Enginerring Spin Podcast Ep 4 Featuring George Kuruvilla

We've had a number of guests, and I don't want to downplay the importance of the guests that we've had in the past, but by far, I have never seen Jeremy as excited about a guest as he is having George Kuruvilla on. Let's get started with this. George, I'm going to throw a date at you real quick. August 13th, 2015. That date sound familiar to you?

No. What, what's, what's special about that day? I have no idea.

Special to me, because this is when I was introduced to George Kuruvilla's singing ability, which, uh, this is in New Orleans. And, uh, what this picture doesn't tell— obviously, I was, I was trying to remember the song you were singing, but the background, I can tell.

Happy, Happy. Yeah.

And, uh, this guy here was in Classic New Orleans form. He was your biggest fan. And I have another picture where this guy finally, I think he passes out and you're staring at him like you, I guess like you just won a cricket match. So, so Jeremy, I'm gonna throw it over to you on this. You wanna do the panic buy stuff?

Yeah, yeah. So this is a fun question, George. We ask everyone this. But of course, when this COVID thing kicked off, everyone was panic buying toilet paper. So it's no fun to ask, you know, what have you been panic buying, or I should say compulsive buying, because if toilet paper is not on the list, then you're not a human. But is there something else in the grocery store when you're there that you're like, man, I don't know if we have enough, I don't know if we have too many, but by golly, I'm gonna buy that? What's on your list?

So I've not been going to the grocery store. It's all been Instacart, but I'd say that in terms of change or something that I'm consuming a whole lot of frozen pancakes, it seems like that's my go-to item these days in terms of breakfast.

Oh, that's funny.

Plus it seems to keep the kids happy.

Yeah.

That's actually a great idea. I mean, we've got Eggos, but not a lot, but pancakes I could get behind that. For sure.

Yeah, we— Leah makes, uh, Leah's a tremendous cook. She made a whole batch of homemade pancakes and we freeze them, a little bit of wax paper and just throw them in the, uh— So the past couple weeks I haven't participated in what I've been buying, um, because it's always— past weeks before that was always beer, like beer and wine. I have that come to the house continually. Um, but today, I don't know if you can see in the background, um, I was driving around and the piñata place by me has piñata coronaviruses. I got back, I was like, "Leah, I need some cash." She goes, "What do you need cash for?" I was like, "I'm gonna go buy this coronavirus piñata." She goes, "You don't need it." I was like, "I know, but I want it." So, kinda goes back to that, to the making a decision on my own and then asking for forgiveness later.

Did that come with the corona boxes on it?

Yeah, it's all on there. Some of them had graduation hats on them. Obviously there's a combo package you can get with this, and you can probably guess what the other piñata is that goes with coronavirus. You want to guess?

You've got whatever the combo package— oh, unbelievable. That is fantastic.

So you get Corona and Trump. So I thought it was funny, so I had to pick it. I don't know what we're going to do with it yet.

Oh, that's great.

So George, the last thing I had, when Jeremy and I were talking yesterday, you are the, so there's a best practices that we do for new hires and new SEs, and one of them is know your network, grow outside your network, and this kind of segues into the topics that we have going on later, but I remember distinctly when I first started here, or you first started, and we're at an event and Mark Nolan comes over and he goes, who do you know outside your team? I was like, not a whole lot of people. He goes, go talk to that guy over there. And it was George Kuruvilla. And so that was my first interaction with George. And George, you can see in the background right now, I may have put this up there on purpose, some of this that I'm working on. George actually is the spark that got me back into art.

And George—

yeah, man, we were in Vegas and you were telling me about what you did on the side. And I was like, man, I'd love to do this. And what I did, as soon as I got back from that trip, I signed up for a ceramics class. So thanks to you, I have 50 really ugly coffee mugs. And yeah, it's a really bad— don't even work, some of them leak.

Um, but you're George—

what I'm getting at is you're my inspiration.

I'm glad I could do some good in this world.

Oh, that is fantastic.

That's awesome.

So I guess that was 7 years ago. We'll segue into the topics. I know Jeremy's got a couple of other things that he wants to bring up just to get to know you a little bit. But 7 years as a solution strategist, and I guess I'm thinking of the movie Office Space now. What do you, what would you say you do here?

