UPDATED 15:52 EDT / OCTOBER 13 2020

CLOUD

Rapid pace of change forces companies to move as fast as customers, says Cloud Wars analyst

The global pandemic has been a catalyst for motivating businesses to move rapidly onto digital platforms. What remains to be seen is how companies serving those businesses will adapt to the rapid pace of change.

“Over the next year or two we’re going to see this mass forcing function in the tech industry that’s going to separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers, versus those that are trapped by their past or legacy,” said Bob Evans (pictured), founder and principal analyst at Cloud Wars Media. “The tech companies that sit back and say: ‘We’d like to help you but that’s not what we do,’ they’re going to get destroyed.”

Evans spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio, during a post-show analysis for Citrix Cloud Summit. They discussed how significant increases in online use have affected Citrix and its customers and the critical role artificial intelligence and machine learning will play as enterprises adopt new models to cope with the pace of change. (* Disclosure below.)

Leap in consultations

How rapidly have companies been forced to move in digital transformation? During the Summit, one chief information officer from a customer of Citrix Systems Inc. described how his company had been averaging 9,000 virtual visits for telemedicine consultations per month before the pandemic.

“That number has gone up to a quarter million virtual visits per month, or 8,000 per day,” Evans noted. “So they’re now doing in a day what they used to do in a month.”

This rapid pace of change has resulted in a significant impact on Citrix. When a vast majority of the company’s 400,000 global users were suddenly forced to work from home as a result of the pandemic, the firm’s remote access software played a key role in maintaining business continuity.

Compressing years into months

Several months ago, Citrix Chief Executive Officer David Henshall described how his firm saw a 200% to 400% increase in demand for its services, built on the backbone of the public cloud. This pace of change has continued, based on Henshall’s remarks during the Citrix Cloud Summit.

“Henshall said they had some companies that were compressing three years into five months or, in some cases, even weeks,” Evans said. “It’s really been extraordinary, and cloud has been the vehicle for these companies to get into their digital future.”

The rapid pace of change and move to remote work models have also placed renewed focus on automation and the need for artificial intelligence and machine learning to facilitate higher efficiency and productivity. Citrix recently released a research study on the future of the workforce, which highlighted the importance of a unified vision between business leaders and employees in adopting AI for the workplace.

Evans believes that the intersection of cloud and AI offers tremendous opportunity for enterprises in the years ahead.

“One of the reasons I have been so bullish on cloud is it presents the perfect delivery system for AI,” Evans said. “Everybody says they’re into AI, every company says they’re into machine learning, and that’s good for customers because the competitive level is going to soar. We will see changes in how business works, driven by AI and machine learning, unlike anything that we’ve ever seen.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Citrix Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Citrix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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