think we had a very privileged position in being so important in customer application delivery over the decades that Citrix has been around. And so the move, even though it seems like it's a quantum leap, that's actually a really natural thing for us to go do because we've won the trust over three decades of being the vendor to deliver mission critical apps. So this is just an extension of that. But yeah, it's super exciting. Yeah, so we've talked about that for the past couple of days. Citrix is a verb within IT. You know, I'm going to Citrix into the application or is that on Citrix? Or is it Citrix yet? It is, we commonly understand what it means to be Citrix. But that's something that you guys have built over 30 years. And I think what's really interesting, Dana Garner, we had him on earlier, he said Citrix is much too modest. There should be a Citrix inside for so many SaaS offerings so that end users, end users understand that the foundational technology for this SaaS service, whether it's some payroll software, some other third-party healthcare solution, is bringing brought to you the application, an underlying application didn't have to be rewritten because of Citrix. I think we're at another foundational moment now. What you guys announced yesterday was foundational. I tweeted out as David was talking and saying, you know what, Citrix is going to be the future of work. Like, you know what, without doing automation, Citrix can't possibly be the future of work. And he announced it. But I want to try and get you to get this in one answer, hopefully, because it's big. You've been working on this for years. It shows it's natural for Citrix to say that they're going to go into the next step of integrating different applications because you've been there already. What's the foundational technology? Because Winframe, back in 1995, was a foundational technology for virtual applications. What's the foundational capability that you're giving businesses today that we're going to look back 20 years from now and say obviously that was the innovation? Yeah, so it's a great question, Keith. I think there's a couple of things really. We talked about it in the keynote extensively yesterday about the analytics piece. So I wouldn't say that analytics is the only thing, but certainly when you think about the way we lined up the analytics conversation around security, performance, and then productivity. So that's the foundational element. And we're going to look back at that in a few years time and realize that we were very privileged to be in the path of user transactions. And the more you're in the path, the more transactions you get, the more transactions you get, the more source data you get, the more source data they get, the more you can feed the machine learning model and the more accurate you can be about delivering the context of the workspace. So I think that's super important. The next bit, of course, would be the acquisition that we made of the Sappho technology back in November of 2018. And I think what you see there in the micro apps and the micro workflows is really that big shift from the version one of the workspace, which was still very much about the traditional applications, traditional desktops, and then bringing together web and SaaS applications. But we sort of always knew that there was a bigger play, which was really to try and sort of, as PJ talked about yesterday, how do we take work and break it down into atomic units? So we don't think about just the application. We think about the why. Why do people use applications? What is it that they do? And if you think about how that plays out with analytics, the more intelligence that we gather, the more intelligent we make the workspace. So I think a couple of things, we'll look back on the Sappho acquisition as a key technology piece, but we'll look back on analytics as maybe the thing that helped to be the flywheel to deliver that intelligence within the workspace environment itself. And the power that that intelligence has to deliver a personalized experience to each user is huge. If we look at the consumerization and the expectations that we all bring to our business lives, we want things to be smart enough to serve up just what I'm looking for, to make my life easier so that intelligence and the analytics has huge implications on being able to help companies use their applications better. If I'm having to go in and learn Salesforce and try to talk them on all these things that as a marketer, I don't need to do, but if I can have technology that's under the covers, under the bonnet, is evaluating that and going to learn, this is all that she needs to do for her role. How much happier am I going to be? How much more productive am I going to be? Game changing. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the most important thing to remember about the whole of the strategy around analytics is it's constantly learning. So it's not like we just do it once. And if you think about where that goes along the term, you know, we're talking about obviously gathering user transaction data that I talked about, that will help us to generate the most valuable micro applications. But then if you think about that a little bit further on, you know, how do we actually then begin to get analytics on the micro apps themselves and even begin to free up more productivity? So there's a continuum here that we see, you know, automation, as you mentioned, will be critical, you know, and if you think about what's happening in the industry in general, you know, robotic process automation has skyrocketed again as organizations look to kind of do exactly what we're talking about, which is to free up the very scarce human capital to work on things that really matter, not on these mundane tasks. And, you know, we talked to lots of customers about this, you know, the notion of how much application do you really use? And, you know, it's been quite common. One of the foundation, I guess, financial components that we talked about, why we did what we did was we looked at enterprise applications that we were delivering through our traditional technologies. And they were really complex for some things that were really actually quite simple. And of course, the Pareto thing holds true