You know, I was thinking about this the other day, right? So if you look at my background prior to Citrix, right? So I was, I've never done any pre-sales. Roles prior to Citrix. Citrix was my first stint. I was a deep techie, always loved tech, you know, a good chunk of that was Citrix, so that was kind of my passion. And then coming in, it was a whole new world. So some of the stuff that you just talked about, Blake, kind of was my way of trying to figure out how I can kind of broaden my horizon and go beyond tech and kind of get better at the role that I'm moving into, right? How do I create conversations and You know, it was a totally new challenge for me, right? So, and I would say it took a good year, year and a half to get into the role. But I think what's been my key driver is I really enjoy my job, right? So, and then that's one. The second thing is the fact that I don't stick to boundaries, right? So like, you know, I don't look at a job description and say that that's what I'm doing. That's never been me. So it's more like I'm always looking for opportunities and if I find something or I, you know, I will go do it, right? So it's not like I'm going to ask for permission. I'm just— and I'll find it. I'll find the problem. I'll try to find a solution to the problem, and I'll move forward. So that's kind of been my mantra at Citrix. So SE, you know, from SE, as an SE, I got lots of opportunities to look at what, what was done and what things, you know, how things can improve. I suggested that. I incorporated some of that. Yeah, that helped me take up some new roles, and I think over time, um, helped me define some new roles, which I like too, right? So, you know, if you look at the DSE role and how it is today compared to the first DSE that's kind of developed with me doing the central thing, and now we've got the others, right? And now same thing with the strategist role. I think if you look at the strategist role and how it was initially defined and how it's being done in some other regions versus what we're doing here, it's a little different, right? So it's just, I mean, I think the bottom line is if, you know, like when you are doing a job, if you truly love that job, you will find ways to make it better for yourself and also make it better for others, for the people that follow. And that's really what I've been trying to do.

Yeah, I was just looking through the list of things in the job description, you know, being involved in key accounts globally, you're partnering with the sales teams and doing strategy, status of business value, the Citrix vision, just evangelization. And, you know, we get requests from you to get feedback around just emerging products, you know, things we need to know, and you're doing things with the C-suite. I'm like, man, George is all over the place. And so, uh, you know, it sounds pretty exciting, but, you know, looking at all— not necessarily that list of things, but, you know, what really excites you? You've been in this role for what, a year now? Year and a half, I want to say.

I'd say a year and— year and 4 months, roughly.

Yeah. So what excites you the most?

Yeah, so I would say the first year was more tied to that description of the role, right? So solution strategy, which is, uh, I would say a blend of— I did a blend of, um, key account engagement and product management for the most part, right? I'd say 70-80% account focused, 20-25%, uh, PM, and 5% of the rest. That was kind of how it was. But this year the roles evolved quite a bit, right? So now if you look at my, uh, split I don't, you know, I don't call myself a solution strategist anymore. I call myself a pre-sales strategist. And the reason I say that is for this reason, right? I spent a fourth of my time on product management. So I work extensively with PMs, whether that's collecting feedback from the— so I want PMs to be more data-driven, right? So that's why I've been trying to keep this monthly cadence with PMs, but I'm trying to encourage some of our SMEs to participate and then help the PMs make better decisions. And a couple of PMs drove that, were successful with that, and now that's being adopted across the PM organization. So that's one aspect of it, but I also drive things like white glove programs and whatnot. So that's the PM side. I'd say 25 to 30% of my time is also spent on customer, customer engagement. So that's all the executive accounts. So that goes on as normal, no different from before. So I don't want to elaborate into that, but main difference is that now it's more C-suite engagement, you know, more strategic discussions as opposed to deep down tech anymore, although I still have a lab and I muck around with it now and then. But the other aspect to that is building new programs. So over the last 6 to 8 months, if you look at our team, there's been so much change. So we've got value engineering, which is something that Mark and I helped kickstart here. We've got a team of roughly 10 folks now. I mean, you know, and that's all happened over the past less than a year, right? I mean, I'd say less than 8 months, I think. And we've got a strategic advisory in place. We've got all these new, you know, methodologies that we are trying to incorporate that you're going to, you know, see moving forward as well in terms of how do you incorporate design thinking into our pre-sales motion such that it helps with this whole concept of value selling? And how do you take advantage of value engineering? All of these things are new concepts that will hopefully make that pre-sales process even better. So that's another aspect, the new initiatives that we're working on, which I enjoy a lot. And the fourth is around just presales enablement. So I work with JP's team a whole lot now. So whether that's just looking at the content that's being produced, things like our monthly training call and things, you know, training agendas, and then also the tools that are being used. So like, for instance, the Teams pilot, some of the new collaboration tools we're looking at. I'm engaged in that stuff too, and it's now, it's more global than just America. So right now I work with EMEA, APJ, and America as well.

