(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's coverage virtually of the AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit Online. Normally we're face to face in Bahrain or Asia Pacific, or even down in New Zealand and Australia, but we have to do it remotely. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE, we've got a great segment here with a great guest, Ian McCrae, Founder and CEO of Orion Health, talking about the Global Healthcare Industry with Cloud Technology because now more than ever, we all know what it looks like, before COVID and after COVID, has upending the health care business, we're seeing it play out in real time, a lot of great benefits to technology. Ian, thank you for coming remotely from New Zealand and we're here in Palo Alto, California, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> You're the Founder and CEO of Orion Health global, award-winning provider of health information technology, supports the delivery of optimized healthcare throughout New Zealand, but now more than ever around the world, congratulations. But now COVID has hit, what is the impact of COVID because this is changing healthcare for the better and speed agility, is the services up to snuff, is it up to par? What is the situation of the post-COVID or the current COVID and then what we'll post-COVID look like for healthcare, what's your opinion? >> So, sir, I've never seen such a dramatic change in such a short time, as has happened over the last nine to 10 months. And you know what we're seeing is before COVID, a lot of focus on automating hospitals, probably primary care, et cetera, now all the focus is on putting medical records together, digital front doors giving patients access to their medical records, and much of the same way you have access to your bank records, when you travel you go into well, we don't travel now actually, but when you go into the lounges, the airline apps are very, very user friendly and the healthcare sector has been a laggard on this area, that's all about to change. And patients will be wanting, they don't want to go when they're feeling ill, they don't want to go down to their local physician practice because, well, there are other sick people there, they want to get the right care, at the right time, and the right place. And usually when they're not feeling well, they want to go online, probably symptom checking, if they need to have a consult they would like to do it there and then and not two or three days later, and they'd like to it virtually, and you know, there are definitely some things that can be done remotely and that's what people want. >> One of the things that comes up in all my interviews around innovation and certainly around AWS and cloud is the speed of innovation, and we were talking before we came on camera about I'm in Palo Alto, California, you're in Auckland, New Zealand, I don't have to fly there, although it's been quarantined for 14 days in New Zealand and summer is coming. but we can get remote services, we're talking and sharing knowledge right now. And when you were also talking before we went on about how healthcare is taking a trajectory similar to the financial industry, you saw our ATM machines, what an innovation, self service, then you got apps and then, you know, the rest is history just connect the dots. The same kind of thing is happening in healthcare, can you share your vision of how you see this playing out, why is it so successful, what are some of the things that need to be worked on and how does cloud bring it all together? >> Just on the banking front, I haven't been to the bank for many years because I understood all online, I had to go to the bank the other day, it was a novel experience. But you know I have a lot of, when I discussed with our developers and they say, well what are the requirements, I said, well, hold on, you're a patient you know what you want, you want your medical record pulled together, right, you want everything there, you can have easy access to it, perhaps you might like the computer to make some suggestions to you, it may want to give you warnings and alerts. And you know what we're also getting is a lot more data, and historically a medical record will be your lab, your radiology, your pharmacy, few procedures, maybe, but what we're getting now is genomic data getting added to its social determinants, where do you live, where do you work, behavioral and lots of other things are getting entered onto the medical record and it is going to get big. Oh, actually I forgot device data as well, all sorts of data. Now, within that vast amount of data, there will be signals that can be picked up, not by humans, but by machine learning and we need to pick the right suggestions that I give them back to the patients themselves, or the circle of care, be it their doctors, physicians, or maybe their family. So the picture I'm trying to paint here is health is going to, historically it's been all seated around physicians and hospitals, and it's all about to change. And it's going to happen quickly, you know normally health is very slow, it's a leg out it takes forever and forever to change, what we're seeing right across the world, I'm talking from Europe, Middle East, Asia, the North America, right across the world, the big health systems looking to provide firm or far richer services to their populations. >> Big joke in Silicon Valley used to be about a decade ago when big data was hitting the scene, we have the smartest data engineers, working on how to make an ad, be placed next to for you and on a page, which in concept is actually technically a challenge, you know, getting the right contextual, relevant piece of information in front of you, I guess it's smart. But if you take that construct to say medicine, you have precision needs, you also have contextual needs so if I need to get a physician, why not do virtually? If that gives me faster care, I got knowledge based system behind it, but if I want precision, I then can come in and it's much efficient, much more efficient. Can you share how the data, 'cause machine learning is a big part of it and machine learning is a consumer of data too, not just users, you're consuming data, but the results are still the same, how are you seeing that translate into value? >> I think the first thing is that if you can treat patients earlier more accurately, you can ultimately keep them healthier and using less health resources. And, you know, you notice around the world, different health systems take a different approach. The most interesting approach we see is when a payer also happens to own the hospitals, their approach changes dramatically and they start pouring a lot of money into primary care so they have to have less hospital beds, but, with data information, you can be more precise in the way you treat the patient. So I've had my genome done, probably quite a few times actually, I just one of the care pair, the different providers so I have avian called CYP2C19, I'm pretty sure I've got it right, and that means I hyper metabolize suite on drugs, so you give them to me they won't work. And so there's information in our medical records, with machine-learning, if you can keep a Tesla on the road, we must be able to use the same, in fact we're, we have a very