Citrix has pioneered ways to make workers more productive for 30 years by enabling remote access to applications before cloud computing existed. Now, Citrix is charting a new future of work that focuses on abstracting productivity above apps, platforms, data and clouds. The goal is to empower, energize and enlighten workers while simplifying and securing anywhere work. Citrix collects data from across clients, applications, files and networks to gain insights using AI/ML that can automate tasks and anticipate needs to guide work and simplify workflows. This positions Citrix to inject intelligence into work and help change how people get their jobs done.

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CEO Henshall on Citrix’s 30-Year
Journey to Make Workers Productive,
IT Stronger, and Partners More Capable
Transcript of a discussion on how Citrix is charting a new future of work that abstracts productivity above
apps, platforms, data, and clouds to empower, energize, and enlighten workers while simplifying and
securing anywhere work across any deployment model.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix Systems.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect. Our next intelligent workspaces discussion explores how for 30
years Citrix has pioneered ways to make workers more productive, IT operators stronger, and a
vast partner ecosystem more capable.
We will now hear how Citrix is by no means resting on its laurels by charting a new future of
work that abstracts productivity above apps, platforms, data, and even clouds. The goal: To
empower, energize, and enlighten disaffected workers while simplifying and securing anywhere
work across any deployment model.
To hear more about Citrix’s evaluation and ambitious next
innovations, I’m very pleased to welcome David Henshall,
President and CEO of Citrix.
David Henshall: Thank you for having me.
Gardner: To me Citrix is unique in that for 30 years it has been
consistently disruptive, driven by vision, and willing to take on
both technology and culture -- which are truly difficult things to
do. And you have done it over and over again.
As Citrix was enabling multiuser remote access -- or cloud
before there was even a word for it -- you knew that changing
technology for delivering apps necessitated change in how users do their jobs. What’s different
now, 30 years later? How has your vision of work further changed from delivery of apps?
Do your best work
Henshall: I think you said it well. For 30 years, we have focused on connecting people and
information on-demand. That has allowed us to let people be productive on their terms. The
fundamental challenge of people is to have access to the tools and resources necessary to get
their jobs done -- or as we describe it, to do their best work.
We look at that as an absolute necessity. It’s one of the things that makes people feel
empowered, feel accomplished, and it allows them to drive better productivity and output. It
Henshall

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allows engagement at the highest levels possible. All of these have been great contributing
factors.
What’s changed? The technology landscape continues to evolve as applications have evolved
over the years – and so have we. You referred to the fact that we’ve reinvented ourselves many
times in the last three decades. All great companies go through the same regeneration against
a common idea, over-and-over again. We are now in what I would describe as the cloud-mobile
era, which has created unprecedented flexibility from the way people used to manage IT.
Everything from new software-as-a-service (SaaS) services are being consumed with much less
effort, all the way to distributed edge services that allow us to compute in new ways that we’ve
never imagined.
And then, of course, on the device side, the choices are frankly nearly infinite. Being able to
support the device of your choice is a critical part of what we do -- and we believe that matters.
Gardner: I was fortunate enough to attend a press conference back in 1995 when Citrix
WinFrame, as it was called at that time, was delivered. The late Citrix cofounder Ed Iacobucci
was leading the press conference. And to me, looking back, that set the stage for things like
desktop as a service (DaaS), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), multi-tenancy, and later SaaS.
We all think of these as major mainstream technologies.
Do you feel that what you’re announcing about the future of work, and of inserting intelligence in
context to what people do at work, will similarly set off a new era in technology? Are we
repeating the past in terms of the scale and magnitude of what you are biting off?
Future productivity goes beyond products
Henshall: The interesting thing about the future is that it keeps changing. Against that
backdrop we are rethinking the way people work. It’s the same general idea about just giving
people the tools to be productive on their terms.
A few years back that was about location, of being able to work outside of a traditional office.
Today more than half the people do not work in a typical corporate headquarters environment.
People are more distributed than ever before.
The challenge we are now trying to solve takes it
another step forward. We think about it from a
productivity standpoint and an engagement template.
The downside of technology is that it does make
everything possible. So therefore the level of complexity
has gone up dramatically. The level of interruptions --
and what we call context shifting -- has gone up
dramatically. And so, we are looking for ways to help
simplify, automate common workflows, and modernize the way people engage with applications.
All of these point toward the same common outcome of, “How do we make people more
productive on their terms?”
We are looking for ways to
help simplify, automate
common workflows, and
modernize the way people
engage with applications.

