>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018, brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Salesforce Dreamforce, they're saying it's 170,000 people. Take public transit, do not bring your car, do not take Uber, grab a line, grab a BART, whatever you need. So we're excited to have a practitioner. We love to get customers on, we love to talk to people that are out here actually using all these tools, and our next guest, we're excited to have Becky Bastien. She's a senior force.com developer for BD, which is Becton Dicksinson-- >> Dickinson. >> Becky, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, what type of products do you work on? >> So, I mean primarily we're a Salesforce.com platform, right? And we have a lot of add-ons with Conga, DocuSign, you name it, we're doing it. Apttus CLM, and we also use Oracle CPQ. Anything that connects to the Salesforce.com platform, you can imagine we probably use it. >> And you've been developing on Salesforce for a number of years, looking at your LinkedIn history, so you've got a lot of experience with the platform. Just a little bit of perspective, how this conference has changed, how Salesforce is a platform from just a pure play kind of Salesforce management system, which is what it started at CRM, to what kind of it is today? >> Yeah, I mean the conference has changed astronomically obviously over the years. What you said, it was 170 thousand, right? It's crazy. >> That's crazy. >> Logistically, it's a little tough to get around but it's so much fun and there's so much that you can learn here. It's just increased over the years. The content has gotten better, there's more focused areas, which I really like. I'm a developer at heart so I really focus on that. But as far as the platform itself, it's really grown. You can do anything with it. At BD, we even have done things that are completely custom, like our entire implementation team for one of our business units runs out of Salesforce.com as a project management application. We don't just use it for sales, right? >> Right. >> Or marketing, even. We use it across the board for implementation and now we're getting into the service aspect as well. >> Right, we're here at the Conga event and we talked before we turned the cameras on, you're using the Conga tool set in kind of a unique and slightly different way than some of the applications we've heard. I wonder if you could share some of the applications that you use and how you use them? >> Sure, so one of our primary uses of Conga is actually generating documents that are customer facing, that really educate our clients, our end clients and then also helps us with some of the data that we're gathering for our product development. But what we do is we go out to the client's site and we're actually sometimes in an operating room, or at a catheter injection or a blood draw, multiple things that we actually gather data on via another application called Fulcrum. We pull all that data back into Salesforce and then we use Conga to generate the documents that are customer facing. With that, it really empowers our business as well because they have full control over that Conga document, so they can make the changes that they need to, without involving IT, and we just kind of hook it all up in the back end for them. >> Right, right. It's really a new kind of world in terms of the opportunity to go gather data on your products, whether it's connected via an application or different things, as opposed to back in the old day, you made it, you shipped it, you sent it out through your distributor and you had no idea how end users are using it, how the doctors are using it in this case. >> Yeah. >> But now, you've got this opportunity to do more of a closed loop feedback, back into the product development. >> Yeah and it's not only a product development, but we're actually educating the hospitals on, are you using the product to what we actually manufactured it for? Are you using it for something entirely different? Are you using it the wrong way? It's actually an education tool back to our end customer and saying, "Hey, this is where you can improve "operating procedures," basically. >> Another hot topic that we hear about all the time, we go to all these conferences, is bots. You talked about, you guys are doing something interesting with bots, again, leveraging the Conga application probably not necessarily the way that's it's, I didn't see Bots on their product sheet. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about that application? >> Yeah, We have a bot where our sales reps can basically enter some information into an Excel spreadsheet. It's for a quick quote for a customer, and the bot will crawl that spreadsheet and feed it back into SAP. What we've found is that our sales reps are having a hard time getting the right customer number, getting the right contact information and things like that, where the Bot would fail if they didn't have the right information. What we've done with Conga is we generate that Excel spreadsheet from Salesforce.com so the sales rep is on an opportunity, and they generate the bot, they generate the spreadsheet, they fill out the rest of the information and then it gets sent along its way and it creates the order and SAP eventually. It's really cutting out some human error. >> Right, so does the Bot fill in the missing data? Or it just flags that you've got some incomplete stuff you have to fill in? >> Yeah so, we're passing it as much as we can for the rep. They're having to manually enter some things like what product, what quantity, and things like that, and then the bot crawls it and throws it into SAP. It's just an easier way for a rep when they're sitting out on-site with a client. They can actually put it in an Excel spreadsheet, which they love. >> Right. Of course we're trying to get 'em away from Excel spreadsheets anyway, but let's go ahead and automate some of it for them so it cuts out that error. >> It's a really interesting story because it's often a battle to get the sales people to work in Salesforce. >> Yeah. >> As opposed to report in Salesforce. >> Right. >> You're really kind of bridging that gap, letting 'em work in Excel, which isn't necessarily their preferred solution but if that's what they're doing and then integrating that back into the automated system. >> It's hard to change that behavior, for sure. >> Yes it is. >> But yeah, by giving them the bot, we're actually making them go into Salesforce. It gets them more comfortable with it and a way to drive user adoption. >> Right and I'm sure you can see a future where AI is going to enable more and more automation of all the little bits and pieces of that process going forward. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, too, what we talked about with gathering all that data, that's one of the things with Einstein that we're really interested in, especially at Dreamforce this year, is learning more about Einstein and what we can do on the platform with all the data that we have gathered. >> Right, right. The other thing you mentioned before we turn on the cameras, it's again, kind of a new technology, is voice. Obviously with the proliferation of Alexa and Google Home and OK Siri, and all these things, voice is going to be an increasingly important way that people interact with applications. As you look forward, down the road, what are some of the opportunities you see there, where you can start to integrate more potential voice control into the applications? >> I think it kind of goes back to our sales reps, again. Where they're on on-site. If they can talk into their phone really quickly and say, "Update this opportunity amount." I mean, that's great. It gets them, again, into Salesforce, it's going to drive that user adoption. I saw a session on it earlier today and I thought it was pretty cool. I think they'll be excited about that. We're also implementing field service for Lightning. We have our actual texts that get dispatched out on-site, so I can really see them using that on the mobile experience as well. >> The dispatch is going out through Lightning and then the management of the service call is also happening inside of Lightning? >> Yeah, we're implementing Service Cloud right now. The next phase will be implementing field service for Lightning. We're now dispatching out of SAP, but we're looking to move it entirely to Salesforce. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> Okay, if Marc Benioff came in and sat down, there was a guy that looked just like his brother here earlier, what would you ask him? What kind of magic wand you've been developing in this thing for a number of years, would you say, Marc, love it, love it, but could you just give me a little of this and and a little of that? >> I'd say, show me the road map and no safe harbor, tell me it's actually going to happen. No, I think mobile is where we're always really trying to figure out where Salesforce is going, and I think they've really improved. But I offline capability is something that has struggled with Salesforce. We have to rely on other apps that write back into Salesforce. >> Right. >> It'd be nice to eliminate those other offline applications and just use Salesforce.com for that offline power train. Because a lot of times we're at the hospital, and there's no wifi, there's no connection. >> Right, right. >> So we have to have that offline capability. >> Still kind of the soft underbelly of cloud-based things but 5G is coming, we were just at the AT&T show and we'll have 5G 10x the speed, 100x the speed. >> Bring it on, yeah. >> So good stuff. Alright, Becky, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Absolutely. >> And keep coding away. >> Thank you. >> Alright. >> She's Becky, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, downtown San Francisco, come on by. (upbeat techno music)

>>Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. >>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante. Welcome to this cube conversation. This is a company that we've been following now for the last couple of years in a trend in robotic process automation, and then automation specifically, uh, it's a, it's a company in an area that we really like. Uh, we've been researching this and publishing and Daniel Dienes is here. He's the CEO of UI path. Yeah, it was great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for inviting me, David. >>That's our pleasure. So let's, let's get an update in your business. You know, we covert obviously you sent everybody for a loop. We had been and have been following you guys quite, quite closely. How's how are things going for UI path? How has the pandemic affected your business? >>We we've designed this company from day one to work in a hybrid mode, local and under, obviously working from anywhere. And the transition to working from anywhere model was a really fast to implement for us. So COVID-19 itself. In the fact of the way we work on the business side, I would say that we are seeing, you know, mixed of events, some, uh, industries that was, that were mostly affected by COVID we're putting their budgets one hole while other industries were increasing 10 times. What I can tell you that in, um, in a nutshell, the numbers for us were really good. We are able to keep eating and beating the thought gets that we set pretty COVID and we focused quite a lot on helping our customers, not the gating through these murky waters. We have quite a lot of, um, involvement in healthcare and federal business. We worked with a few hospitals to help with accelerating the COVID test. In one case, we were able to save two hours a day for every nurse. So instead of filling up paperwork, they are able to focus on the patient. And that's not one isolated instance. We've done tremendous work across the, across the globe. And, uh, you know, we, uh, you know, that we raised our last round in, uh, June end of June. And that was a recognition of our accelerated business, >>Right? Yes. I mean, you raised it in the, of the pandemic, you know, I I've been saying that. I mean, everybody of course says the covert has accelerated a number of trends and I've been saying there's a, that there's now an increased mandate for automation, I think there was before, but yeah, maybe there was some complacency, although you didn't see it in your numbers, you guys obviously growing very right fast. You mentioned healthcare. I would think of banking and financial as well, which of course was a stronghold. But when you think about in the U S anyway, that the payroll protection act and the number of loans that had to be processed, you know, bank bankers would talk to me and say, we are volume, increased two orders of magnitude. We had, we had no way to do it. And they turn to automation to do that. So, so I've said that there is an automation mandate, and I think there, there, there has been because of the productivity gap, particularly in the U S in Europe, you don't see it so much in, in of course in China. Uh, but, but certainly the U S in the last couple of decades has declined in terms of productivity. So, you know, people are not going to be able to solve the world's biggest problems without automation. How are you thinking about that? Um, in, in this post COVID world, >>As you said, the awareness that we have to automate has increased 10 times compared to pre COVID the days. I would not say that yet automation is number one priority on the company's leader's agenda, not in the same way as conferencing and video conferencing, and all this directly affected, positively affected the software industries. But I believe that, uh, while automation is slower to adopt, and it requires a lot more investment to adopt it's, uh, it's gone, uh, dominate the agenda post COVID in the, in the sense that people will have to recoup, you know, all the losses that they had in the COVID, they learn their lessons. And, uh, you know, for instance, I talked to the few CEOs of watch, you