So George, what I'm hearing is that you typically work just barely 40 hours a week. There's a lot of stuff you got going on. I like the field feedback directly to the PMs as well, because I feel like, you know, the first part of my career here was PM driving the message down and us trying to figure out how to make it work. And, uh, you know, I think what we're seeing, especially coming out of, out of this year, is that the field is driving really fast innovation and changes, even, uh, to the point— I guess we'll go into the analytics conversation now. You know, the analytics use cases, I, I think the field is providing, you know, a level of creativity and imagination that was beyond what the PMs even suspected that analytics were going to be valuable for. So I guess with that, from a product-specific side, the PMs that you're working with right now, you know, talk a little bit about some of the cutting-edge stuff that we have, analytics, you know, let's start there.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned analytics because I think analytics is kind of the poster child for how the engagement needs to be. Sameer was one of the first PMs to really, you know, adopt this process of engaging the field significantly, maintaining a cadence, and all Samir and Matt, I should say, and also engaging with our customers, right? Like taking our feedback seriously. So I think, and I think what drove that is because he was asked to take on Director and he was in charge of something totally different and he really needed to rely on the feedback, right? So, but, and so you can kind of see the benefits of that in the product, right? If you look at Director and how that evolved and how the roadmap was influenced based on all of all of what we were providing them or what our customers were providing them. The product, you know, is one of our big successes, right? In terms of the feature parity and how things improved there. Same thing goes for analytics. I would say that now Sameer owns both security and performance analytics, you know, so that, you know, Sameer and Matt and Pones all work together. And, you know, again, they're being very, very proactive in terms of giving us visibility into what they're thinking 6 to 12 months down. And then asking us for our feedback, right? So I think performance analytics, I mean, security analytics, the vision was always great. The problem was in terms of the vision versus execution, there were some gaps, and I think we're getting a lot better at it. If you look at the numbers, I think last quarter, last quarter was a record quarter for analytics as a whole. I think we closed close to $1 million in business, which for a product that pretty much just launched, that's pretty impressive. So it's clear that customers are slowly embracing the solution. And if you look at the vision for the product too, right, so they're talking about essentially once Samir took on security analytics, the first thing he was trying to determine is where should effort be invested that adoption— that's going to drive adoption immediately. And I think what he quickly realized is security analytics when tied to CVAD is probably our low-hanging fruit. So that's where he is making his investments. And I think that's the right strategy. As far as performance analytics, I think it's again a no-brainer, right? Any customer conversation that we have, the idea resonates with the customer. Now obviously, in terms of does it really displace a ControlUp or an EG innovation? Not yet, right? But I think the vision is right. Now we have to add more things in terms of remediation and like, you know, making the problems kind of front and center when the user logs into the dashboard. Those are all areas where we can improve, but I feel like we're on the right path there as well. So analytics is definitely exciting, but outside of analytics, I mean, the obvious one that everyone will talk about is Workspace Intelligence and microapps. So yeah, I mean, again, great vision. I think very important in our future, right? If you're truly going to be— if you're truly going to differentiate ourselves from the competition, that has to be a hit. And the way that becomes a hit is by building that platform and making it accessible to the ecosystem, and the ecosystem buys into a concept and you have like an app store of some sort that our customers and end users can consume from. And I think the virtual hackathon and Converge were all steps in that direction. If you see, you know, even on the last training call, if you look at some of the ideas that Steve Wilson shared, even the— I thought the, the PVS idea that he shared where a partner of ours who has no background in coding has some PowerShell scripts, uses some sort of a platform that generates APIs and was able to get, you know, an image update microapp tied into Workspace. I think that's so cool, right? That kind of shows you the, you know, what's possible if more and more of our ecosystem members adopt the solution. So that's very, very promising as well. So I mean, I'd say those are the two big ones to me. Yeah, but obviously there's, uh, I'm excited about Workspace security as well. In terms of combining SIEM and access control. I think that whole web and SaaS play is again something that as customers, as this app ecosystem evolves, and there's no doubt that customers are moving from a traditional monolithic app approach to something totally different. And I think Workspace Security has a big part to play, especially as remote work becomes more of the norm, right? We all know that moving forward, people are going to work 2 or 3 days from home, right? I mean, it's just gonna happen for operational reasons. And so that's another big bet.

George, you're dropping some knowledge here.

No kidding.

It looks like you're firing up to respond here, man.

You know, analytics is— so we had Larry Sweeney on last week, by the way, and just in the commercial team alone, you know, we asked him where we're seeing the biggest traction, and we asked him what technology should we really spend some extra cycles learning and understanding and some things like that. And he hit on analytics. You know, he said, man, we've got a dozen opportunities and I'm starting to see those in my teams and opportunities as well where analytics, whether it's security, you know, and we're not just seeing security. I think that's the easy one. Folks understand that, but we're actually starting to see some performance analytics opportunities as well. And what's interesting, and I told Blake this, I go, you know, I feel like sometimes we've got product management when they introduce a new product, They kind of tell us, hey, this is where these use cases probably sit. And I think we focused in on login times, we focused in on really, you know, login times across sites and all those sorts of things. By the way, not a bad thing, but then we started doing POCs and then we had customers turn it on and then they came back to us and told us, this is how we're using it. Here's a good example. On Larry's all-hands last week, or I guess this week, time's flying, we had a customer conversation around they understood that Comcast was dropping connections because performance analytics was showing that the VDAs were going down or folks couldn't connect. You know, we had another, another customer in South Florida who turned on the performance analytics POC and they saw that, oh man, right around the time that Azure was running out of capacity in Europe, they noticed that there were high load times but just in the EMEA region. And when they went to investigate, so I think customers are uncovering some of these opportunities, some of these scenarios, and it becomes, man, I want to hear more of those. Like, how do we socialize that, right? How do we get that word out? So we're just seeing these in commercial. I would love to hear maybe what some of our enterprise peers are hearing or seeing and how some of their customers are using the product as well. So do you have any insight there?