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Gardner: To solve that problem of location flexibility years ago, Citrix had to deal with the
network, servers, performance and capacity, and latency -- all of which were invisible. End
users didn’t know that it was Citrix behind-the-scenes.
Will people know the Citrix name and associate it with workspaces now that you are elevating
your value above IT?
Henshall: We are solving broader challenges. We have moved gradually over the years from
being a behind-the-scenes infrastructure technology. People have actually used the company’s
name as a verb. “I have Citrixed into my environment,” for example. That will slowly evolve into
still leveraging Citrix as a verb, but meaning something like, “I Citrixed to get my job done.” That
takes on an even broader definition around productivity and simplification, and it allows us more
degrees of freedom.
We are working with ecosystem partners across the
infrastructure landscape, all types of application vendors. We
therefore are a bridge between all of those. It doesn’t mean
we necessarily have to have our name front and center, but
Citrix is still a verb for most people in the way they think about
getting their jobs done.
Gardner: I commend you for that because a lot of companies can’t resist making their name
part-and-parcel of a solution. Perhaps that’s why you’ve been such a good partner over the
years. You’ve been supplying a lot of the workhorses to get jobs done, but without necessarily
having to strut your stuff.
Let’s get back to the issues around worker talent, productivity, and worker user experience. It
seems to me we have lot of the bits and parts for this. We have great apps, great technology,
and cloud distribution. We are seeing interactivity via chatbots, and robotic programming
automation (RPA).
Why do you think being at the middle is the right place to pull this all together? How can Citrix
uniquely help, whereas none of the other individual parts can?
Empower the people, manage the tech
Henshall: It’s a problem they are all focused on solving. So take a SaaS application, for
example. You have applications that are incredibly powerful, best of breed, and they allow for
infinite flexibility. Therein lies part of the challenge. The vast majority of people are not power
users. They are not looking for every single bell and whistle across a workflow. They are looking
for the opportunity to get something done, and it’s usually something fairly simple.
We are designing an interface to help abstract away a lot of complexity from the end user so
they can focus on the task more than the technology itself. It’s an interesting challenge because
so much technology is focused on the tech and how great and powerful and inflexible it is, and
they lose sight of what people are trying to accomplish.
We start by working backward. We start with the end user, understand what they need to be
productive, empowered, and engaged. We let that be a guiding principle behind our roadmap.
Citrix is still a verb for
most people in the way
they think about getting
their jobs done.

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That gives us flexibility to empathize, to understand more about customers and end users more
effectively than if we were building something purely for technology’s sake.
Gardner: For younger workers who have grown up all-digital all the time, they are more
culturally attuned to being proactive. They want to go out and do things with choice. So
culturally, time is on your side.
On the other hand, getting people to change their behaviors can be very challenging. They don’t
know that it could be any better, so they can be resistant. This is more than working with an IT
department on infrastructure. We are talking about changing people’s thinking and how they
relate to technology.
How do you propose to do that? Do you see yourself working in an ecosystem in such a way
that this is not just, “If we build it, they will come,” affair, but evangelizing to the point where
cognitive patterns can be changed?
Henshall: A lot of our relationships and conversations have been evolving over the last few
years. We’ve been moving further up what I would call “the IT hierarchy.” We’re having
conversations with CIOs now about broad infrastructure, ways that we can help address the use
cases of all their employees, not just those that historically needing all the power of
virtualization.
But as we move forward, there is a large transformation going on. Whether we use terms like
digital transformation and others, those are less technology conversations and more about
business outcomes – more than any time in my 30-year-career.
Because of that, you’re not only engaging the CIO, you may have the same conversation with a
line of business executive, a chief people officer, the chief financial officer (CFO), or someone in
another functional organizations. And this is because they’re all trying to accomplish a specific
outcome more than focusing on the technology itself.
And that allows us to elevate the discussion in a
way that is much more interesting. It allows us to
think about the human and business outcomes
more so than ever before. And again, it’s just one
more extension of how we are getting out of the
“technology for technology’s sake” view and much
more into the, “What is it that we are actually trying
to accomplish” view.
Gardner: David, as we tackle these issues, elevate the experience, and let people work the way
they want, it seems we are also opening up the floodgates for addition of more intelligence.
Whether you call it artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or augmented intelligence,
the fact is that we are able to deal with more data, derive analytics from it, learn patterns,
reapply those learning lessons, and repeat. So injecting that into work, and how people get their
jobs done, is the big question these days. People are trying to tackle it from a variety of different
directions.
You have said an advantage Citrix has, is in access to data. What kind of data are we talking
about, and why is that going to put Citrix in a leadership position?
We are getting out of the
“technology for technology’s sake”
view and much more into the “What
is it that we are actually trying to
accomplish” view.