know, fortune 500 businesses, and they are telling me, Daniel, I wish that we have started earlier. So now we are seeing, you know, an adoption that is more top down and adoption that is starting from the C level suite, even the CEO of large enterprises. >>Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that if a customer has tasted, you know, the benefits of, of RPA and automation, uh, and as realizes what it can do for their business, they're gonna maybe double down on it, especially in a time when revenues might be under pressure. Uh, and, and you're not hiring a, a no, a lot of people have put, you know, freezes on number of head layoffs. You've got to do more with less you guys. I wonder if you could bring up this, this chart, I want to share this and get Daniel's reaction. So we all were talking about land and expand. So what this is ETR data, and what it does is it asks customers where they're at. Do they know about a vendor in this case? It's it's UI path is on the left and automation anywhere, and then some others, but do you know about the vendor? >>And, and are you planning on, you know, are you evaluating it? Are you planning to implement it? Uh, and this chart shows those respondents that said, yes, we, we, we are a customer. And we, we plan to expand our usage and you can see over the last three surveys that the yellow is even an uptick. And so people, this essentially the takeaway here is that once people taste it, that you land, and then they expand and find new use cases, are you seeing that in your business? And maybe you can give us some, some high level examples we've seen quite the look >>We have today more than 60 customers with, uh, over a million dollars in spending with us, uh, more than, uh, like 800 customers that spend more than a hundred K we've lost. And our net expansion rate is more than 140% consistent over many past quarters that shows a very solid, uh, expansion desire from our customers. And it shows that our technology is very well suitable for large case automation, deployments, enterprise wide, especially with our, uh, program or robot for every person. We are seeing huge interest and way bigger deals. We are able to lend upfront work to upscale our existing customers. You know, in a way I don't believe that in five years from now on, we will ever have people just to mindlessly move data from one screen to the other. I think this is a thing of the past, as much as plowing the fields is a thing of the past. >>So I wonder if he could talk a little bit about the, where you've come from as a company. So, I mean, you started in 2005. So, I mean, I think of you as a startup, but you've been around for a long time. Uh, and, and my sense is you started as a product company, but, you know, recently you guys announced this end to end platform for what you call or maybe Gardner calls. I don't know their term of hyper automation, but, but you've gone from a product company to a platform company. I wonder if you could talk about how you think about that transition and, and, and the platform generally >>To become a platform requires of certain level. And it's in a way, a harder business to promote to one enterprise customer. They, uh, they are very likely to test water with the product, but when, uh, you know, bad thing, everything, automation, why don't a platform, it's a different game. So this is why we, uh, we had to go from the steps of products, you know, product then like a couple of products, and then putting everything together into a platform. The power of the platform in, uh, in this particular instance comes from, uh, the integration of all pieces in a platform and an automation, white platform will have a different sets of products that play from the discovery of the processes that you automated, the implementation and maintenance of the process into the analytics that helps you track your progress. And also you have technologies that addresses two different persona in an enterprise from, you know, software engineers, RPA developers into the citizen developers. >>So it's a, it's a, it's a huge offering. And, um, the, what is really important for us is that we give full fledged platform. So an enterprise customer knows we will be able to build everything on the top of this platform, and they will offer best in class where it matters. And we believe that best-in-class matters in few important areas like RPA, like process mining, like analytics, while they will offer good enough where they will offer integration with best-in-class products where, uh, it's, uh, it's not so important in the, in the grand scheme of deploying automation, but the integration is tremendously important piece, put yourself in the shoes of a big enterprise instead of buying 20 different products, different, a licensing agreement, different maintainers stuff, different teams to support them. You just have one and they, and you have the guarantee. They work very well together. It's a very big proposition. I did requires maturity of the platform when they are making, you know, big strides into having the credibility that you know is required to have such a big investment. >>Well, I have to bring you bring that up. I have to ask you, so you guys are obviously a RPA and automation specialist building out a platform, very focused on that. And we always talk about this best of breed versus, uh, versus integrated suites. And you're sort of talking about integration. Of course, we saw Microsoft come out and as, as well as others, IBM, I think SAP have announced sort of what I would consider one dot products, you know, not nearly as robust as you and some of your, your leading competition, but how do you think about that in terms of staying ahead of that? I mean, you know, we all know Microsoft, you used to work there, they come out with a one Datto and, you know, then the two dot O and it's just still, and then eventually they get it right? So you have to move fast. >>Yes, absolutely. And we, we proved that we can move fast. We've built this company from zero five years ago to, you know, we are almost half a billion dollar in era today. So wait, we are fast. This is one of the four tenants of our culture be fast. But speaking about what the strategy in, uh, I believe that the space of low code, no code business application development, and the hyper automation space will, uh, converge into one single space, a company like Microsoft started with, uh, a simple product like, uh, if TTT and, uh, that was dedicated only to citizen developer to build very, you know, small and quick integrations. Like if you look at, uh, if you look at the power automate use cases, you'll see one of the most common use cases to set on a lot for myself. Well, I understand the value of such use case, but it's a far cry from setting an alarm and to automating, you know, end to end, procure to pay or order to cash for a big enterprise or COVID testing. >>And basically where we are coming from two different angles. We are coming from the RPA