>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back. Get ready, Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco. It's Salesforce, Dreamforce. They're telling me it's 170,000 people which I find hard to believe but I'm not out there walking around in the traffic or stuck in an Uber. Hopefully you aren't either. We're excited, we're at the Conga Connect West of it. Here at the Thirsty Bear, they're giving out free drinks, free entertainment, free food. Stop on by, just a couple steps over from Moscone South and they'll be here for all three days. So we're excited to be here, too. First Salesforce, we've got some great guests lined up for you today. Talk about the whole life cycle of this cash-to-quote, or quote-to-cash, excuse me. To Sharmon Moss first, she is the Practice Lead at ATG for CLM. Sharmon, great to see you. >> It's great to be with you, Jeff. >> Absolutely, and with her is Bob Grewal. He is VP of Enterprise Contract Sales for Conga. Bob, great to see you. >> You as well. Glad that we are here. >> So, what an event. Just before we jump into it, you guys said you did this last year, you had such a great turnout, you had kind of up the investment. >> Yeah, so last year, we did a phenomenal amount of events, we wanted to provide our customers opportunity to come in and have a place where they can meet with us, socialize, meet our technical folks but at the same time, enjoy themselves and find a place to relax and work. We do a disco party, a silent disco party last year, that was phenomenal and over-subscribed so this year we ended up having to put a tent in the back and maybe even a bigger investment so our people and partners can come in here and have a great place work, meet and greet, and learn. >> Great. So Sharmon here, she is a Practice Lead out in the field with all the customers. >> It's true. >> So we talk a lot, we go to a lot of tech events at theCUBE and we always talk about people processing tech. And more often than not, the tech is the easiest part. >> It's true. >> To really make this stuff work, so give us kind of what you see in the field, kind of the state of the market in contract management. >> So what we're seeing at ATG, we are a technology management consulting firm and what we've seen recently is, you know, we had the whole optimization of CPQ over the last four or five years and right now, we're really seeing the digitalization of contract management really take a front place in what companies are trying to automate. And that's why we're so excited to work with the team at Conga because our synergies and the way we work together and our cultures are so similar that we're really able to provide just a great compliment to our customers. >> So when you say automating contract management, the first thing the probably goes into most people's heads, at least the first time I heard it, was no way, there's so much nuance, there's so much you know, legalese and maybe negotiated terms and settlements in a contract. How do you possibly automate that beyond, which is state-of-the-art ten years ago, where is it and when is it due? So what are some of the things that people, you know, what can you do today, what does the future hold, what is the state-of-the-art in contract management? >> Well, I think you nailed it on both points. So it's not just about the technology and us as the technology provider would probably argue it's not the easiest part of the solution. But I think it's the combination and the reason why ATG partnership with Conga makes so much sense for us, is that, to capture the digital transformation, or the contract automation value, we really got to do two things. One, you got to get the right technology which Conga provides today. And then you got to have the partner to work with you where we've partnered with ATG to really look at your business processes and as you do that, this is a great opportunity to review how you're doing it today, optimize that, because it's not just about going digital with it, it's really about making sure that we have the right approval process. And then you say, what's possible today? Well, today, CLM has been around for a long time, right, and we think that it's hit a tipping point where it's not just about creating workflows and approval processes. In fact, in many cases, those are table stakes. We seem to do it better, we've designed it so it's easier to use, easier to manage, but the piece that we're seeing as really a focus on the datasite. How do we make that data that lives in those contracts valuable to the organization? So when you're engaging with your customers, now you have a better engagement strategy based on real data, what's changes, what being utilized in your contract. So for us, a big part of it is that we can do the workloads, we can do the approval processes, but where we're really going to differentiate ourselves is that data and making sure that we can make that work, to optimize revenue, to mitigate risk but most importantly, to be able to understand what's happening in the contract world, what you're negotiating so we can make your engagements in the future easier and faster. >> Right, right. So just curious, Sharmon, because you negotiate the contract, you go through all the pain, you know, and you finally get it signed but then generally it would just go in a drawer, or somebody's hard drive on a laptop and let's just hope they're working for us in a year from now, we didn't give them the laptop. But how does that get baked