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Soup to nuts supervision of workflow
Henshall: We have a portfolio that spans
everything from the client device through the
application, files, and the network. We are able to
instrument many different parts of the entire
workflow. We can capture information about how
people are using technologies, what their usage
patterns look like, where they are coming in from,
and how the files are being used.
In most cases, we take that and apply it into contextual outcomes. For example, in the case of
security, we have an analytics platform and we use those security analytics. We can create a
risk score that’s very similar to your credit score for an individual user’s behavior if something
anomalous happens. For example, you’re here with me and you’re in front of your computer, but
you also tried to log on from another part of the globe at the same time.
Things like that can be flagged almost instantaneously and allows the organization to identify
and -- in many cases -- automatically address those types of scenarios. In that case, it may
immediately ask for two-factor authentication.
We are not capturing personally identifiable information (PII) and other types of broader data
that fall under a privacy umbrella. We access a lot of anonymized things that provide the
insights.
Every company has [had privacy discussions] and will continue to evolve over time as
technology evolves because the underlying platforms are becoming very powerful. Citrix
operates in about 100 countries around the world. We are already very familiar with local
compliance and data privacy regulations. We are making sure that we can operate within those
and certainly give our customers in those markets the tools to make sure that they are operating
effectively within the constraints as well.
Gardner: The many resources people rely on to do their jobs come from different places --
public clouds, private clouds, a hybrid between them, different SaaS providers, and different
legacy systems of record.
You are in a unique position in the middle of that. You can learn from it and begin to suggest
how people can improve. Those patterns can be really powerful. It’s not something we’ve been
able to do before.
What do we call that? Is it AI? Or a valet or digital assistant to help in your work while protective
of privacy and adhering to all the laws along the way? And where do you see that going in terms
of having an impact on the economy and on companies?
AI, ML to assist and automate tasks
We capture information about how
people are using technologies,
what their usage patterns look like,
where they are coming in from,
and how the files are being used.

6. Page 6 of 8
Henshall: Two very broad questions. From the future standpoint, AI and ML capabilities are
helping turn all the data we have into more useful or actionable information. And in our case,
you mentioned virtual assistance. We will be using intelligent assistance to help you automate
simple tasks.
And many of those could be tasked between applications. For example, you could ask your
assistant to move a meeting to next Thursday or any time your other meeting participants
happen to be available. The bots will go out, search for that optimal time, and take those
actions. Those are the types of things that we envision more for the virtual assistants going
forward, and I think those will be interesting.
Beyond that, it becomes a learning mechanism whereby we can identify that your bot came
back and told you you’ve had the same conflict two meetings in a row. Do you want to change
all future meetings so that this doesn’t happen again? It can become much more predictive.
And so, this journey that Citrix has been on for many years started with helping to simplify IT so
that it became easier to deliver the infrastructure. The second part of that journey was making it
easier for people to consume those resources across the complexities we have talked about.
Now, the products we announced at our May 2019
Citrix Synergy Conference are more about guiding
work to help simplify the workflows. We will be
doing more in this last space on how to anticipate
what you will need so that we can automate it
ahead of time. And that’s an interesting journey. It
will take a few years to get there, but it’s going to
be pretty powerful when we do.
Gardner: As you’re conducting product development, I assume you’re reflecting these
capabilities back to your own workforce, the Citrix global talent pool. Do you drink your own
champagne? What are you finding? Does it give you a sense as the CEO that your workforce
has an advantage by employing these technologies? Do we have any proof points that the
productivity is in fact enhanced?
Henshall: It’s still early days. A lot of these are brand-new technologies that don’t have enough
of a base of learning yet.
But some of the early learnings can identify areas where you’re multitasking too much, or are in
an inefficient process, or in my case, I tend to look at automating opportunities for how much I
am multitasking inside of a meeting. That helps me understand whether I should be in that
meeting in the first place, whether I am a 100 percent focused and committed -- or have I been
distracted by other elements.
Those are interesting learnings that are more about personal productivity and how we can
optimize from that respect.
More broadly speaking, our workforce is globally distributed. We absolutely drink our own
champagne when it comes to engaging a global team. We have teams now in about 40
countries around the world and we are very, very virtual. In fact, among my leadership team, I
am the only member that lives full-time in [Citrix’s headquarters] in South Florida. We make that
We will be doing more in [guiding
work to help simplify workflows]
on how to anticipate what you
need so that we can automate it
ahead of time.