angle that is putting computer vision at the center of the technology. And they are coming from weak API integration. And we are making, we are making progress, you know, towards each other. My belief, I believe that, um, we have an advantage here in a sense that, uh, RPA is a technology that can produce immediate returns, but the labs K Y LA while the anther type of technologies, first of all, traditional automation, and then all this new type of API economy, API integrations kind of largely failed to show scalability within big enterprises. They are nice to have, but they are not essential when you are choosing a platform. My, uh, take is that you are choosing a platform based on what you need the most. This is where you choose the best in class. And you need the certainty that you partner with a vendor that invest the most. Well, this is our bread and butter. This is where we start. And of course we are offering every piece that the other are doing while they are also getting into, into our world. But our advantage being cloud agnostic, being ERP, agnostic, being CRM agnostic, and having started from the most sensitive technology that offer you, you know, the most, uh, the most savings center, best productivity increases. It's a tremendous advantage. >>And of course, you know, I'm excited about this opportunity and I've talked to a number of your customers. And so, you know, to me, that's the proof in the pudding, but you mentioned your annual recurring revenue, you know, approaching half a billion. So I got add, and, you know, as well that in my breaking analysis, we took a look at the total available market for RPA. And then I think, well, we've extended that I think we kinda missed the broader automation agenda in the platform thinking, and we've, we've updated those figures. I mean, it's, uh, it's hundreds of billions of dollars of an opportunity at least. And so the reason I bring this up is of course, last week we saw the hottest software IPO in history, and snowflake is a company with $400 million ARR growing at 120%. The company went from, you know, early this year, $15 billion valuation went up to 20, went up to 30. >>They, they launched a 33 billion within five minutes. It was worth 80 billion. You know, of course it's settling down now in the 60 billion, but unbelievable. And I would argue that your total available market is perhaps even even larger. I would say it is larger because it has a deeper business impact, uh, than, than say a snowflake. And of course, people watching my programs know that I'm a very, very high on that company. So my question is, what do you think about that, that IPO? How are you thinking about your, your own IPO? It would seem that that UI path is in a great position to at some point become a public company. >>We, first of all, if you are speaking about the time way, nobody would argue that our team is not higher than a snowflake. Pam, I, we can argue that their market is maybe more consolidated. Everybody understands data market in a way, and our market might be way more scattered across different use cases, but in a way, it's the market of data versus the market of all data versus old processes in the world. It's way, way more people are tasked today with processes then to analyzing and working with data in the way we are going after a very large problem that we have to solve. And we have to empower people of doing what they are naturally built to do, like, you know, talking to other people, socially interact, being creative, making decision, instead of doing this numbing part of their daily jobs that aren't required by this state of the industry. >>So our time we talked with different bankers and I've seen various figures from like 200 BD, one, two way into like two, three years for something that it's happy with. So time is the problem. It's the way, the way we are. I think, uh, we, uh, what we want to build, it's a durable business and it's a, it's a durable growth. Why in the same time being a cashflow positive, and we are very close to achieve this goals. And that will look, I believe that will be a very compelling proposition for our own IPO. I don't know if we can get snowflake multiples or not, but this is the feeling not the more, the biggest thing when my agenda, my, my agenda is to build a longterm sustainable, durable business. I am looking to next five to 10 years of this business. And IPO is just the fundraising event in, in, you know, after all. >>Great. So yeah, that's good. I wanted to ask you kind of what the, what the parameters are and, you know, I think you answered it is you're not rushing to get in, to draft off of some event that you had no control over that that notion of cashflow positive is really interesting to me. I said about the snowflake. I feel they have plenty of Tam just like you guys. And I agreed somewhere between 200 billion and 3 trillion. That's about right. And so, and, but, but I think that the, what I said about Snowflake's IPO is that I'm not worried about their lack of profitability right now. At some point I'm really going to be focused on their operating cash flow. And if you can, if you can come out with the large Tam, your, your growth that you're at the large ARR and cashflow positive, I can't wait to see that IPO Daniel. That's going to be super exciting. So we'll, we'll, uh, we'll be patient, but Daniel Dienes thank you so much for coming back into QBR. I was a great guest. Really appreciate the update on your business. >>Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation. Thanks. You're welcome. And >>Keep it right there. Everybody we'll be back with our next guest. Run up to this short break. This is Dave Volante.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's the Cube, covering .conf2017, brought to you by Splunk. (busy electronic music) >> Welcome back to the Washington Convention Center, the Walter Washington Convention Center, in our nation's capital as our coverage continues here of .conf2017. We're here at Splunk along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls, and kind of coming down the home stretch, Dave. There's just something about the crowd's lingering still, the show for, still has that good vibe to it, late second day, hasn't let off yet. >> Oh, no, remember, the show goes on through tomorrow. There's some event tonight, I think. I don't know, the band's here. >> Yeah, but-- >> Be hanging out, partying tonight. >> But you can tell the Splunkers are alive and well. We have Terry Ramos with us, who's going to join us for the next 15 minutes or so, the VP of Business Development of Palo Alto Networks. Terry, good to see you, sir. >> Good, really appreciate you having me here. >> You bet, you bet, thanks for joining us. You've got a partnership now, you've synced up with Splunk. >> Terry: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit about that. Then we'll get into the customer value after that. But first off, what's the partnership all about? >> Sure. We've actually been partners for