Yeah, so I mean, I know of a few really large, like Partners Healthcare is a huge performance analytics customer. And, you know, I think, you know, they were, they're kind of our poster child for a lot of things, right? So whether it's CVAD or performance analytics, or, I mean, they seem to be on the bleeding edge. And I know that even through the COVID crisis, you know, they were leveraging a lot of our solutions. So I would say that's one of our big customers. Like when you talk about tens of thousands, that's one that, you know, comes to mind. Verizon, I believe, is also a large-scale performance analytics customer. I believe Cigna is in the process of getting onboarded. So there are plenty of examples that we can share. And, you know, in terms of, you know, the trends, you know, like the reasons why people move forward, it's precisely what you said, right? It's basically bubbling up. When you're talking about a really large environment, how do we, like, you know, instead of having to dig through all of the minutia, how can I quickly bubble up my pain points, right? And that's what performance analytics does well, right? Like, very quickly identify, hey, here's the area that I really need to focus on. Here's a group of users that have a certain pain point, or we are seeing a broad theme that we need to address. And then when you click on those users, very quickly determining some common patterns that help you troubleshoot further. And if you want to dig down deeper, you absolutely can as well.

We had this conversation on my team call this morning because I'm trying to conceptualize, you know, how easy is it really, like, in the grand scheme of things? And I know there's some technical caveats as you get a little bit underneath the covers Joe Piper had a good comment. We had 2 wins last week in commercial North Central, and his question was, why did the customer find it valuable? Like, what part of it did they, did they find valuable? And that goes back to the value engineering, you know, uncovering what that is. You know, what I would say continues to be a little bit of confusion, I think we need to figure this out, um, is the confusion around ADM and analytics and how they overlay. And we had Sam Spence on a couple weeks ago, and he did a great job of articulating that Eventually it'll all get there. But I'm curious, George, have you had conversations with the PMs on unifying the solution and maybe a little bit of the roadmap on that?

You know, honestly, I've had this conversation for a while now. I mean, it's— I mean, I saw this confusion coming early on, right? And because the messaging, messaging was from a marketing perspective was conflicting, and you had our teams, the Workspace team going and telling a certain thing. We had the networking team selling something similar but with a different toolset. And I think the solution to the problem is, I mean, it's pretty obvious. Everything has to flow through analytics, right? I mean, you know, that, you know, in terms of how you get there, whether it's ADM or whatnot, that's immaterial. And how, uh, how the products are sold, that's immaterial. But in terms of how the user or how, how the admin consumes it, it has to be one unified platform in my mind. Now the only exception to that is I think there's some value in having, like, if I'm a NetScaler admin, right, or I'm a networking admin, I'm never, you know, maybe I'm my entire time I'm only spending in ADM and, you know, because that's my world, right? So maybe there's some value for that admin in consuming some of that data, like maybe the network level information within that view. So when let's say I get a help desk call and when you're talking about triaging, you know, maybe in my workspace admin looks at analytics my networking admin looks at ADM, but, you know, maybe has different perspectives because in ADM you do get a little bit more depth in terms of the information, right? More along the networking line, whereas in, at least today in analytics, it's a little bit more high level. Now they're planning to get some of the deeper, you know, server retransmits and whatnot, but as of today, it's a little bit more high level. So I think you can argue that perhaps from a networking angle, there's still value keep it separately. But I think the messaging has to be uniform. We cannot have inconsistencies there because it confuses our customers, our sellers as well.

I mean, I get asked the question all the time, especially from the NSSs. It's like, what's the, what's the difference? Like, sounds very similar.

Yeah, no, I agree. And, and, uh, Sameer's aware of it. I'm sure our networking teams are aware of it. They're still trying to figure out how to tackle this.

I know we'll get there. I know we will. And the other thing, when you were talking about the workspace stuff, uh, you mentioned the word possibilities, and that to me is what I find to be the most compelling thing with the intelligence, the creativity aspect of it. We're— we had a conversation or thread going on yesterday about education and K-12, and, uh, my wife uses something called Clever. That's their workspace. Uh, it's not very clever. It's terrible, as a matter of fact. And I was asking her, I was like, how good would it be, or how great would it be to have all your actions that you have to do in the beginning, or your students, the things that they have to do to check off their day virtually, presented them front and center in a workspace that they could then get to everything that they need to do for the day? And she goes, that'd be fantastic. So. Did you give her the pitch?