A, into making sure, there was an example earlier, that the right payment terms get into the ERP system and then also, going forward, how does that not just become a stale document that's just sitting in a repository but how do we extract the value to your point to get more benefit from that tough negotiated piece of paper that we worked so hard on. >> Right, and I think that's where we're seeing the change now. Because, historically, it was our legal teams that wanted to automate things, to make their lives simpler, and now we're seeing we need not just to support the legal teams with this information, we need to support reporting, we need to support renewals, we need to support amendments and we need those data elements that are associated. So like you said, the payment terms or the length of the term of a specific service, we needed to datatize that, put that in a system where people can search for it, discover it. So many cases, even like companies with MNA, do due diligence based on this content, right? It can't just be a piece of paper in a box somewhere anymore. It needs to be out there and that's what the future of contract management offers. We are, at this point, in the emergence of this technology where customers are starting to realize the value in that digitalization. >> Go ahead. >> If that helps. >> I was just going to say that the other thing is happening too, is the nature of business relationships is changing so much with new revenue models, right. Subscription models, you know, and kind of prorated and how do you work in your discount structure. It's so much more complicated and so much variety in the ways people are engaging with their customers. I would imagine most of the time that just kind of happens in that contract is still in that guy's laptop that we don't know where it is and we just kind of execute those things. So how is that getting surfaced and kind of bait back so that it's more of a closed loop process? >> Yeah, so a couple of things and we can talk about the processes as Sharmon walking us through kind of hey, we can automate this, we can do this. There's a couple of things in the technology side that Conga's really done and when we think about that, one is a True-up. So when we built this on the Salesforce platform, one of the things that we really did was how do we take what's been in that contract, so simple thing like the terms for payment change from 30 days to 45. Well today or traditionally, people would go and have to update that manually. Well we created a technology called True-up where you're able identify all those key factors, these key data points, and automatically have that update within your Salesforce instance. A challenge for one of our customers is renewals, right? Often we have standard policies of we're going to have to notice customers 60 days in advance of their renewal. Well sometimes we have to negotiate that and sometimes it's 90 days or six months. We've made that really easy when those terms change, we have the ability to true those up and that actually will be reflected in Salesforce automatically. So without any human intervention, outside of approving the term that you've accepted it, it automatically uploads into Salesforce. >> So Truing-up, just to repeat what you said to make sure I understand, so it's basically taking a negotiated terms and the contract and making sure it's getting into the system of records, system of engagement. >> Exactly. >> So it's implemented. >> Yup. >> It's true and another factor within the integration of the Salesforce, is that you can make some of that negotiation happen upfront. So, if you're using CPQ solution for instance, you may negotiate the quote before it even gets to the contract and that can limit the amount of Truing-up we even have to do at the end. >> Right, right. >> And that's the other piece is that one of the things we've done is when it comes to just a cash to quote, we've built a product specifically designed for the cash-to-quote. We call it Conga Contracts Negotiator Edition. And what that really is designed of is, for those customers that have quotes that are going out, that are getting quantities in negotiated, maybe a price propose change, maybe a different terms that are already listed on that quote, we've provided a technology that basically can support that so when the customer comes back with those changes, it also can be Trued-up with Salesforce without having to go in and go back and rework the quote and redo all those quantities. We've made that sync in that True-up capability available even for that quote thing. So very complimentary to the CPQ practice that ATG has today. >> Right. Just curious, Sharmon, from some of your experience with customers. What is the hardest thing that people think is going to be easy and then what's the low-hanging fruit that people go "oh my goodness, this is phenomenal," that maybe is not that hard but the value delivery is consistently over the top for people that are kind of in this journey? >> The thing that I think companies often struggle to do implement into their vision here, is that when you are buying a piece of technology to solve a problem, is that, that piece of technology on its own is not going to solve your problem. You have to take a look at the processes that you use and figure out how to optimize those along with the tools, these awesome tools, that you get with the technology and not pave your cart path. So don't keep doing the same things you've been