about five years, really helping us solve some customer needs. We've got about several thousand customers who are actually using both products together to solve the needs I'll talk about in a minute. The partnership is really key to us. We've invested a ton of time, money, effort into it, we have executive level sponsorship all the way down to sales. In the field, we have reps working together to really position the solution to customers, both us and Splunk and then how we tie together. We're the number one downloaded app for Splunk by far that's a third party, so they have a couple that are more downloaded than us, but for third party, we've done that. We develop it all in house ourselves. For customers out there who think the app's great, I'll talk about the new version coming, I'd love any feedback on what should we do next, what are the next things we should do in the app, because we're really developing this and making this investment for customers to get the value out of it. >> What about the business update for Palo Alto Networks? I mean, can you give us the sort of quick rundown on what's going on in your world? >> Sure. I think most people know Palo Alto Networks has done pretty well. We just finished our FY '17, finished with about 42,500 customers. Revenue was, I think, 1.8 billion, approximately. We're still a very high growth company, and been growing the product set pretty well, from products next-gen firewall, all the attached subscriptions. Then we've got things like the Endpoint Traps now that's really doing well in the market, where customers need help on preventing exploits on the endpoint. That's been a growing market for us. >> It's the hottest space in the data center right now, and everybody wants to partner with you guys. Obviously, Splunk, you go to all the big shows, and they're touting their partnerships with Palo Alto. What do you attribute that sort of success to? >> Customers, truly. I run the partnerships for the company. If we do not have a customer who will be invested in the integration and the partnership, we don't do it. The number one thing we ask when somebody says, I want to partner with you, is, who's the customer, what's the use case, and why, right. Then if we can get good answers to that, then we go down the path of a partnership. Even then, though, we're still pretty selective. We've got 150 partners today that are technology partnerships. But we've got a limited number, Splunk's a big one, that we really invest heavily in, far more than the others, far more than just an API integration, the stuff of getting out to customers in the field the development of apps and integration, those things. >> Talk about, we laugh about Barney deals sometimes, I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. What differentiates that sort of Splunk level of partnership? Is it engineering resources? Is it deeper go to market? Maybe talk about that a little. >> Yeah, I hate Barney partnerships completely. If I do those, fire me, truthfully. I think the value that we've done with Splunk that we've really drawn out is, we've built this app, right, so BD has a team of developers on our team that writes the app for Splunk. We have spent four years developing this app. We were the first company to do adaptive response before it was called adaptive response. You see something in Splunk, you can actually take action back to a firewall to actually block something, quarantine something, anything like that. The app today is really focused on our products, right, through Endpoint, WildFire, things like that, right, so it's very product focused. We're actually putting in a lot of time and effort into a brand new app that we're developing that we're showing off now that we'll ship in about a month a half that's really focused on adversaries and incidents. We have something called the adversary score card where it'll show you, this is what's actually happening on my network, how far is this threat penetrating my network and my endpoints, is it being stopped, when is it being stopped. Then we've got an incident flow, too, that shows that level down to Traps prevented this, and here's how it prevented it. Then if we go back to the adversary score card, it ties into what part of the kill chain did we actually stop it at. For a CISO, when you come in and you say, there's a new outbreak, there's a new worm, there's a new threat that's happening, how do I know that I'm protected? Well, Splunk gives you great access to that data. What we've done is an app on top of it that's a single click. A SOC guy can say, here's where we're at, here's where we've blocked it. >> I guess I've been talking to a lot of folks here the last two days, and we've got a vendor right over here, we're talking, they have a little scorecard up, and they tell you about how certain intrusions are detected at certain intervals, 190 days to 300 and some odd days. Then I hear talk about a scorecard that tells you, hey, you've got this risk threat, and this is what's happened. I mean, I guess I'm having a hard time squaring that all up with, it sounds like a real time examination. But it's really not, because we're talking about maybe half a year or longer, in some cases, before a threat is detected. >> Yeah, so as a company, we've really focused on prevention. Prevent as much as you can. We have a product called WildFire, where we have tens of thousands of customers who actually share data with us, files and other things, files, URLs, other things. What we do is we run those through sandboxing, dynamic analysis, static analysis, all sorts of stuff, to identify if it's malicious. If it's malicious, we don't just start blocking that file, we also send down to the firewall all the things that it does. Does it connect to another website to download a different payload, does it connect to a C&C site, command and control site? What's that malware actually doing? We send that down to the customer, but we also send it to all of our customers. It may hit a target, right, the zero day hit one customer, but then we start really, how do we prevent this along the way, both in the network and at the endpoint? Yeah, there are a lot of people that talk about breaches long term, all that, what we're trying to make sure is we're preventing as much as we can and letting the SOC guys really focus on the things that they need to. A simple piece of malware, they shouldn't be having to look at that. That should be automatically stopped, prevented. But that advanced attack, they need to focus on that and what are they doing about it. >> The payloads have really evolved in the last decade. You mentioned zero day. Think about them, we didn't even know what it was in the early 2000s. I wonder if you could talk about how your business has evolved as the sophistication of the attackers has evolved from hacktivist to organized crime to nation state. >> Yeah, yeah. It has evolved a lot, and when you think about the company, 42,500 customers says a lot. We've been able to grow