Blake, did you just give her the pitch?

Yeah, she bought it. How much can I buy? How little can I buy? I was like, well, you can buy one license. I love it.

She knows what we do now, doesn't she?

She does. I was asking her, I was like, can you run down like on a daily basis, just tell me all the applications you use? And the words out of her mouth are Jesus, Jesus Christ, thank you for life again. And she literally, she went Zoom, Teams, Clever, iXL, 50. She got down to a point, I was just like, chug. I was like, all right, I get it. Then she looks at me, she goes, why are you asking me this? I was like, I'm curious, I'm curious. I want to know about you, honey.

Man, so it's, it's interesting, uh, with Intelligent Workspace, with analytics, you know, a lot of these emerging technologies, you know, I have this conversation with my team all the time where we get very excited to the point of frustration almost because We've got this thing that's out there, but man, we want to insert those other things. I mean, you hit on this, George, when you said, you know, with performance analytics, we're not replacing ControlUp right now. We're not replacing some of these tools. But I think when customers hear, or when our teams hear performance, they're thinking, man, all that stuff should be in there. But I mean, I almost quote Sheryl Sandberg on a weekly basis. I'm like, listen, done is better than perfect. You've got to get something out there, get some feedback, and then constantly iterate. What's been very exciting to see is that iteration. As we start to see these things roll out and folks start to use it, we go, "Oh, you know what? That would be helpful. Let's get that feedback to George. Let's get that feedback to PM and we'll start integrating that in." No, exactly.

I think it's important to understand what we're trying to do with performance analytics. We want to be the best when it comes to our stack. We are not trying to replace the EG Innovations and ControlOps as far as the rest of the infrastructure. That's why we have an ecosystem. So, and there's a place for everybody. I mean, we want to be, as far as the workspace goes and the visibility and troubleshooting goes, that's what we are targeting. And I think we have, you know, just looking at the potential with that platform, we have the potential to essentially make it easier for our administrators to get to the bottom of, you know, the cause of issues and troubleshoot it more effectively. And I think, and that's what we should be focusing on. If we go down that that path of when the customer says, oh, does it replace this or that? Then you get trapped. This should not be a feature parity war. We should stick to our message around the Workspace.

Speaking of ecosystem, you bring up a good point, or you bring up the next topic that I have here, and that's the return of VDI. I mean, listen, I love Gabe. This Twitter account right now is bordering on obscene.

Remote PC, remote PC, some more remote.

Good for him.

I love his LinkedIn post, by the way. No, no, did you catch his LinkedIn post? It was basically, after 7 years, my baby's all grown up, was kind of the message. So, you know, he's been the champion for so long. Oh yeah, yeah, you got— I will post it. You got to check it out. It's so good. It's so good.

You know, he was way ahead of the curve, like what, 8 years ahead of the curve when it comes to remote DC.

I was asking somebody yesterday, man, why is he so, is there some kind of profit sharing that I don't know about? Like, why is he so much?

That's funny, somebody asked me the same question this morning. Do we know? I mean, I'm sure he's incentivized for something. But then yeah, George, just real quick, the industry, we saw Cloud Jumper acquisition, We've also seen Nutanix try with frames. VMware is kind of always out there. There's been some announcements this week. Jeremy sent over what they got going on, furloughs.

Oh yeah, they're doing, who, Nutanix? Yeah, they're doing a couple of furloughs. They're doing a week-long, some cost-cutting moves. So I don't know if it's the sales force or what. I don't know if it identifies that, but yeah, they're doing a couple of weeks of furloughs. VMware's freezing pay, you know, so there's, Yep. Interesting thing going on.

I heard this morning that, I heard this morning that Okta is taking all of their travel budget that they had, they're pushing all that towards marketing. So the virtual marketing stuff.

Right.

So, but no, the furlough is happening everywhere. I think even my wife next week, she's on furlough. I think maybe, I think it's better than layoffs, right? Like if they can sort of, you know, reduce some of the operational costs that way, why not? Now in terms of the industry, yes. It's been amazing to see how VDI is cool again. You know, I joke about this, right? Like, you know, all of a sudden Citrix is cool again with all of our legacy, the stuff that we've been talking about forever, right? It's a new hot thing. And all of a sudden we are, you know, bullseye too. Everybody wants to attack us. Like, you talk about CloudJumper, if you look at a lot of the marketing, they're going right at us. Or if you look at iTopia with the, you know, Google Cloud partnership, again, saying— I'm hearing a lot about them now. Apparently the board of directors has Al Montserrat and somebody else. And again, they're going right at us, right? And they're going into our accounts and, you know, attacking us, right? And it's, it's because, you know, I mean, we are, you know, if we have the largest market share and they, you know, we have, you know, they have to attack us if they're going to gain anything, right?