big machine learning project here on this company, and to not only get the information out of the medical records but save it back up, this is the hard part, save it back up to the providers, and to the patients in a meaningful useful way, an actionable way, not too much, not too little and that's usually the challenge, actually. >> You're a customer in your business, and you guys are in New Zealand, but it's global, you've a global footprint, how are you leveraging cloud technology to address your customers? >> It's usually useful because we end up with one target platform so when we come to deploy in any part of the world, it's the same platform. And you know from a security point of view, if we're trying to secure all these on-prem installations, it's very, very hard so we have a lot of security features that are provided for us, there are lots of infrastructure tooling, deployment and monitoring all the stuff is just inherent within the cloud and I guess what's most important we have a standard platform that we can target right across the world. >> And you're using Amazon Web Services, I mean, I'd imagine that as you go outside and look at the edge, as you have to have these secure edge points where you're serving clients, that's important, how're you securing that edge? >> Well, fortunately for us as Amazon is increasingly getting right across the world so there are still some regions which, this tool are working on, but over time, we would be expecting officially every country in the world to have all sorts of services available. >> You see the future of health care going from your standpoint, I mean, if you had to throw a projectile in the future to say, you know, five years from now, where are we on the progress and innovation wave, how do you see that Ian, playing out? >> So, certainly last 30 years, we've had various ways of innovation on healthcare, I think this pandemic is going to transform healthcare in such a major way in such a short time, and we'll see it totally transform within two to four years. And the transformation will be just like your bank, your airline, or lots of other buying stuff actually via Amazon actually, we'll see that sort of transformation of healthcare. We have talked a lot about healthcare, historically being patient centric, it is really not true, our healthcare today and most parts of the world has been geared around the various healthcare facilities, so this change we're going to see now, it'll be geared around the patients themselves, which is really intriguing but exciting. >> Position, I want to get my genome done, you've reminded me, I got to get that done. >> Finding that out, you know, you know--- >> I want to know, (laughs) I want to kind of know in advance, so I can either go down the planes, have a good time or low the loam games. >> I find out I had the positivity gene, you know, I kind of knew that and you know, I'm the fairly positive individual, so (laughs). >> Yeah, well, so as you I'm going to get my, I've to go through that process. But you know, again, fundamentally, you know that I agree this industry is going to be right for change, I remember the old debates on HIPAA and having silos, and so the data protection was a big part of that business and privacy as a huge, but one area, I'll get to that in a second, but the one area I want to touch on first is that really an important one, for everyone around the world is how does technology help people, everywhere get access to healthcare? How do you see that unless there's one approach that the government do it all, some people like that, some people don't, but generally speaking technology should help you, what's your view on how technology helps us, get accessible healthcare? >> What it means no matter where you live or what you do, most people have access to the internet either via our phone or a computer. And so what you want to be able to do, what we need to do, as a society, is give everybody access, just like they have access to their banking records, have a similar access to their medical records. And again, you know, the standard features, you know, symptom checking for patients who have chronic conditions, advice, help, medication charts are really important, the ability to go online and do internet consult or the conditions that don't require a physical examination, be able to message your circle of care, it's basically the automation of healthcare, which, you know, sadly has legged other industries. >> It is a critical point, you mentioned that early, I want to get back on the date and we'll get to privacy right after. You mentioned AI and machine learning, obviously it's a huge part of it, having data models that are intelligent, I know I've covered Amazon SageMaker and a bunch of other stuff they're working on, so they're getting smarter and they're doing it by industry, which I think is smart. But I want to ask you about data, I was just having a conversation this morning with a colleague, and we hear about AI and AI and machine learning, they're consumers too, (chuckles) so if machines are going to automate humans, which they are, the machines are consuming data so the machine learning is now a consumer, not just a technology. So when you're consuming data, you got to have a good approach. You guys are doing a lot with data, how should people think about machine learning and data, because if you believe that machine learning will assist humans, then machines are going to talk to other machines and consume data, and create insights, et cetera, and spoil another systematic effects. How should people think about data who are in healthcare, what's your insight there? >> Well, the tricky thing with machine learning and healthcare is not so much the algorithms, the algorithms are readily available on Amazon and elsewhere, and the big problem that we have found, and we've been working on this for some time and have a lot of people working on it, the big problem we have is first of all marshaling, getting all the data together, wrangling the data, so and then there's a fun part where run the algorithms and then the next big problem is getting the results back into the clinical workflow. So we spent all our time upstream and downstream and a bit in the middle, which is the fun bit, takes a very small amount of time. And so it's probably the hardest part is getting it back into the clinical workflow, that's the hardest part, really, it's really difficult. >> You know, I really appreciate what you do, I think this is going to be the beginning of a big wave of innovation, I was talking with Max Peterson about some areas where they saw, you know, thousands and thousands of people being cared, that they never would have been cared for virtually with the systems and then cloud. Again, just the beginning, and I think this is a reconfiguration of the healthcare value chain and--- >> Configuration, I mean, at pre-COVID we as a company spend so much time on planes, traveling all over the world, I've hardly traveled this year and zoom and all the other technologies, I've quite enjoyed it to be fair. So, and I think that there's a reconfiguration of how business is done, it's started to happen in healthcare and--- >> If tell my wife, I'm coming to New Zealand, I get quarantined for 14 days. >> That's right. >> Yeah, I'm