that out. When you talk about a product, something like WildFire that does this payload analysis, when we launched the product it was free. You'd get an update about every 24 hours, right. We moved it down to, I think it was four hours, then it was an hour, 20 minutes, and now it's about five minutes. In about five minutes, we do all that analysis and how do we stop it. Back to the question is, when you're talking about guys that are just using malware and running it over and over, that's one thing. But when you're talking about sophisticated nation states, that's where you've got to get this, prevent it as quickly as you possibly can. >> If we're talking about customer value, you've kind of touched on it a little bit, but ultimately, you said you've got some to deal with Splunk, some to deal with you, some are now dealing with both. End of the day, what does that mean to me, that you're bringing this extra arsenal in? How am I going to leverage that in my operations? What can I do with it better, I guess, down the road? >> Yeah, I think it really comes down to that, how quickly can you react, how do you know what to react to. I mean, it's as simple as that, I know it sounds super simple, but it is that. If I'm a SOC guy sitting in a SOC, looking at the threats that are happening on my network, what's happening on my endpoints, and being able to say, this one actually got through the firewall. It was a total zero day, we had never seen it before. But it landed at the endpoint, and it tried to run and we prevented it there. Now you can go and take action down to that endpoint and say, let's get it off the endpoint, the firewall's going to be updated in a few minutes anyway. But let's go really focus on that. It's the focus of, what do you need to worry about. >> Dave: Do you know what a zero day is? >> You've kind of, yeah, I mean, it's the movie, right? >> He's going, no, no, there was a movie because of the concept-- >> Because of the idea. >> David's note, there's been zero days of protection. But you can explain it better than I can. >> Yeah, zero day means it's a brand new attack, never seen before, whether it be-- >> Unique characteristics and traits in a new way that infiltrate, and something that's totally off from left field. >> When you think about it, those are hard to create. They take a lot of time and effort to go find the bugs in programs, right. If it's something in a Microsoft or an Oracle, that's a lot of effort, right, to go find that new way to do a buffer overflow or a heap spray or whatever it is. That's a lot of work, that's a lot of money. One of the things we focused on is, if we can prevent it faster, that money, that investment those people are making is out the window. We really, again, are going to focus on the high end, high fidelity stuff. >> The documentary called "Zero Days," but there was, I don't know how many zero day viruses inside of Stuxnet, like, I don't know, four or five. You maybe used to see, the antivirus guys would tell you, we maybe see one or two a year, and there were four or five inside of this code. >> Loaded into one invasion, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's the threat from within. I mean, one of the threats, if I recall correctly, was actually, they had to go in and steal some chip at some Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer, so they had to have a guy infiltrate, who knows, with a mop or something, stick a, had to break in, basically. These are, when you see a payload like that, you know it's a nation state, not just some hacktivist, right, or even organized crime doesn't necessarily have the resources for the most part, right? >> It's a big investment, it is. Zero days are a big investment, because you've got to figure it out, you may have to get hardware, you have to get the software. It's a lot of work to fund that. >> They're worth a lot of money on the black market. I mean, you can sell those things. >> That's why, if we make them unusable fairly quickly, it stops that investment. >> We were talking with Monte Mercer earlier, just talking about his comments this morning, keynotes about you could be successful defending, right. It's not all bets are off, we're hopeless here. But it still sounds as if, in your world, there are these inherent frustrations, because bad guys are really smart. All of a sudden, you've got a whole new way, a whole new world that you have to combat, just when you thought you had enough prophylactic activity going on in one place, boom, here you are now. Can you successfully defend? Do you feel like you have the tools to be that watch at the gate? >> I'd be a liar if I say you can prevent everything, right. It's just not possible. But what you've got to be able to prevent is everything that's known, and then take the unknown, make it known as quickly as possible, and start preventing that. That's the goal. If anybody out here is saying they prevent everything, it's just not true, it can't be true. But the faster you take that unknown and make it known and start preventing it, that's what you do. >> Well, and it's never just one thing in this world, right? Now there's much more emphasis being placed on response and predicting the probability of the severity and things of that nature. It really is an ecosystem, right. >> Terry: It is, that's what I do. >> Which is kind of back to what you do. How do you see this ecosystem evolving? What are your objectives? >> I think that from my standpoint, we'll continue to build out new partnerships for customers. We really focus on those ones that are important to customers. We recently did a lot with authentication partners, right, because that's another level of, if people are getting those credentials and using them then what are they doing with them, right? We did some new stuff in the product with a number of partners where we look at the credentials, and if they're leaving the network, going to an unknown site, that should never happen, right? Your corporate credentials should never go to some unknown site. That's a good example of how we build out new things for customers that weren't seen before with a partner. We don't do authentication, so we rely on partners to do that with us. As we continue to talk about partnership and BD, we're going to continue to focus on those things that really solve that need for our customer. >> Well, I don't know how you guys sleep at night, but I'm glad you do. >> Dave: No, we don't. What do you mean? I'm glad you don't. >> It's 24/7, that's for sure. >> Terry: Yes. >> Terry, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you very much. >> We appreciate the time, glad to have you on the Cube. The Cube will continue live from Washington, DC, we're at .conf2017. (busy electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Silicon Valley, it's the theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Hey welcome back. We're here live in Palo Alto at the SiliconANGLE Media Cube studios, our new 4500 square foot office. We