doing for 20 years and just make them automated. Take advantage of this tool that you have. I think what people underestimate how easy it is, is all the things that they have available to them with this automation. The approval process that can be automated. I don't have to email four people and get their responses back to say "yeah, those changes are OK". That I can build that approval process, that I can build in the acceptance of changes to clauses. My legal department can say "I'll accept this as governing law or that as governing law" and give my salespeople the opportunity to do that without involving legal. And people often don't understand how easy that can be. >> Right. Fewer emails? That's got to be an easy case. >> Yeah, I wish it was just that simple but absolutely right, we're eliminating everything that lives outside of it and getting control. I mean, I couldn't agree more. Customers sometimes think the technology is going to solve the problem and it's really not just the technology when it comes to CLM. It's about the technology and the process and I think with the processes we've done and the practices we've developed, that's really helping customers get greater at adoption, greater rate of ROI, really optimize that so that they're getting a higher value. And time to evaluate what the process we use when they're looking at CLM. >> It's almost a waste of money if you don't go the extra mile for the people in the process, to really take advantage of the investment. Well Bob, Sharmon, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and Bob, specifically, congrats on this great event and thank you for having us. >> Yeah, thank you for joining us as well and thank you for the time. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Bob, she's Sharmon, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Conga Connect West at the Thirsty Bear at Dreamforce, San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here, live in Bahrain, for the exclusive CUBE coverage of AWS Summit here in the region. Obviously, huge news, Amazon's having a region here, a full region, that's going to create a lot of connections, new opportunities, and hopefully make the life easier for all the developers and whatnot. Great guest here, so we're just talking with Kim on camera, about all the exciting developments on Amazon. We've got Abdul Raman, who's the group EVP of tech, at the ATG, which is the Al Tayyar Travel Group, in Saudi Arabia. >> Yep. >> Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks a lot for having me. >> So, I'll quickly fast forward, you guys started in 2015, programming in the cloud, your like, we were late. I think that's actually a good time, 'cause Amazon had a lot of mature services ready. Went from zero to billions in revenue. >> Correct. >> Really big success story, that's large scale, all cloud based right? >> Yep, correct. >> Tell your story, what do you guys do, real quick, take a minute to explain your group, what you guys do, and then, what were the architectural things you decided, how did you get the growth? >> So, we are a 40 years old company, we started in 1979, we are the largest travel and tourism company in the Middle East. We went public, through our IPO in 2012. And 2015, our new board, and new management, including myself, we started building our ten-year strategy plan. And we said, we need to diversify our investment, so it mandated that we need to have an online presence. In 2015, we had a choice to build our online presence, which is very late, either on-premise using, building a data center, or we go to the cloud. We had multiple metrics including the cost efficiency, including scalability, security and so on, and all these metrics, when we compared on-premise versus cloud, cloud always win. And we selected Amazon to build our online presence. And beginning of 2015, we had zero presence, zero revenue. Our total revenue from the classic legacy systems, for the retail was almost two billion dollars. But we had zero revenue from the online. We were able, within six weeks, to build the proof of concept, and launch it immediately, and we started heavily investing in various components, from back-end, front-end, DevOps, and so on. And this year, we anticipate, we're going to be generating more than two billion riyal of revenue, that's about 450 >> Online >> Online only. >> Via cloud. >> Exactly, only on Amazon. And for us, that has been the best success story we had for years. >> It's an amazing success story actually. >> We look backward to our decision back then. >> I'll break for you, that's like actually really amazing. This is something that I think people don't really understand, what about the cloud, and certainly Amazon, and the kind of scale that you can get, if you get something right, both on the business model side and architecturally, you can be a unicorn. You're really a unicorn in revenue, that's the word that they hear in the startup world, unicorn, but mostly that's stock value, that's not actually real cash, in how many years? This is pretty phenomenal. This is the entrepreneurial dream, that is now a reality. >> Yep, that's correct. >> This is the story here. >> Exactly, and I'm happy that you mentioned that. We actually, when we started this venture, we said, to the founders, you guys are a startup. We rented out, in 2015, a garage, literally. >> Yeah, get out of the way. >> A house, A very old warehouse, we brought like, five guys, you are the core team, we told them, you