stuck down under summertime. >> You get one of those hotels with the view of the Harbor, very nice. >> And final question and just close it out here in the segments, I think this is super important, you mentioned at the top, COVID has upended the healthcare industry, remote health is what people want, whether it's for, you know, not to being around other sick people, or for convenience, or for just access. This is a game changer, you got iWatches now, I was just watching Apple discuss some of the new technologies and processes that they have in these things for heartbeat, so, you know how this signals. This is absolutely going to be a game changer, software needs to be written, it has to be so far defined, cloud is going to be at the center of it. What's your final assessment, share your partying thoughts? >> We are definitely, in a major reconfiguration of healthcare that's going to happen very quickly, I would've thought that 24 months, maybe no more than 36 and what we're going to end up with is a health system, just like your bank and the big challenge for our sector is first of all, the large amounts of data, how do you store it, where do you store, and the cloud is ideal place to do it, then how do you make sense of it, you know, how do you give just the right advice to an elderly patient versus a millennial who is very technology aware? So these, there's lots of innovation and problems to be solved and lots of opportunities I believe for startups and new innovative companies, and so it's interesting times. >> I think time's short, you know, it's just so much to do, great recruitment opportunity in Orion Health. Thank you for spending time, Ian McCrae, Founder and CEO of Orion health, an award winning provider of health information global based out of New Zealand, thank you for taking the time to come on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We're not face to face, normally we'd be in person, but we're doing it remotely due to the pandemic, thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to Austin. I'm Lisa Martin. With Day Volante were a pure accelerate 2019 the fourth annual event. Getting bigger and bigger and more customers on the Cube. Very excited to welcome the C I. O of Kensington Swan. Nigel Stevenson. Nigel. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Thanks for coming all the way up here or down here, Up here from New Zealand. Give us our audience. A little bit of an overview of Kensington Swan and specifically about your role is CEO. >> Sure again, Just once a top tier law firm in New Zealand. We've got a bit of an announcement from last month Were about to combine with sentence, which you might know more familiar from a brain kind of perspective. Slightly larger than what we are at the moment. We're, ah, a few 100 staffs, but between the officers and opened and Wellington with the focus spawn corporate commercial legal practice is so top tier or high in law expertise. >> So you've been there about three years. Give us a little bit of a picture of Kensington's I T department applications workloads. What's going on? There >> must be a pretty similar Thio emotional films or proficient service. Is firms actually a similar with the coming firms to smell the the most common tools we use around the PR, the practice management systems that we have on in production of documents for the work that we provide to our clients, maintaining those keeping them, searching for them, Actually, in all the emails and everything else that goes along every single matter that we do from a compliance perspective, we need to keep all of that and make sure it's safe and sound and easily searchable. >> So big drivers you got, you got the clients, you got the lawyers, you got the paralegals. It's this machine running you got, you know, to say confidentiality compliance. What are the big drivers in the business that are affecting I t. Strategy? I >> think, especially in the provision service is sick. Just continue to modernize. We've hit systems, and after the last decision, things tighten up a bit for a while, and then we fed a large push over the last few years to really bring things up. Today, bring it Bring it, Making more current on relevant to what's out there. With that, we can then bring on other applications. And I and other tools that would really help us Thio drive the business and different directions >> is the first time your accelerator Yeah, let's talk infrastructure. So it s so paint a picture. What's, uh what's it look like? You know you're here. Obviously you're pure customer, right? So what's the storage infrastructure look like? And >> we've had to guess what you would be a pretty typical infrastructure for many, many years with the two data center model. VM were storage observers and sewn on, then replicated across from a d R perspective to the other data center. They know we've gone through a big decision around. Where do we go with it? Do we take that out to the cloud? Do we keep it on Prem? Do we keep the $2 centers one way? We've ended up deciding this to go with the single Production Data center based in Auckland were we've got some d our capability. They want an office, but then plane to scale up to the cloud. So we've got enough compute to keep us going. The systems that we've got a cz we grow, we'll move. >> So you had to replicated data centers. Essentially. Is that right? You know, expensive. And then you've essentially now got a main data center. You've got some a little bit of lightweight infrastructure for D R purposes. Is that right? Way? >> Previously since he had two of everything. Well, more than two of everything but everything we head of the production, we head of the second read absent a lot of set there a semi idle for quite a lot of time. And as you say, that's quite expensive to have Ah, lot of equipment sitting there not really been used. So moving Maur to single data Seena Mol replicating some of the infrastructure, but not not the full sit. It's moving. >> So the decision to stay on Prem versus Go all in the cloud talk to us about some of the business drivers that led you to say we're going to stay on from and within that what elevated cure storage to the obvious choice >> sure is a little bit if it's old cloud model and I think that's really helped you guess influence were the on prim had we has gone as well, and we'll get that. Get that sick and weird things like the scalability off the simplicity, not having to have very experience experienced stories technicians on and so on. I think back to my days fishing nightie and putting together other brains of storage unit was a multi month process. Certifications after certifications just to be out a plug it together and then configure and coat. The story's all right. You know what the cloud and what we found with pure is. It's just become really simple. Within a couple of hours of the array arriving that was wrecked, it was turned on. It was cut into the pool and presented through TV anyway, so I'm just really, really simple. >> All the bit twiddling of the past really didn't do much for your business, obviously, but then you it shows you chose toe stay on Prem. Many law firms d'oh! Just because of the privacy and confidentiality And yeah, they had some color to that. This is a couple >> of ingles thio. If there's