merged with our two offices here to have our own studio, and we're covering Mobile World Congress for two days. 8AM to 6 every day, breaking down all the analysis from the news, commentary and really breaking down the meaning and the impact of what's happening, and the trends. We're doing it here in California, bringing folks in and also calling people up in Barcelona, getting their reaction on the ground. We've got our reporters, we have analysts there but all the action's happening here in Palo Alto for our analysis. Our next guest is Christina Ku, director of NTT Docomo Ventures. Welcome to theCube, appreciate it. >> Hi. Well it was good to see you again. >> Great to see you. Obviously we've known each other for over a decade now and you've been in the investment community for a while. The first question is why aren't you there at a Mobile World Congress? Because it's changed so much, it's a telco show and some apps are now thrown in there. But there's so much more going on right now around 5G, AI, software, end to end fabrics. So it's not just "Give me more software, provision more subscribers." It's a whole other ball game. >> That's a great question. So our CEO of NTT Docomo is there, and the C-level team. But we are the innovation team. We have been here since 2005 doing research and then added business development about three years ago and then a ventures team that's been around and now we're part of NTT Docomo Ventures. What we're looking for is more services and software and this year I guess the focus is AI. And AI is, I would call it the new infrastructure. Since wireless networks are all data now, the new infrastructure is AI rules. Rules for everything, vertical and new maps. So I can talk a little bit more what we've been seeing in kind of the software and services area and how we're looking at the Bay Area as kind of the new innovation to bring back to Japan to work with NTT Docomo. >> That's awesome. Let's take a minute, Christina, if you can, just before we get started, take a minute to explain what your role is and the group that you're in at NTT Docomo here in the Bay area. What you guys are doing, the focus, and some of the things that you're involved in. >> Great yeah, thanks. So, I'm a director and I invest on behalf of two funds. One is NTT Docomo Ventures for NTT Docomo, the wireless carrier. Sixty-million subscribers, all in Japan. Our competitor is SoftBank. We're bigger in Japan, and have more market share. And also the NTT Group has a two hundred and fifty million dollar fund. They're off the 101 Freeway. There's NTT Security, i-Cube, a division of companies, as well. And the idea is to bring these technologies through start ups, through BD, to help them enter Japan. And also, to invest, a minority investment. >> That's awesome. So you have to pound the pavement, go out there and see all the action. Obviously, Silicon Valley, a lot of stuff happening here, and you've got a lot of experience here. Your thoughts on the business model, and how the AI as a service, you mentioned that, which is, we totally see the same thing. We see a confluence of old network models transforming into personal networks. We're seeing a trend where the relationship to the network, if you will, from a personal standpoint, could be the device initially, but now it's wearables. It's the watch, it's the tablet. So now people have this connection, digital connection to the network. Might not be just one network, it could be two, so now AI has to come in, and people are speculating that AI could be that nice brokering automation between all the digital services. Whether I'm jumping into an autonomous vehicle >> So if you refer to services for consumers, then the approach that we have is to offer a B to B to C business model, so in each lifestyle category. We purchased a cooking school, or a percentage of a cooking school, ABC Cooking. And then we were looking for kitchen devices, right, to offer that service, an oven, a bluetooth connected pan. I think some of these devices will be showing up at a Mobile World Congress. And then, people want a service wrapped around that. Same thing happened last year with fitness, with Fitbit, but also there's so many other devices to monitor your heartbeat and your health at the consumer level. But consumers want a service provider, someone to put that together for them. And I think AI would be in that layer. >> So when you say service, you don't mean like, network services or connections, you mean lifestyle services. You mentioned cooking. By the way, Twitch has one of the most popular shows in Korea. People watch each other eating food. It's one of the hottest live-streaming shows. But this kind of talks about that. You mentioned healthcare. Is this the kind of new software you see? And these are kind of the new digital services? Is that what you're looking at? >> That's exactly what we're looking at. I think people don't associate a carrier and services. In Asia, more so, maybe Korea, and Japan, because 5G will happen there, first. And Docomo will be the first carrier to have 5G in Japan. I think Korea, they'll have their version first. So I think with that, we have been, I guess since the days of i-mode, offering services, in a way. Because PC, and phone has been analogous, all data services have been just data in Japan. >> What's your take on 5G right now? Because obviously that's the big story at Mobile World Congress. Is it real? Is this one of the big upgrade areas? Do you see that being a catalyst? >> Yeah, I mean, we will have it for the Tokoyo Olympics. So we're working on that. >> And what kind of speeds are they talking about? Gigabit, is that what they're looking at? >> Yeah, I think it's within 30 seconds you can download a full HD movie. >> (laughs) I want that. >> For consumers like me right? >> Come on, I want that now. We had our last guest talking about that. "What am I going to do with a Gig?" I'm like, well, apps will figure it out. That's one of the beautiful things about software. What's the coolest thing that you've seen? In terms of, as you look at some of the things that are around the corner, what are some of the cool highlights that you see connecting the dots with some of these new kinds of services? What's the trends? >> Depends on if you say consumer, enterprise, or kind of core. Like I said, what's in the home is interesting. On the infrastructure side, mapping. I think new types of beyond Waze mapping, 3-D drone mapping. >> The drone thing is super hot. That is killer. >> But it requires a new data set. >> Yeah. >> Right? And if you look at, Waze is great, but if you look at it, it's almost outdated, now, right? In terms of what you can imagine, if there is a tree that comes up because of a storm, or has fallen down, you want that map to configure that. So that the drone can fly over the building, or the tree, or whatever's in the way. So you need real-time mapping, and I think that's an interesting area that we've been looking at a lot. >> And connectivity