>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is "theCUBE's" ongoing coverage, where we go out to the events, in this case, of course, virtually, to extract the signal from the noise. And now we're going to talk about the shifts in customer employee experiences and channels. The past year, obviously, has exposed gaps in both of those areas. The shift to digital channels, something that hit every industry. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So, there's huge demand for better, a.k.a. less frustrating, and hopefully superior, customer experiences. That's never been higher. It puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver. And with me to talk about these trends are two great guests. Alex Shootman, the General Manager of Adobe Workfront. Alex was CEO of Workfront, which Adobe acquired last year. And Matthew Candy, Global Managing Director of IBM iX. Gentleman, welcome. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Matt, let's start with you. Maybe you could talk to the shifts that I talked about earlier, in the past year, and customers' expectations, and how they changed, and how you guys responded. >> Yes, so, Dave, I mean, it's been, my goodness, what a year, right? If we'd gone back and thought, we never would have seen this coming. And certainly, I guess, for the clients, I run the digital customer experience business, the services business, here at IBM, and certainly, we have been very busy helping clients, across just about every industry, accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think what has been absolutely clear, is digital, mobile, all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels, has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going, and survived over this time. And certainly, we've seen that transformation accelerate, right? And companies shifting from face-to-face interactions from a B2B sales perspective, into a kind of online B2B commerce, et cetera. So, really it's become digital by default. And I think customers really demanding personalized experiences, and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you in how they deal with you. >> You know Matt, I mean, our business, you think about our business, it was predominantly going out to events, live events, and then overnight, our entire industry had to shift to virtual. And what it was is, you had all these physical capabilities, and people trying to shove it into virtual, and it was really hard. There was a lot of unknowns, and really different. I imagine there's some parallels within marketing organizations. And I wonder if you could talk, Matt, about what kind of barriers you saw about delivering those kind of digital interactions and experiences. >> Yes. So, I guess, we've seen kind of five core challenges that companies have been facing. So, firstly, around volume and velocity of content. So, as we're putting more demand into organizations, right, for more content at a greater pace, right, this causes challenges for companies in terms of being able to get content out there, and surface it through their digital channels, right? Whether that's kiosks, or voice, web, mobile, et cetera. And that pace is not slowing down. Second thing is this demand for personalization. So, as companies and individuals are touching through all of these touch points across marketing sales and service, the need to be able to interact in the right way, showing that you know me, using personal data to match the right offer at the right time, critically important. Thirdly, the martech stack, right. Across many of these organizations, this explosion in marketing technology over the last 10 years has been absolutely incredible. And so one of the big challenges companies have is how we tie all of these different components of the stack together, to build this seamless experience. Fourth challenge, right? Additional communication channels. So, as we need more content and personalization, and we've got to join up across all these different systems, how do we make this consistent across all of these channels, right, whether it's digital or physical, is a true test of many organizations' ability to respond. And the fifth point is the coordination needed across departments within companies. And so, how the marketing department deals with legal, with regulatory approvals, with sales. How they go out to their agency partners. And this has certainly got a lot more complex across geographies, and across boundaries, within companies and outside. And so we see, absolutely, this need to put in place, basically, the marketing system of record that helps manage this. And this is where we see huge opportunity together with Adobe. >> Yeah, so, Alex, maybe you could talk about this a little bit. I mean, you guys are well-known for deep expertise and leadership, and orchestrating marketing workflows and the like. Matt talked about the martech stack. What's your take on this? And how are IBM iX and Adobe Workfront working together? >> What has occurred in response to what Matt talked about, is that companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. You know, they looked at, if you go back in time, and you look at financials in a company, people thought, "Wow, this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials." They realized their customers were really important, so they said, "We should put a system in place to manage our customers." People are important. They bought Workday to make sure that they could manage their people. And all of this complexity that Matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization. And so they started investing in a marketing system of record, like Workfront. >> You know, that's interesting. Just a quick aside. I mean, if you think about a lot of the problems we have in data and big data, typical to talk about stovepipe. You just mentioned three examples, finance, HR, and now marketing, where we've contextualized the system. In other words, the domain experts, the people in finance, and HR, and marketing, they're the ones who know the data the best. They don't have to go, necessarily, to some big data team, and data scientist, and all this stuff. They know what they want and they know it. And that's really what you guys are serving in your streamlining. This notion, Alex, of a marketing system of record is really interesting. I mean, it's relatively new, isn't it? So, why does it matter so much to marketers? >> Yeah, if you think about it, we've been able to serve 3,000 enterprises around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands. Half of the Fortune 100. And what has created the need for the new, if you think about it, are the challenges that start arising when you implement the concepts that Matt talked about. Consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet. And you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You've got a private credit card issuer. They do business with hundreds of thousands of companies. Their account managers are interacting with those companies, and all of that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that's happening. Or consider a major medical manufacturer who's trying to get medical products out the door. And the marketing team is trying to coordinate with the product team, with the regulatory team, with the supply chain team, with the legal team. And they're trying to orchestrate all of that