Yeah.

But if you look under the hood, all they are really doing, most of these guys, it's just an RDS overlay, right? Whether it's Itopia or CloudJumper, it's essentially, you know, some management capabilities for RDS. So all the inherent deficiencies that we've been talking about forever with RDS still apply. So that would be pretty easy to debunk once we get past the marketing fluff. As far as VMware, I thought the most interesting news to come out this week was what Microsoft and VMware announced as far as Azure goes, where, you know, I think there used to be a platform called CloudSimple that allowed VMware customers to essentially migrate some of their workloads into Azure through that bare metal architecture running ESX in Azure. And now Microsoft essentially announced a parallel path to that calling, I think it's still called the Azure VMware Solution, but they built a solution, not CloudSimple, their own, that allows customers to essentially use the NSX-T networking architecture and to leverage vSphere to migrate workloads over to Azure. So no, no need for CloudSimple anymore. You can just use native Azure solutions, which makes it interesting right now. You know, it makes it that much more appealing for customers to move workloads to Azure because a lot of times the, the roadblock that we face is the fact that, hey, we've got workflows in place, we've got tools that we use, and the fear of the unknown. And we're kind of getting past that And this is a big blow for AWS because AWS forever claims that, hey, they have this deep partnership with VMware. What they do with VMware is one of a kind. And now Microsoft can argue that, hey, we got the same kind of thing going on. But I heard though that the, the solution was not jointly developed. It was totally Microsoft that built this tool. So that's pretty interesting to me. And I think it's good for us, by the way. I don't think this is a bad thing for us because You know, a lot of our customers that are figuring out what are the initial low-hanging fruit that they can migrate to the public cloud, I think there's a Citrix Cloud with Azure VMware solution story to be told, and hopefully our marketing gets on top of that.

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, so that's been, I mean, that's been kind of Nutanix's story for a while. Like, their XAI framework is really how do you make it easy to move workloads off your on-premise Nutanix up to the cloud, right? And, you know, at some point, VMware's got to figure out how to, to compete there, right? Because, you know, it's the same tooling that Nutanix is using, you know, across clouds, and, you know, VMware needs to do the same thing. So it's just probably more of an infrastructure play. What I always thought was interesting about VMware's approach was, you know, I think a lot of customers in the cloud want to use cloud-native tools. And there was always kind of a, all right, now I'm putting ESX, vSphere in that cloud. Now on the one hand, my VMware engineers can sort of keep using SRM and some of those VMware tools, but what does that cloud team do now? They've got to learn a new set of tools that they weren't necessarily having to do in the past. So this is a very interesting arena to be in.

No, I'm with you. And I think although VMware in terms of where they're going with Project Pacific and using Kubernetes for the future of vCenter, I think it's all the right strategy. That's how they kind of keep their existing footprint. And you can see that the fact that Microsoft goes and builds a tool like that for VMware shows that they believe that this is the way forward.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone is going to go— well, I don't want to say this out loud, I guess I will. I don't think folks are going to deploy Azure Stack on-prem en masse. And so I think if Microsoft wants to get a lot of that on-prem footprint into Azure, that's their endgame. Then I mean, this is a step they got to take. I mean, it makes sense.

It makes the most logical sense. I mean, absolutely. Yeah, footprint. So I've got, I've got two more questions. Yeah, Jeremy, got anything?

I want you to go first because every time I do this, I steal one of your questions.

So we agree on the questions we're going to talk about beforehand. One of them is good.

It's one of them's not.

Yeah, I don't think so. Like, uh, One I just came up with, so it might not work, but we'll go with it. So you mentioned earlier, George, techie. What's the coolest tech that you have right now? You can see behind Jeremy right now. Oh gosh, Nano Leaves.

Let me— yeah, boys, you know who it was. So it was, uh, this is how it worked. We were on a phone call with Chris Voce.

Yeah, that's it.

And Rob Elliott. And so we're having this phone call and Chris didn't even have his Nano Leaves on, and he's just got them sitting behind him. And Rob stops the conversation and goes, Is that a Nanoleaf? That was, by the way, that's my best Robin Presson. So right now I've just got it circulating colors, but if I hit, um, if I— let's move this around. Oh, this is Nightclub. This is one of my favorites.

If you—

oh, that's awesome. Little sound, little sound. And also if the dog barks too, so when Amazon shows up, that's sort of my alarm. It just lights up. But yeah, no, it's awesome.