one being performance, wait. I need to make sure that the lawyers get the performance that they need they charging six minute increments like like most. If they can't work, then the building they're not working up providing to the clients and the clients. Also that work done at a at a good speed and returned to them as quickly as possible. And as the world has moved more to that client centric approach, you know, delivering to the client's becomes ultimate impairment to what we do. So performance was definitely key economic self. When we looked at cloud in on a price per gig per month with pure, it worked out very competitive. It wasn't quite there. Toe move into the cloud. New Zealand. We don't have the AWS or is your database data centers based on his own. They're all in Australia, So there's Ah Leighton see aspect of going many thousands of miles across the under the undersea cables to get to that data on payments. Right there, it's fast, is connected waken different, >> so you have essentially replaced your you're spinning disc with flash. Is that correct? >> Yes, that was on the other parts of it. No, you wanted to get something that was definitely modern and set us for the future. For quite a number of years Way didn't look a spinning disc. It'll weigh. Just win. Looked at what flesh rays were available. Way have head spinning this, but I definitely wanted to get your flesh. >> How >> important was the Evergreen model to you? Is it is it how much of it is marketing and how much is it? Is it Is it big business impact for you? >> Quite a few other places of work We've hit that three year or five year support moral challenge where all of a sudden the support can hockey stick up on become really, really expensive to carry on the arrays. So one of the other drivers was from an environmental environmental perspective of if you're gonna throw their equipment out after five years, but it's still working fine. Yeah, that's not really great on the environment. So with the fresh perspective as well as you have a green be able to maintain and keep their equipment running and going for longer than five years without a shop up left on the cost was really, really important. >> Sustainability was important to you guys. So you before we might live, you mentioned that you guys have been pure customers since about December of 2018. So about 10 months or so. So those lawyers that are billing every few minutes I have to get access to data because the clients are demanding kit. What's it been? Their reaction? Thio, the performance that you're delivering to them and a new correlation with revenue that business has made because of the decision to stay on from? >> I'll tell you what the best thing about it is. I don't complain that things are slow anymore, you know? So they say, Nighty, if you're not hearing any issues, that you're doing a good job and I would definitely in that camp The system's running significantly faster than what they were previously on. That was on a five year old array that was reasonable. Let's start as well. So the league Ford has been really recognizable from a performance perspective, so >> you don't get the Atta boy, but you just don't get the grief. >> Yeah, yeah, it's not very often that people come and say that you know, with regulations, and that since a nightie, >> but it sounds like it also simplified your management you described it used to take a long time Thio provisioning array before now it's sort of same day or a part of a portion of what have you done with that additional resource? Did you did your rift people? Did you redeploy them? >> You take the same style of if you do move things to the cloud. You know, with any type of outsourcing model messages freeing up time on the staff have got now work on other things. You know, we're slowly moving up the stack on a valu ed perspective of what we deliver, doubling more into automation integration, digital contract processing, the area that I think we should be working in rather than tweaking the nuts and bolts. Well, that that's where I started. So, yeah, it was good career passing the time >> being able to get to that value at is something that we talked with a lot of customers about that absolutely critical about not spending so much time at managing something. I want to get my job done. So a number of announcements came out today. I'm just curious to get your take on, for example, this kind of customer force that Dave and I were talking about with Charlie Giancarlo their CEO. Just a minute ago about this bridge to hybrid club, you mentioned an acquisition or a merger coming with Denton's. How would something like this hybrid bridge that here announced with AWS How might that be a facilitator of the merger? Or maybe even it's the IittIe foundation that you've established with Pierre. That's going to be a great facilitator of that pending merger. >> I think one of the slides and the Maquis know this morning talked about the on Priam in the cloud world being quite separate and we found that it is We've we've looked Whenever we go out to market, we'll look at both options and take your best of breed approach. Thio what, within a cure or subscribed way got into some cloud solutions. I'm not sure if Aladdin mention brains at all, but s so we have got cloudy >> from our standpoint, but your corporate standpoint, >> So we've got a bit of both, but it has been a bit hard to bridge the two, even even from a backup d R perspective on then also from scaling the the on cream applications into the cloud. Some some things just work better in the cloud or a better architect in the clouds. Fishy, some remote excess solutions were. If we've got issues, we want that separate, Will they dear? Yet between what else? Systems and the excess for staff on this kind of space that we've we've built in two for that be Never join those worlds a lot more seamlessly and through the same management consoles and just gonna make life a lot easier will be out of scale back and forward so we can move the data. I remember years and years ago talking to storage vendors and saying, Well, where can we can't replicate? No, Dad are up to a different brand or a different service In this case with the adoption or on sort of cloud, that's still very prevalent. >> Yes, So I mean, I deal. You'd like a common management framework control playing data plane, Back up framework. Is that right? Is that an objective between cloud and on Prem? I mean, it definitely helps, >> but the other things was mentioned in the keynote is around the availability of skilled people you think with my generation and I started often stopped supporting, then work my way through infrastructure and project management, team management and son. The people coming out of university now don't really have that same career path there from a slot in somewhere up the scared, the stick on >> very started python. And we're working on >> them or in the development of spice rather than the infrastructure space. The ability to find staff that have the knowledge off the system is getting hotter and hotter. Eso so the cloud moral, the almost storage is a service on the on prime since you cut through that and it means that you don't need those staff with the commonality of the tools that also helps us. Well, you don't have to serve