there, the 80% of people only want to get something out and 20% of people put something in. So that was obviously a key decision point for us to move ahead with the intelligent workspace, the micro apps that you saw. The other thing that's really interesting actually that we don't really talk about so much is that from a security perspective as well, being able to deliver just a part of the application actually minimizes the entire sort of attack surface, if you like, whether that's for, you know, nefarious employees internally or for true people who want to come in and sort of hack into your systems, the less that we can expose generally, then I think that's better overall, right? So there's actually some other upsides that we don't necessarily talk about in the context of intelligence, but when we talk to CIOs and we talk to the people in the business who really are interested in these technologies and these solutions, then we tend to expand the conversation a little bit into some things that we don't necessarily talk about all the time. Yeah, it's surprising how many questions you guys have answered for me today. I was at SAP Sapphire a couple of weeks ago and they were talking about X data, O data, X data being experience data and this is the output of digital transformation. I was having a really tough time wrapping my head around the concept of X data and I think this is hopefully something you can further along the discussion when I think of just the access that Citrix has to this raw data, maybe the only other company that has more user data or more access to user data would be Microsoft via Windows, but Citrix presents SAP, which 80% of the world's transactions run through is presented via Citrix a good majority of the time. Your CRM solutions and cloud-based options and Salesforce is presented again through Citrix. So you're collecting a ton of data as customers say, okay, what's the account balance out of SAP? Let me put it into this CRM solution, Salesforce. You're capturing that X data. How do you make sense of it? I think is the question, and this is where the AI comes in, from a person looking at the process and they come to Citrix and say, Christian, you guys have the X data. Help us understand how that X data translates into business productivity. How do I personalize the experience for a individual user? Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you an example. CTOs like to have a vision, right? So we'll talk a little bit about the vision. So I give you a relatively straightforward example. So we tend to see use cases around reviews and approvals and those kinds of things, whether it's expense reports or PTO requests, all the things that we've typically shown in the keynotes in the various demos that we've done as we've grown the solution. So here's what we kind of think about. So let's say, for example, that you have an employee, that employee submits expense reports on a fairly frequent basis and they tend to submit them for under $500. You may get to the point where you say, actually, why do I keep approving these? Because my level of trust with the employee is high. The dollar values of the individual reports is relatively low. So why would the system not just handle that and automatically approve them until something was an anomaly? So if one came in that was $750, $1,000, then I would get an alert. So I think when you talk about the X data, absolutely. You know, the interaction with the X data is really where we see the value from the Citrix perspective because we can learn how you actually deal with those notifications and those actions. So if there's an example of a micro application which gives you an expense report from, let's say, SAP concur and you never actually open it, you just click the approve button, then is there a real reason for you to continue to see the opportunity to open it? Because, you know, as I said, the level of trust is high, the dollar value is low, and I can get productivity back that way by actually looking at it from a sort of, why should I actually approve this in the traditional way? I'll let the system take care of it until there's something that exceeds the thresholds that I've learned that you're comfortable with. We're, oh, sorry, Keith, I was going to say, on that front though, where are enterprise companies in terms of letting that control go to the intelligence in the system? I mean, how many times have we all submitted expense reports and maybe some of us like me, go to Starbucks twice on the same day, hey, it happens and you get rejection because it's the exact same dollar amount and it's wasting all these cycles. But where is the appetite and maybe the trust from some of those larger organizations that culturally say somebody in procurement or finance has to click on every single thing and evaluate every single line item? Yeah, so I think the sort of the beauty of what we've built here, certainly with what you saw yesterday, what we've been talking about at the show here, we're not actually changing any existing business rules or business workflow engine components. So I think that's a really interesting point for us to bring up and to make sure that everybody understands. Right now in the version that we're talking about for release later this year, we're actually honoring most of the business rules and the workflows that are in the system of record. So that could be the HR system, the finance system or the ERP system or whatever. So I think from an audit perspective, then we're good on that from that perspective because when we actually submit things back into the system of record from the micro apps, we're doing that on behalf of the user. So the transactions are still valid as if they were coming from the native experience. So I think that's great that we don't mess with any of that because I think the higher we kind of make the hurdles for people to adopt that in the, whether it's cultural or whether it's regulatory, then obviously there's a downside to that. So I think that's a good sort of first pass for us. I would suspect that as we go through this a little bit later though, there's going to be some potentially interesting questions that come up about certainly in highly regulated environments about the legality of a robot or