Yeah, George, I follow you on the social webs, social interwebs, and I've seen you've done some cool stuff in your office. Your daughter's playing piano, got the golden doodle running around.

By the way, we're a little disappointed. Blake and I both have our pimped-out microphones here, and we've seen your home stage, your little rig. You've got an impressive one on your own.

I can maybe show you. It's like, that's the other side of it, which has got my home rig, but I don't use that for work generally. But yeah, in terms of cool things I'm working on, I actually blogged about something the other day. So my latest fascination has been trying to figure out, and I get, go down these paths often. So I'm trying to figure out how I can use my SLR and my Sony RX100 as a webcam, right? And I want to do that without spending a penny, right? So I went down that path and I used some open source tools and I was able to get it to work. So I blogged about it. So, you know, you can use OBS Studio and Camtasia on Mac and PC to essentially make that work. And I actually tested it with PJ. So I, you know, my podcast, right? So it's Unplugged. So I had, I was interviewing PJ the other day and I tried using it for Of course, 5 minutes in, the damn thing crashed.

You know, Jeremy, I forgot about that. We were going to get on this call and I was going to pretend like you were coming to our video/podcast and you were going to pretend we were going to yours.

Yeah, well, man, welcome George!

Hey, welcome Blake!

Wait, is this, is this podcast inception? What's going on?

We had Larry Sweeney on last week and he— I asked him a question and he turned around and goes, I want to know what you think. And I was like, I'm, I'm the host here. You know what he told me?

That's not allowed.

I'm the boss.

No, a lot, a lot. I mean, if I start talking about all the geekiness, it'll never end. But there's a lot of side projects, you know, on the music side. Yeah, photography. So I mean, that's kind of how I remain same, same, right? I like to do Till 5:30, 6 is work. After 6 is my creative time.

And George, I'm gonna throw something out there right now, and I think you got to work on this. And if you need somebody to collaborate with, I can play one or two songs on my piano as well.

There you go.

Yeah, I can do Biz Markie. You've got what I need. So if you want to do like a rap, bro, I can help you out with that.

And if you need someone in the rhythm section, I can hook you up with at least Oh, there you go. I can hook you up with at least the bass or the sticks, but not both at the same time. This is still a work in progress.

I think we need to have a new configuration for Citrox with some of you guys in there.

No, I'm gonna get on stage and do cowbell and maybe, maybe a couple more rap songs. I might be able to do that, but, uh, so Jeremy, I You're gonna have to edit this video down. Last week we were on for 85 minutes, George.

We're trying to keep it down. We try to keep it to 30 minutes, but Blake had to— there's some stuff on the cutting room floor.

Yeah, it's hard. Ah, it is to edit it. But the last one, I think, Jeremy, you want to take the predicting the future?

Yeah, predict the future. Um, you know, what are we looking at next? Um, we talking Citrix or we talking industry, Blake?

Whatever you guys want. George?

Yeah, so I think, um, I think from an industry perspective, I think the big move is the fact that, uh, remote work is here to stay, right? I think that's gonna be— I mean, that's what I'm most excited about, and I'm just, uh, because it presents such a huge opportunity for us, right? So, you know, as much as we talk about the crisis phase and extended remote work, there's a truth to that, right? I mean, as more and more users work from home, workspace becomes that much more important, and I'm excited about that. So from an industry perspective, that's what I see. I expect more work from home as a result, maybe cutting short on real estate and whatnot, and then maybe talent coming from all over the globe, right? It's going to be a little different. All the opportunities that opens up, that's what I'm excited about. Now, as far as Citrix goes, I think our future is absolutely in the workspace, and I think we touched on this earlier, right? It's about, it's not us developing everything. We build a really sound platform, and I'm looking forward to more and more of our ecosystem buying into that vision and our Citrix developer side just growing exponentially at some point. And then, Blake, like your wife, education, goes into this ecosystem and says, hey, I want this, this, and this connectors and microapps. She, you know, that whole onboarding process being a lot simpler, the whole onboarding into Workspace becoming more, you know, like more transactional. That's where I see this going. And I see more of a, both the consumer side to this and also the enterprise side to this. That's, I think that's what I want to see this go.

You know, that's interesting. You know, for Leah, the biggest benefit she would get is this organization. The education vertical is such a mess. Yeah, because they have so much stuff just sitting around. Um, and George, we talked about it the past couple weeks on the, on, on this, uh, session about the relevancy, right? We're up there with like the top 5 brands. There's a website that Larry sent out, and, you know, we're up there with like Amazon, Kellogg, and some of the big companies that are out there. And then just last week, seeing Citrix of Billions. I don't know if you guys watch Billions. Some terrible people on that show, but it's cool seeing what's on there. Actually, Tarkin was on the CGC call yesterday, CGC leaders call, and he gave me a little bit of behind the scenes. I don't know if you noticed, but they actually changed the color to have like the, the, uh, I forget what it's called, it's like a black top, uh, for the email or the notification that came up so it would stand out more. So they actually had to recolor theme that so it would be good for TV. I think Adam worked on that, but yeah, good stuff, man. I'm with you. I think work from home is gonna be interesting. All the stats that are going on around that right now.