someone who's years and years training and a new solution to be out of them have the confidence to move into it. >> What do >> you actually installing from frump? Yours? It is a vile storage block storage combination. We've got the X series of race. Okay, they're going for performance, obviously. And, um, because I was thinking in the cloud, you might you might be more interested in object store because of, you know, your document heaviness. But it depends on the merger, I guess. Where you guys go? >> Yeah, the you mentioned before on this some data sovereignty concerns around. We're that Donald stays. And that's why I think a lot of the law firms it probably are keeping some of their infrastructure on from so for sovereignty, we expect in performance. If it is the air, it's it is performing. The cloud can form in different ways, but having a bit of both gives you really good choice, that best of breed model >> with pure storage. You got the foundation as this acquisition, and this merger comes forward that everything's in place. Feel pretty confident about that. Yeah, we've >> got a lot of work to dio over the next few months while we adjust. What? We've got a software perspective to align with the intense global software suite. But I'm pretty confident that it can be delivered really well. >> So what's in the C I ose mind these days? You know, security cloud hybrid strategies, alignment with the business. What do your top three? >> I think like a mission before I'm really trying to kind of lift what we do to deliver value to the business. It's been John what type of business it is, but it can be seen as a cost center way. Really want to be out? Be more involved in in what, in our case, the lawyers are doing. The main project that we've got on the moment is automating legal processes not to replace any people but to augment what they do on to provide them better tools, more efficient tools. Talks that the younger lawyers, when they come in, can follow their way through and learn what their process is. Also overlaying the legal aspects around there as well. So it's not just online form. It's a it's a training guide. It's It's everything for each of those processes that >> you're deploying any machine learning, artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and in that regard yet is that we haven't quite got >> there. It's definitely on the list. Some of the things that would liketo look at those things, like machine readable software to go through documents, pullout snippets. A lot of time lawyers will spend have to read through a lot of material fine key bits of information and extract that to the news within the documents that we produce, even in simple process, is still doing that they loaned from the rial complex 56 page construction contracts. There's a There's a lot that we could potentially help to find that information for them when it comes into things like he discovery for litigation in the old days. Know that wheel in a truckload of >> paper file boxes? Guys must have loved that building at six minute increments >> way. Get your hard drive with terabytes of data. It gonna troll through all of that and that there's some real space that good I toes can help cut through that significantly faster than your standard kind of funnel based such fools. If >> you think you think software robots have a place like robotic process automation are, I think >> way we're going with it is Thea Pair. You can fit in between the human process. We're mapping out more from a business process. Perspective were there's gonna be some educational steps some human steps mopey a steps on eventually get through an outcome of delivering what the lawyers need for the clients. >> So last question is that I have is, you know, what way do all these shows we do like 100 events a year, everybody you know, the vendors tell you how great they are and what we always like to ask the practitioners your experience with pure relative toe other, you know, stories. And you know, the name names. But just is it substantively different? How much? I guess I ask you again. How much is marketing versus substantive business value for you as a practitioner? >> Yeah. So we've only had the array since December. One of things. I did a case study for Pure just recently in one of things that highlighted and there was the support. When you go on to a new vendor or choose any any different path, you're taking that kind of risk in the step into the unknown way did have an issue a few weeks after we put the first Korean on they came in during Christmas break were we were all off in our case at the beach, which is bit different in the Southern Hemisphere. But they came in flawlessly sort of the issue out gotta back working. Yeah, without necessarily having to do anything apart from let them in the building on, and that really gives the confidence and what they do, how they can deliver going forward. >> I think there's a lot of value and sharing that these things don't always go very smoothly. But you need to have established that relationship with that partner that can be rapidly deployed to help. Ultimately, I'm sure those lawyers either want to start building every three minutes. They want to be able to build more every six minutes. So never a dull moment, Nigel. In your world. But we thank you so much for joining David me on the Cuban. Maybe next year we'll be talking about how a I is helping. Hopefully clients achieve better results. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, per day. Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat music) >> Woman: (clears throat) Here today. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Josie Gillan and Laurel McLay. They have just launched a new collaboration, Twinovate. Tell our viewers about Twinovate. You are identical twins, I first of all should say his. >> Yes, we are. So Twinovate one in, what it is is Laurel and I are actually mirror twins and I'm left brain, I'm right-handed. Laurel's right brain and she's left-handed. So what I am is, I'm in my previous background is engineering leadership. I've worked at companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Cloudera. But Laurel and I saw an opportunity with our diverse viewpoints to start a collaboration together. So I'm the left brain twin. I'm logical, I'm problem-solving, and I love nothing more than to get that code compiled. >> And I'm the right brain twin, so I'm creative, language, any of that messy human emotional stuff. I'm a career coach back in New Zealand. And so I love nothing more that helping people with their identity, their uniqueness, and looking at some of the behavioral challenges which might be holding them back. So we looked at the two of us together and we thought, wow, we've got some great stuff and what are we truly passionate about? We're truly passionate about women, particularly in STEM, being able to contribute themselves fully in a way that works for them. To not only their own legacy, but the legacy of who they're collaborating with. >> Now you are here at Grace Hopper, you're running a workshop, and before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about an apology epidemic. Explain what you mean by that. >> Well, if you think about an epidemic, it's something that spreads, and often it spreads