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work because we embrace all of our own technology, stay on top of common projects,
communicate across all the various mediums, and collaborate where need be.
That allows us to tap into nontraditional workforce populations, to differentiate, and enable folks
who need different types of flexibility for their own lifestyles. You miss great talent if you are far
too rigid. Personally, I believe the days are gone when everybody is expected to work inside a
corporate headquarters. It’s just not practical anymore.
Gardner: For those businesses that recognize there is tremendous change afoot, are using new
models like cloud, and don’t want complexity to outstrip productivity – what advice do you have
for them as they start digital transformation efforts? What should they be putting in place now to
take advantage of what companies like Citrix will be providing them in a few years?
Business-first supports global collaboration
Henshall: The number one thing on any digital transformation project is to be currently clear
about what the outcome is you are trying to achieve. Start with the outcome and work backward.
You can leverage platforms like Citrix, for example, to look across multiple technologies, focus
on those business outcomes, and leave the technology decision in many cases to last. It
shouldn’t be the other way around because if you do, you will self-limit what those outcomes
should be.
Make sure you have buy-in across all stakeholders. As I talked about earlier, have a
conversation with the CFO, head of marketing, head of human resources, and many others.
Look for breadth of outcomes, because you don’t want to solve problems for one small team,
you want to solve problems across the enterprise. That’s where you get the best leverage. It
allows you the best opportunity to simplify the complexity that has built up over the last 30 to 40
years. This will help people get out from under that problem.
Gardner: Lastly, for IT departments specifically, the people who have been most aware of Citrix
as a brand, how should IT be thinking about entering this new era of focusing on work and
productivity? What should IT be thinking about to transform themselves to be in the best
position to attain these better business outcomes?
Henshall: I have already seen the transformation happening. Most IT administrators want to
focus on larger business problems, more than just maintaining the existing infrastructure.
Unfortunately, the budgets have been relatively limited for innovation because of all the
complexity we have talked about.
But my advice for everyone is, take a step back, understand how to be the champion of the
business, to be the hero by providing great outcomes, great experiences, and higher
productivity. That’s not a technology conversation first and foremost. Obviously it has a
technology element but understand and be empathetic of the needs of the business. Then work
backward, and Citrix will help you get there.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how Citrix has pioneered ways to make workers more productive,
IT operators stronger, and a vast partner ecosystem more capable. And we have learned how

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Citrix is charting a new future of work that abstracts productivity above apps and clouds to
empower, energize, and enlighten workers anywhere.
Please join me in thanking our guest, David Henshall, President and CEO of Citrix. Thank you,
sir.
Henshall: Thank you very much.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect intelligent
workspaces interview. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for
listening, and do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix Systems.
Transcript of a discussion on how Citrix is charting a new future of work that abstracts productivity above
apps, platforms, data, and clouds to empower, energize, and enlighten workers while simplifying and
securing anywhere work across any deployment model. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019.
All rights reserved.
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