work, so that they can get products out the door more quickly. Or maybe a financial services organization that's also trying to get new products out the door, and they're trying to get all the approval about the content that goes with those products, and it's all about speed to market. That's what's creating the need for the new, as you phrased it, Dave. >> Yes. Excellent. Thank you. So, then Matt, paint a picture. A lot of people may not be familiar with IBM iX. Maybe how you guys... You got creators, you got deep expertise in this area. So, maybe talk about where you add value, and how you work with Adobe. >> Okay, so IBM iX, so, we sit within the services business at IBM. As you said, Dave, right, we have designers, experienced strategists, engineers, basically able to deliver kind of end-to-end digital and customer experience solution, right from the creative, all the way through to the technology platforms, and the operations. Adobe is one of our key strategic partners across IBM, and certainly within my part of the business. And so, we couldn't have been more delighted when Workfront joined Adobe, through the acquisition there. So, we already had a strong relationship with the Workfront team. And so now seeing that as part of the Adobe platform and family there, really opens up massive opportunities. We're working with several major airlines, automotive companies, retailers, using Adobe technology to transform the customer experiences that they have. Putting in place new digital platforms, and new ways of engaging with those customers. But what is absolutely clear, as Alex was talking about, this need for a marketing systems of record, as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience, and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that, organized, executing in the correct way, in an efficient way, in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical, effectively, to drive this kind of workflow improvement, the productivity improvement, and put intelligence and automation into these processes, across the organization. So there is, certainly, we believe a huge opportunity together in the market, to help clients transform, and to deliver the value in this space. >> Got it. Alex, maybe you can just, at a high level, share some examples of how Adobe, and drawing on your experiences from Workfront, how you've helped companies where they had to get content out, they had to automate the processes, and the outcomes that you saw, that you hope to share with other clients. >> You know what, what Matt's talking about is the need for intelligent workflows within a marketing organization. Because a marketing organization is trying to solve one of two challenges. Either they're trying to be more efficient because they can't get more resources to do the work that they need to do, or they're trying to operate with speed. And so what our breakthrough thinking was, Dave, in terms of solving these problems, and then I'll give an example, is the realization that while it seemed like work should be different in different enterprises, ultimately, all work has five elements to it. The first thing is, you decide to do something, or I ask you to do something. So, we have to have the strategic planning around the intake of work. Then we have to plan out the work. Then we actually have to execute the work. We have to understand who's doing what. We have to have transparency to whether or not that work is getting done, or if people need help in that work. Then that work needs to be approved by somebody. And then finally, especially in marketing, then we have to actually deliver that work to a technology like ADM, where we're going to publish it on the web. So, if you take the case of a major financial, a financial company that serves consumers, that financial company is constantly bringing new products to market. Now, if you're bringing new products to market, if you think about the United States, you have to make sure that you have supported the regulatory approval that's necessary for a product. So, that product has to be able to go to the right investor. That product, if it's in a certain state, has to have oversight to it. So, now you're a marketing team, in a financial services organization that's supporting getting new product to market, and in a particular customer, it used to take 'em 63 days to go through all of the approvals necessary to just get content out the door. Now that they are effectively intaking the work, planning the work, executing the work reviewing the work, and delivering the work digitally, that's down to eight days. >> And with the martech platform, you have the data. So, you know what content you want to get out, and you can make decisions much better. I mean, my big takeaway is, you got the art of marketing, and those with the marketing DNA, I don't have that gene, but it's intersecting with the science and automation, and the data, and the workflows, and driving efficiency, and ultimately driving results and revenue. So, that's my big takeaway from this conversation, but Alex, maybe you could give us your takeaway, and then Matt, you can bring us home. >> Yeah. I mean, my takeaway is in this new economy, marketing is a tier one corporate activity. Marketing is a peer activity to manufacturing, to distribution, to sales, and to finance. And every one of those disciplines are managed with a system. Marketing needs its own system, because it's as important as any other organization. And so to me, Dave, it's no more complicated than that. That marketing is now as important as every other function. And it needs to be managed as every other function. And Workfront is the application that marketing manages the workflows, and the business of marketing. >> All right, Matt. Give us your final thoughts, please. >> Yep, no. My final thought, building on what Alex said, so, we've put together a joint point of view with Adobe, and with Workfront, called "Intelligent Content Transformation," right. That is our strategic framework to help clients accelerate on this journey, both of delivering these amazing customer outcomes, but how we transform the processes within the marketing organization. And I think that yes, you can continue to focus on delivering amazing digital experiences for customers, and it's absolutely critical, and that's critical to revenue growth, but actually, what's also critical, is to drive efficiency in these workflows across the enterprise, right? And that is not only going to enable the revenue growth, it's going to enable you to deliver on that promise. But it's also going to result in significant cost and efficiency improvements for these companies, by focusing on marketing in the same way as we have done for procurement transformation, supply chain transformation, finance transformation, HR transformation, right? There's a lot of effort gone into the efficiency of those workflows. We've got to do the same for marketing. So, massive opportunity, Dave, massive. >> It is massive. Every company has to, in some way, shape, or form, put high-quality content in front of their customers to engage with them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right- >> See you again. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." You're watching IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. We'll be right back. (bright music) ♪ Da, de, de, da, da, de, da, la ♪ (bright music)