without people even realizing it, before it's too late. And so what we realized was that women, and particularly when you're using language like just, I'm sorry, it's only me. If someone gives us a compliment we say, oh, I bought this, this old thing, I got it on sale. And what we realized was the message of that was saying was I don't count, I'm invisible, please put yourself before me. And the challenge about this epidemic is a lot of people don't realize they're saying it. >> Yeah, and some great examples. This is really resonating with people. So I'm actually on a moms in tech Facebook group, and I asked for some stories. And one woman talked about softball practice. And she practices at the same field where men practice. And what she noticed is every time the women dropped a ball or missed a pitch they would say sorry, sorry, and she turned around and looked at the males and the males never, never did that. So why are we apologizing? >> And we have created this cool little sheet we call Apology Bingo that's available on our Facebook page, and it helps people to look at the many times that they might say these words. One of the words that I have realized I say all the time is actually. And even though actually may not sound apologetic in itself, it's absolutely. >> It's a qualifier, it's, right. >> It's qualifier, exactly. And so what we're talking about apologizing, over-explaining and qualifying. >> And that makes you appear a lot less confident, and really can have career-limiting impact. >> Well, I want to talk about the career-limiting impact, but I also just want to ask you about so it's one thing to understand and acknowledge and become aware that you are using this kind of language. How do you eradicate it from your vocabulary? >> So what we talk about in the workshop is little shifts and big calls. So the little shifts are those small things that you can do to catch yourself. And that's at the language level. So for example, there's a Gmail app called Just Not Sorry. >> It's a Chrome plugin. >> And so what you do is, you add that to your Gmail and it will show and underline some of the language in each email which is apologetic. But then I call it the big calls. And that's really two things. The first thing is do you want to start a revolution? Because let's face it, when you turn up previously apologetic and maybe not too troublesome, let's just say, and you start kicking out your unapologetic language, there are going to be potentially some people around there who don't take kindly to that. And they may call you angry or uppity. >> Or even worse (laughs). >> Or even worse, exactly. So I feel it's about people learning and doing some personal development work on themselves to get the courage to that. Not saying that everyone needs to start a revolution, but for those who feel inspired to do it. And for everyone I believe it is a symptom of the I'm not good enough self-worth and we have an interesting take on self-value, don't we, Josie? >> We do. Being an identical twin is very interesting because what we've found is I might get really quite snippy at Laurel and she said to me, well, why are you so snippy at me? And it was like, well, I see things in you that I don't like in myself. And so we have decided let's turn it around. I want to acknowledge in Laurel things I do like in myself and accept the things that, the bad with the good. >> Right, right and we could all learn from that. I mean, it's just a lesson in humanity. >> And one other point I want to make though, with the people might not appreciate this. We're not dropping manners here. Clearly we are not suggesting that you're no longer courteous. What we want to say is save sorry for when it really counts. >> Rebecca: For when you need to apologize. >> Right. >> Absolutely. >> So in terms of the career-limiting factors that we were talking about, what are sort of the unintended consequences of this apologetic behavior? >> Well, I can talk to that. In some of my roles in the past as an engineering leader, I've really focused on maybe more building up my team, collaboration, and sometimes my management may not agree with the way that I'm doing it, right? Now, rather than having a healthy dialogue about why I'm doing it this way and maybe coming to some kind of general agreement, I have in the past tended to say I must be wrong, he or she must be right. And the ironic thing is, with my experience, I meant to bring that in. I meant to bring my experience in. I've heard in reviews that you don't have enough of an opinion. So really I think that was certainly career-limiting for me and something I'm learning how to do much better. >> So at Twinovate you are empowering women in STEM, you are making sure that they feel included, making sure that they feel like they have a voice at the table, making sure that they are, as you said, not apologizing for being women in the workforce. Do you go in and do you work with individuals? Do you work with companies who say we need to help our workforce deal with these issues? >> Absolutely. So in this workshop we just had an hour and it was a packed audience, it was fantastic. So something that I'm really clear about is it's such a privilege being in front of a room, so we want to make sure that it's just not the talking heads, that people look at their own situation, and we give them examples, both professional and personal, because let's face it, that's a big part of it, isn't it? When people are apologetic in their own worlds. And so they all work together at the table to be able to come up and discuss, and we share that as a room. And the workshop capacity is something that we will deal with people one-on-one because that's when I've done this the whole. I think that one of the reasons I am good at uniqueness and identity is because I'm an identical twin. And so I can work with people and nail their specific challenge in a heartbeat. So for me it's about sharing that power of group but also giving the individual attention so people can walk away knowing the stuff that's particularly relevant to them. >> Okay, alright. So how, I mean I think one of the other questions I would have for you is that you're based in Silicon Valley, you're based in Auckland. Is the tech industry similar? How would you describe the different tech industries in your respective countries? >> Look, it's been so interesting, because I do quite a lot of work in New Zealand and Australia, and not just in technology, but also in engineering, which is the other part of STEM, of course. And it's more flipped the other way because I understand the challenges in new Zealand and Australia, I've been having wonderful conversations on the floor here in the last couple of days, and saying, is it true that when you turn up or someone turns up to your offices that they immediately assume you're the receptionist? And they just go, oh my goodness, absolutely. You know, is it true that you have sometimes direct reports who don't like what you say and they'll literally say it's because you're a woman? And they'll go, yes. So I feel that this is a global epidemic. >> It's a challenge, >> It's a challenge, yes. >> They're facing it everywhere. So what is next for Twinovate? Where do you go from here? I mean you're here at Grace Hopper, which is obviously a receptive