Yeah. And it's kind of interesting for me too, 'cause my wife is kind of the, like all the bad examples we talk about, that's my wife, right? So box, VMware, VPN, you know, just a horrible user experience. Yeah, he's an engineer trying to upload CAD files and she's like, oh my gosh, the wheels spin.

You're like, sweetheart, sweetheart, just give me a name, I'll, I'll make the phone call, just give me a name, we'll get this fixed.

You know, Swanny said the same thing. Swanny's wife was having to work remote. I forget what she was using, but it was a terrible experience. And yeah, I think another thing too, I'm guilty of this, is I take for granted how cool the products we are, like we have, are, and the innovation that we've had and how long we've been doing— like the work from home, it was nothing for me. Like, Mike The biggest thing for me working from home now is I've got Scarlett upstairs on Zoom sometimes, you know, a lot of the bandwidth is being constrained. I tried to do a Peloton ride yesterday in the afternoon. I was PRing, man. I was tearing it up. And then slow network connectivity.

SD-WAN, man. I'm not—

yeah, I need it. I need the 100 LTE in my house right now.

I love it. I love it.

All right, Jeremy, I'm gonna throw it over to you on this. Um, because I don't want to talk about Peloton anymore, even though I just did. Okay, listen, it's a pyramid scheme. Listen, it's a pyramid scheme, and, uh, Swanee's at the top. I learned all my ways from him. His biggest line is this, and I used it on Jeremy yesterday, because your wife will use the bike more than you. So in your inbox, as soon as this call is over, you're both going to get a registration or a referral link. For me.

By the way, I've already gotten it. Here's how it starts: the Peloton bike has transformed how I work out, and I'd love to share it with you.

But what I was trying to do with Unplugged was I wanted to expose, uh, you know, people in certain parts of the organization with, uh, you know, folks in different parts of the organization. Yeah. And I wanted to keep it completely non-technical. So I don't want technology as far as possible.

You want to see perspectives. Yeah.

So I want it to be more about, uh, uh, you know, like a little bit on current issues, so maybe COVID or whatnot, right? So you kick it off there, but very quickly pivot to career, you know, what got them to where they are, their role at Citrix, uh, you know, their teams, you know, what, you know, characteristics that they look for in team members, things like that, you know. More, more around the career and professional development, and then I go on to the personal side.

One more thing, I'm curious, your conversation with PJ, what'd you guys talk about?

So in the case of PJ, I didn't know that he's got— he's a, you know, he doesn't say he's one, but he's a musician. So he's got a whole room of instruments that he plays.

Uh, really?

Yeah, he plays the accordion and piano and I don't know what else, like. But he says that after work he turns his computer off and he goes to that room and he plays music. I told him when we go to events, the two things I look forward to— Chris Flex shirt and PJ shoes.

Like, where do you get your shoes?

And he's like, you know, he lives in Seattle, but he'll go to, um, you know, Vancouver to get shoes. He'll go to these small stores. He says when he goes— whenever he goes on a trip, he'll try to find these mom-and-pop shops, find unique shoes. Like, the latest one he said was from Turkey.

Oh boy, Blake, you can always tell when Blake's up to something because he gets quiet and looks around.

Oh yeah, listen, I want to— if I die and I'm reincarnated, I want to be a weatherman in San Diego.

Is that your favorite sport, George? Are you a cricket guy first?

So I'd say growing up, you know, as most Indians, You know, I played a lot of cricket. I played it at the university level. So it was cricket and ping pong. Those are the two that I spent a lot of time playing.

All right, no, no, don't challenge George at cricket or ping pong.

That's right.

You know what Swati told me he learned most about cricket? How to cuss and leave poo dry.

Because I think in his Iowa league, he plays with a lot of Indians. Australians and Indians cuss a lot when they play cricket.

Yeah, I actually witnessed this in a cab one time. Swanny threw it out and the driver was like, wow.

I could see him doing that so deadpan too, just throwing something out.

He's got the best way. Give it away, give it away, give it away now. One more thing on the crazy gear. Have y'all seen that the US military, US government has declassified and validated the existence of UFOs.

I did see that.

So let me ask you this though, right? So they've declassified UFOs, but they've really gotten into what they could be as much as it's just things that appear in the sky. Yeah, we don't know what they are.

Yeah, here's what I know about that. Uh, they haven't said what it couldn't be either.

The truth is out there.

I miss the human touch, guys. I miss it.

The human touch.