are a startup, give us whatever you want to do. And it has been very successful since then. >> It's kind of like the Steve Jobs story, you got Apple, with the Mac II, and then the little group over here, you know, doing the Macintosh. >> Yep, yep, yep. >> That's your group, because you got to get out of their way, it's a mindset, I want to ask you that, that was one of my questions, but we got there a little early, but, this is a cultural shift. Cloud is a different mindset. >> Yep. >> It's not the old way of planning, team-building. >> Yep. >> It really is a different dynamic both execution wise, but team makeup. >> Correct. >> Can you share that piece of it? >> We gave our founders complete freedom, in how they're going to make up their management style. So we have a complete agile team, we have diverse geographical locations, we have people from India, developers in Egypt, in Dubai, in Saudi, and be all work and collaborate, using DevOp tools from Amazon, so we divide the work load, our product teams, weekly launch feature list. They tell us when they would like to launch every two weeks, or three weeks, a new version of the website, or the mobile apps. So, we have a completely agile development methodology, and we give our new venture a truly startup culture. >> And the key for you, if I get this right, is to have executive leadership say, we're doing this? >> Yep. >> Was that in place, did you drive that? >> Absolutely, so when our board said, told us, the new board in 2015, guys we don't have an online, go and get it, me and the CEO said, the best way to do it, is just spin off a completely different unit, completely independent, startup mentality, intro manuals, and told them, guys, sky is limit. We need to be the number one player in the Middle East. >> So, I got to dig deeper, 'cause I love, you know, it's all sexy, and great story when you say, this is how we started, and we finished strong, but as Andy Jassy would say, the CEO of AWS, the learning's in the middle, the ups and downs, as you figure things out, 'cause a lot of things about cloud, is iteration. >> Yep. >> 'Cause you have the ability to move very fast, and you get smart people together, so there's a glorious start and a glorious outcome, but in the middle is the experimentation, that's where the real work gets done. Can you share some of the learnings? Was it a technology selection? Did you really, do you have more queuing, more database, as you start to play with Amazon, this becomes, actually, a business process. >> Our biggest, yeah. >> Playing with the different pieces and which services are right for which process. Can you share something? >> Correct. So our biggest challenge was finding the right skillset, who are people who understand how Amazon, AWS, works. In the Middle East, we don't have that many skillset, or skillful people, so we had to wait, train the people, send them to Amazon workshops, be very patient with the mistakes, we don't mind people refactoring all the old code. Every month we start from scratch. We were very aware that this is, what we are doing, is never been done before in the Middle East. And what we have developed, in terms of, for example, the big data, the big data platform we build today, is one of the largest, we are processing terrabytes of data every week. It's one of the largest in the Middle East. The number of developers we have today, more than 500, working on AWS. I don't think any company in the Middle East, have that number of developers, working on this platform. So we're very proud that we gave our developers the trust and we are aware that you need to fail fast, learn, and quickly adapt. >> And it's a contagious mindset too, when you start seeing success. >> Yep. >> So talk about some of the architectural, talk about the stack that you're using. Obviously, you must be using a variety of the Amazon goodness, EC2, that's pretty obvious, are you guys using the queuing, are you using Kinesis? How you, can you talk about some of the architectural things, if you can? >> Yep, so we have, the front-end that we have today, is completely built on Node.js and AngularJS, so it's very fast, very agile. Our back end is built on Java, most of the code built on Java. We have multiple messaging buses, that asynchronous mode, so whenever there is something that needs to be given to a certain component, we don't have to wait for serial queuing. It's all parallel. At the same time, we have a lot of Auto Scaling components. One of the examples I gave earlier today, is that, we had, the beginning of this summer, we had so many marketing campaigns, and we were surprised by how successful these marketing campaigns. We have noticed, in one marketing campaign, that our demand, from our customer, have reached 300 percent, within 24 hours, and the Auto Scaling that we have in place, have been very successful. We were able to immediately meet that demand. >> Talk about how good the Auto Scaling is. Isn't that a relief? >> Absolutely. >> I mean, explain how it works because, essentially, when the demand comes in, explain how it works. >> Yep, so, just to give an example, if we had this infrastructure on-premise, we would have needed six weeks to procure a new infrastructure, install it, configure it, and we would have lost all this six weeks of revenue. >> And then, by the way, you would have lost the first 24 hour surge, then you'd go over-billed, and then wait around, and then not know if you over-provisioned. >> Absolutely. >> This is, the