audience, a vast audience for the message, but what's next for your collaboration? >> Well, as Josie said, we were really quite surprised about how strongly it resonated here today, and we've got some great feedback. We're both got children, but we're both lucky enough to have fathers of those children that are very, very supportive, and so, hey, we've got this great opportunity to see more of each other. I'm coming back in March, we're coming back next year for Grace Hopper, so I'll be coming to the states twice a year and Josie's coming down to New Zealand and Australia at least once a year. And we're just having very limited partnerships with people who want to work with us and we'll look at some public stuff too. >> And maybe a book in the works? >> So I've already written a book. >> Okay. >> But I wrote it about, I was being unapologetic at the time, and this is what I'm really passionate about. So by the time I come back in March, my unapologetic book, which is literally about unapologetic careers and lifestyles will be in our hot little hands. And Josie's contributing to that with a particular Twinovate chapter that we've been working on. >> Excellent, well, Josie, Laurel, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. And Josie, you're a Cube alum I should have said, too. >> There you go, yes, exactly. >> Great to see you again, Rebecca. >> Well, best of luck to you both. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge17 brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick Rob McDonnell is here he's the head of Enterprise Products at Air New Zealand Rob thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure thanks for having me. >> So Air New Zealand you know energy costs are down that's good for the airline business isn't it. >> Anything that's good for the barrel price of oil. >> It's priced like a tax cut to the consumer, we all go traveling. Tell us a little about the organization and your role. So we're in New Zealand headquartered out of Auckland in New Zealand Asia Pacific based but we have routed that travel to London as well. Asia Pacific is our core business. I'm part of the Digital Leadership team in the Enterprise Products, that's products like a typical IT function would run, like a CIO would run. So we have a product organization which we've had in place for the last year and a half. One of the product managers looks after our customers. So for online booking, mobile app and customer experience, one of my colleagues looks after the operational products another colleague looks after air points products with the frequent flier program. And I look after everything else internally so you've got HR products, you've got finance, help desk, incident management, we've got mobility, offices, workspace and collaboration, so there's really quite a bit in there. >> So what are the big drivers in your business that are affecting those things that you look after. >> Probably the primary one now is the new focus and a renewed focus on the internal customer. Since we started in this role a year and a half ago I've been mandating and championing the cause of the internal customer. Typically, it's about the revenue and the external customer but for me it's about the internal customer. And I've got 12 and a half thousand Air New Zealanders that I consider my customers. Those guys are the ones that wake up in the morning, they look at their Apple watch and check a message, or they login in the morning and that experience has to be correct, it has to be right when they walk into the office and when they swipe in with a badge or want to do something like get a payroll slip or something. That experience is my primary driver. So, we're looking at typifying what we have so fixing the pain-points is probably my first thing. Remove all the pain points out of the way of my customers my users, make sure they can operate. Make the job the challenge, not the tools they are using. Focusing on mobility, so focusing on the more mobile workforce that we have. I'd reckon about 60% of my user base is considered mobile. We got crew and pilots that you wouldn't see in the head office from one day to the next. A big push on cloud for obvious reasons, and then future workspace. >> So tell us about your ServiceNow journey, when did that start? >> So our ServiceNow journey started just over a year and a half ago. We had quite a frustrating environment where we had a bad reputation for digital services. People weren't too happy calling our help desk. The name of the product we had was called assist an internally branded product, people called it Cease and desist, the reputation was, we had a bad reputation. So one of our primary goals was to get that reputation back, earn it back and really try and delight out customers. So we had gone through some product selection and ServiceNow came right on top and was the product of choice for us to implement. So we were able to replace four platforms with ServiceNow. We had one platform we buying parts off the internet a couple things to keep it going, so was a bit of a shaky situation. Bad user experience, so implementing ServiceNow we made sure that we took a, when we did the reorganization for digital, we stopped the project and changed it to be a business organizational change project not an IT project. So it wasn't IT delivering a product to the business it was a business choice and a business decision so we changed, stopped the project, introduced and implemented change management as part of the project, we brought in different skills in terms of Agile ways of working and we changed the product structure as well to suit. We went live with an MVP last year, we pushed out redesigned platform January last year, was about 70% ready, so again it was a new feeling for Air New Zealand staff having a product that wasn't perfect, but just suited for going live. And then we went live with the full suite of what we were doing in June, July last year. It's been an awesome journey. >> So you made the decision to sweep the floor of these four other platforms. At the point at which you made that decision you did a contract with ServiceNow. What happened, how long did it take you to get to that MVP, what did you have to do. I mean the old saying is God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. You had to deal with that existing infrastructure how did you go from that point to the MVP how long did it take? >> Our approach was to, we were trying to de-risk or learn more about what the experience is going to be for our customers, so we went live, onboard in Helsinki so one of the first customers to go live on the Helsinki product. In the interim, we took the existing platform and we reskinned it with a brand new look and feel. The brand new look and feel was around how we wanted our customers to experience service management. So we followed them in terms of their role rather than just rolling out the product. So we reskinned the existing product and we reiterated and reiterated on what they wanted. Changing the features in the screen and rolling that one out. So we knew we had a really really good product and on the day we went live, we just basically flipped the switch. We didn't carry over any existing tickets, migrated hardly any of the data, started from scratch basically