a digital assistant or some kind of ancillary system being able to submit and do things on your behalf. So this is not a GDPR thing, by the way, or anything of that nature. It's more if something was to happen in the system that wasn't intended, who's responsible? Is it the robot or is it the individual that's allowed the robot to work on their behalf? So I think there will be some interesting questions that come up along those lines. But I think in the V1 we're honoring the business rules, we're honoring the business logic, the workflow. And so I'm expecting that most customers will look at this and say, yeah, I kind of get it. And it's more valuable than it is a problem. That's certainly the goal. So let's talk about scale of this new foundational capability yet. Like I can easily see this working inside of your existing set of VDI products. You have visibility into the analytic data, but at some point you're going to have enough data that the VDI isn't needed to create these workflows and these solutions. I can see this actually freeing up desktops for some employees where the only reason why they ever needed a desktop because they had to go into Concur or the time management solution. If I do 40 hours every week for 52 weeks, I don't need to log into a portal to do that. How tied to your existing set of products is this capability? Is this something that from a total addressable market that whether it's a mobile app or mobile first app that you guys can ingest this type of capability into? Yeah, so I mean, as you know, Welky, we've been talking about the death of the PC in the industry for a decade, right? And the reality is that most customers have an application portfolio that's heavily reliant on Windows. Now, having said that, there are obviously cases and we look at sort of some of the, what we call the customer jobs to be done, okay? Which is a Harvard business thing that came from Clayton Christensen and it's a really interesting way of making sure that the innovations that we bring are actually addressing the things that customers need to get done within their own environments. So if you take a use case, let's say it was a field technician. So you're going out, you're going to fix a faulty gas meter or you're going to go out and perform some kind of maintenance work. It's highly likely that you're going to use a mobile device. And so what we showed yesterday with the mobile version of the intelligent experience, what we showed with the workspace assistant, absolutely, I see use cases where we can give them instant productivity, you know, to pull and to push data into the systems of record, where the underlying operating system on the mobile device is kind of academic. But there will certainly be use cases where, you know, VDI or physical windows desktops will be around for a very long time. So I think the value that we have is making sure that all those user transactions go through the workspace one way or another. So that helps us with the analytics piece. But I think if I look a little bit further out, I mean, again, we showed some demos of it yesterday in one of the CTO breakout sessions that we had. The real ultimate goal is to sort of think about the workspace overall as more of an experience that will evolve. It's not necessarily an app. An app is one way to consume it. But we want to build a platform that can consume and be consumed by other things. So whether that's Microsoft Teams that we showed yesterday, whether that becomes Slack, Facebook for work, or whether it's an integrated voice assistant within, you know, an Apple device or a Microsoft device or a Google device or a Samsung device. See, the value of that from a choice perspective is that we then really don't demand what the customers use and ultimately their end users. So I think when we get a little bit further along in the thinking around the platform itself, it opens up endless possibilities to interact with the information you need. And it's not predicated upon any operating system because hopefully we can be ubiquitous. So Citrix has over 400,000 customers worldwide. I think I read 98, 99% of the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100. Intelligent experience goes generally available later on this year. There's some customers in beta. What are you looking forward to as 2019 continues coming off the high that is Citrix Synergy 2019? Well, you know, so like I said at the start here, I've been working on this thing with the, you know, the frankly, the brilliant team that we have here at Citrix for just about three years. So I wouldn't say it was quite stealth, but we've gone through these kind of programmatic changes internally. I'm looking for, I'm most looking forward to when customers understand the power of what we're going to give them with the builder. So the builder again is something we showed yesterday, but you know, you think about the approach that we have is that we're going to obviously help customers to get productive and to get going with the intelligent experience by creating these out of the box, micro apps and micro workflows for many of the most popular SaaS applications. The real big thing I'm looking forward to is when people can actually take the builder that we've developed and give it to their line of business people and say, hey, you can create as many micro apps as you think are necessary within the construct of your business process to enable your people. So that to me is kind of like, they're going to be the ultimate wow when people say, actually I can give this to a person who is capable of creating a pivot table in Microsoft Excel as an example. And they can then actually use the technologies that we provide to create the micro apps and micro workflows for their own part of the business without the help of traditional development. I think that's going to be huge. And I can't wait until we've got the first examples of people who said, hey, you've made my life easier. I can't work without Citrix. Well, businesses can be built on that. The new Excel Citrix builder, the new Excel. I hope so, I hope so. Well, we'll all be excited to be watching with close eyes. Christian, thank you for joining Keith and me on theCUBE at Synergy 2019. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.