old way. The new way is, you configure Auto Scaling, based on policy, and then it just spins up. >> Absolutely. >> Resources. >> Absolutely. >> While you're sleeping. >> Exactly, so in a few seconds, the Auto Scaling fires up a lot of instances, and we immediately cope with the demand. >> You know, it's funny you mentioned that. One of the comments we have inside our company is, you know you're successful online, when you're making money while you're sleeping. And, you know, if you have Auto Scaling, and things of that nature, these things are programmatic, this is what elastic is all about, this is what coders, >> Yep. >> Not system administrators do >> True. >> And once they do it, they're highly motivated not to manage it again. >> Correct, absolutely. >> Again, this is back to the culture of DevOps. >> Yep, yep. >> How have you guys innovated on that piece, can you give some other examples? >> Yes, so today we have, our big data has feeds from all the buys from the big social networks, Twitter and Facebook, and also from Google, and we have all this analytical data, into our big data, and we analyze all our customer behavior, what they're looking for, what kind of destinations, holidays, business travel, and we try to adapt every two, three weeks, our product and services to meet our customer demand. Next year, we're going to be launching our machine learning, and AI infrastructure. This way, we'll be able to do real time, predictive analysis, and we will be able to serve each customer, unique, fully personalized, customized, web page and experience. We will be able to exceed our customer expectations, and we'll be able to give our customer exactly what they're looking for. >> Abdul, I got to ask you a personal question. >> Sure. >> What are you most proud of, of this success story? What are some of the things, that you look back and say, wow, we really knocked it out of the park, we did great on this, and then an example where you had a good learning experience. Maybe a trip and a fall, that was a learning opportunity. What are you most proud of? And areas that you learned the most about from, tripping and falling, and failure. >> Yep, so I think the most thing I'm proud of, is we have gathered great minds, and we have created great culture. I think great companies have great people behind them, and this, I've learned from reading the stories of Apple or Microsoft, or Google and so on. So, I think we've been very successful in this area, in the Middle East, where the resources are very scarce, and the ability to attract very smart people is very difficult, to bring them in the Middle East. And I think, we've been very successful in that regard, we've been able to gather a lot of smart people, and create great culture. >> You know, Marc Andreessen wrote that article, book about, or maybe it was a tweet, I can't even remember, the 10x engineer. >> Yep. >> And that concept is one engineer, that does cloud and DevOps right is worth ten engineers in the old world. And so, if you can collect, a selection of these 10x multipliers, that can do architecture. >> Correct. >> Now I personally believe that the full-stack developer, might be obsoleted with the cloud, or reduce the requirement for full-stack developer, but you'll still need full-stack developers for cloud, in general, but you don't need to stockpile full-stack developers. >> True, true, I agree. >> If you have good full-stack developers, you then can hire application developers >> True. >> Because the full-stack takes care of all the scale. >> Exactly, you can always repurpose those guys, and up-skill them to do something different. Instead of being a full-stack, you really want to focus on solution developer. >> Google's proven this with their SRE, if you've seen, they have operators, and developers. And this, as you scale, you're operating infrastructure, or you're writing code for applications. >> Correct. >> Alright, so what's the learnings that have been magnified for you? In the middle of the journey here, there's always the, you know, situation were, you know, you have to take care of personnel issue, or technology selection tweak or change, iteration, I won't say pivot, 'cause people don't pivot, when they're succeeding, it's just navigating through the journey. What was something that you've experienced that was magnified in the learnings, that have helped you get better? >> Yep, I believe that the multi-culture and the multi-nationalities and multi-discipline and people coming from different backgrounds. We have people from Asia, from Europe, from the U.S., in our company, and this helped having different backgrounds, different experiences, and this has helped us to build a nice, multi-dimensional solutions. And people have been able to share this experience, in a very nice way. >> That's great, Abdul, thanks so much for sharing, taking the time. >> Thank you. >> Here on theCUBE, and sharing your insight, and amazing success story, congratulations to you and your team, really love to hear these amazing success stories, essentially building from zero start, online, to billions in revenue, that's an amazing success story. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And it certainly is great. Exclusive coverage here, we are in Bahrain, this exclusive CUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter @furrier, or just search my name, reach out to me, let me know what you think. Stay with us for more coverage, after this break. (techno music fades out)