by flicking a switch. The product we went live with on the ServiceNow platform looked exactly like the one we reskinned in preparation for when we de-risked it. >> How long did that take to get to MVP? >> MVP was about two months and we included design. Then the remainder was about three months. >> What are some of the things you're measuring in terms of the customer satisfaction? Obviously nobody is saying cease and desist anymore. But what are some of the things you are measuring getting feedback from your internal customers? >> People like the product they like the platform. They like the fact that we can access it on a mobile phone. Which again, is a new thing for internal staff and Air New Zealanders. Along side the digital changes we were making some physical changes too. So we introduced a new help desk along side both at the airport and in the city offices. So again, people were getting physical and digital experience when we went live. And like I said I like the product, I like the simplicity and our business partners enjoy the speed that they can get catalog items up and get their teams more efficient and more effective. The ability to do pre-approved changes has driven a lot of efficiency, I think we have over 75% of pre-approved changes. We had things like I think 26% of our calls to the help desk were for password resets we're using this took to help reduce those numbers. We introduced a new MPS score as well or a digital happiness score for our internal customers. So we have it for external, so we've introduced that for internal. We promote that on the front of our portal as well so people can give us feedback in terms of what they like and what they don't like. So it's fairly responsive in how we react to what they want in the product. >> You avoided custom modules or did you do some custom modification to the platform? >> Mainly configuration to get it where we wanted to go. The look and feel in the portal was fairly custom but using code components available on the platform. >> Yeah, so when you upgrade you don't have to do the heavy wrestling with the modules. >> No it was an easy journey. >> And then how about a single CMDB is that something that you guys have adopted. >> So CMDB we delayed until this year. We're actually starting it next month. >> What's the conversation like internally around CMDB? Is it, you got a lot of different parts of the organization and is it going to be a single CMDB for the entire organization or are there going to be multiple CMDB's? >> So it's a big, scary topic, and the lady we're getting on, we're talking about it in iterative approach start small and build out. Primarily it will be the core enterprise stack, shared services stack, then we need to look at, and again it's wonderful being here at Knowledge and learning how far people are pushing it in terms of their external customers, so I'm looking at operations, I'll be looking at IoT and figuring how I can use that platform to be more effective. Having the CMDB will be a good starting block for that. >> You said IoT. >> So opportunities for us are around, we're an airline we have plans, we have power machines, we have engines on planes so you would have heard GE being mentioned quite a bit here. So what's the opportunity with those products and how can we use service management for event management of those stacks? When we think about the digital workplace environment and the connected devices, how do we use ServiceNow in that environment and how do we use it effectively? I think there's a great opportunity for us there. >> Can you take us back into the discussions internally when you had to sell the project internally to the management. Who did you have to involve, what was the business case? >> I think the business case was primarily lead by IT. Or the old IT because it was our product. All the onus on the project resided in IT, so I think the sale around the cost of the platform the duration on implementation, it wasn't too hard to sell in terms of the risk we were carrying on the legacy platforms. I think the opportunity if you flip it around the other side it was an easier conversation to our customers to say this is what you're getting and they were quite keen and quite eager to get involved in the implementation. >> What have you seen so far, it's early days but what kind of results have you seen? Can you share any metrics with us? >> I'll give you some indications early on about pre-approved changes and we have a bit of a, I'll defer on the exact numbers on our desk, we have so many parameters going on in New Zealand it wouldn't be fair to anybody. >> Well so just generally the business impact how would you describe that? >> Very positive, so we use it in the GSS area so Group Shared Services, so they're finding it far more effective to engage with their teams allocating work and automating the workflow. We have quite a queue, quite a backlog of other areas that want to get involved and automate and optimize. >> Where do you see this platform going? Do you see it driving into different parts of the business? We hear a lot about that at this conference is that something that you guys are looking at? >> Yeah, we rolled out to a group, our ground service equipment team, so they use it for example, a rampload or someone on the tarmac notifying a vendor that there is something wrong with a piece of equipment. So that optimizes that flow. So we're saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So that's quite an efficiency gain. So looking to push into again, more HR and finance, Group Shared Services. Looking to optimize against our work day implementation in July, so make sure those two platforms work together very well and build a platform appropriately. >> OK, so you'll bring in the HR piece, is that right? >> Yeah, we'll need to find a, I've been having lots of conversations the last few days around how those two behemoth products fit together how you use them effectively and that's where we need to get to. So how do you use a portal on the front end to make it easier for the customer or the user to do what they want without having to think about what platform they need to go to. >> How about the show? You mentioned it's great being here, as a quasi-noob. Is this your first? >> This is my first Knowledge. I think it's fantastic. >> Things you've learned? What kinds of things are exciting you here? >> I like the ServiceNow people amazing, passionate, including the guys back in Australia and New Zealand a few of them are here, I can see the passion back there and I can see it here so it's quite collegial and it's amazing to see. I think the event's awesome, it's massive. Keynote was fantastic, it was really good. And just the energy with the vendors and the passion that people have for their customers and the business value they can get from this product, that's one of the key things I'm hearing from all the conversations. >> It sounds like you're getting what's been talked about over and over which is such the peer input in terms of helping you figure out where you're going to go next. >> Yeah, lot's of people are here to learn, but also lots of people are here to share and I'm learning that time and time again. Which is great. >> Rob thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. Be right back.