will fuel a lot of these devices, whether they're drones, or other sensors on the network. As that's, I'd imagine, the good instrumentation out there for that stuff. >> And also social data. The confluence of easy, cheap social data. And then marrying that, and stitching that in there. You know, we've found companies that will identify you through video, like computer vision, and a drone will follow you and recognize you through AI. >> That's cool. >> That's kind of, you know, there may be small increases in innovation, but without the AI and the machine learning, you can't- >> Yeah, it's interesting, you know, this lifestyle, these services. I think that's the right strategy in the right direction. Because we were just having a debate earlier this morning on theCube, here, about autonomous vehicles. Because one of the four categories of the hot trends in Mobile World Congress is autonomous vehicles, entertainment and media, smart cities, and home, automating and all that stuff. And that's all an opportunity for services. But we were debating that transportation's not going away, but I might not buy a car in the future. The differentiation might come from really cool software that allows me to take my preferences, my Spotify playlist, all my digital services that I am leveraging into an environment, whether it's a car, a theater, a park, a stadium. Whatever lifestyle I'm in, I can then move with my digital ecosystem, if you will. My personal- >> Your preferences. >> My digital aura, if you will, and not have to reboot, and connect. I mean right now, my phone works. I just associate, but you know, still, it feels clunky. So I think that's kind of a cool direction. Is that something that you see that telcos and most folks will pick up? Or is that just you guys doing that right now? >> I think what interests me about NTT Docomo when I joined was that they're kind of in the forefront, and in kind of leadership of that. And I think Korea and Japan, in Asia, are looking ahead. What do you do with unlimited data? And then kind of following you everywhere. So I think AI, uh, you know, we had SIRI, Shabette Concierge, which was, I guess, our version of SIRI a long time ago. There's a lot of voice-enabled applications. So, I guess, will that be the interface? I think another interesting concept is what will be the interface? The phone, Amazon Echo, what will be the natural interface for you to connect to these devices and preferences? >> Take us through the day to day in the life of a VC, kind of the deals that you do. What happens in your day to day life here in Silicon Valley? Take us through some of the things that you go through every day. >> Most days, I guess, just meeting with companies and trying to find, you know, the next one. There's so many great areas, and also the next trends. We also do a lot of enterprise deals. So I've been looking at security, cloud, a lot of the devops, or kind of what's around the cloud systems. Finding the right companies. And then, also intersecting with my, I have a business development team, and they connect to Tokyo, so there at night, talking to the business group leaders. And finding that balance of, what is a technology that would work in Japan? What are they interested in? And then, out here, scouting for those companies. >> Yeah, one of the sub-plots of the Mobile World Congress this year, which is consistent with pretty much the trend is that the enterprise, IT, is evolving very quickly because of the cloud. Amazon has certainly demonstrated the winning in the cloud. And security, no perimeter, API economy, these new trends are forcing IT to move from this proven operational methodology to very agile, data-driven, high-compute clouds. And security's one of the huge issues. And now you have multi-clouds, where I might have something in Azure, I might have something in Amazon, I might have something in a geographic basis around the world trying to operate globally, being a multinational, is challenging. What's your take on that? Because this is an area that is not sexy as the consumer play, but in the B-to-B space, it is really front and center. RSA conference just last week, we were talking on email about RSA. Two weeks ago, that was the number one thing. You've got the cybersecurity issues, you've got the cyber surveillance, and also just the threat detection from ransomware to just consumer phishing. What's your thoughts in this area? >> So, I guess we're looking at kind of what's the next new area, which would be using AI to analyze all this data that's coming in, from the perimeter, from the end point, on your network, right? And then what can bubble up to the surface? We've invested in two companies in this area: Centrify and Cyphort. Looking for, kind of, other companies that- >> John: Well, Centrify, they're really focused on the breech. >> They're really focused, yes. >> Tom Kemp, in fact we went to their party at the RSA, Jeff Frick and I. They had a great band. Had a good time with those guys. But they're doing extremely well. They're very focused on mobile. >> They're doing really well, yeah. >> So what is the challenge, in your mind, right now, if you're an entrepreneur out there, for the folks watching? They're looking for kind of like the white space. They're looking for some tea leaves to read. Could you share any color on just advice for the entrepreneurs out there? Because it's certainly a turbulent time in the enterprise, and just in general, the cloud market. >> It's very competitive. >> Advice for entres, where should they focus? What sort of key metrics should they be building their ventures around? >> I think it depends on if you have an idea, or have a product already, but I think it's very competitive, right? And it's hard to break out of. What's your product differentiation? On the enterprise space, I think building a product, solving the problem. And then once you've done that, built a great team, then sales. And I think in the security space, trying to get to a million ARR, right? Just getting to a certain scale- >> So tell us about Centrify. When did you guys invest in those guys? Early, was it later on, which round did you guys- >> We invested, in the last round, so, uh, we were late stage investors, but we're very happy with the investment. They're doing very well. >> Awesome. Any other cool things you're working on that you'd like to share? >> We have taken apart AI, and started to look at transportation, so I think mapping is a little bit a part of that. It's also driving different industries, like e-commerce, IoT. We've looked at IoT. >> You must get a lot of this all the time, and I've got to ask you the same question, because I always get asked, "John, what is AI?" Now, I have two answers. Oh, AI's been around for a long time, but then there's a new AI. How do you answer that question? Because AI as a service essentially is software in the world paradigm, and it certainly is happening where you're going to start to see some significant software advances. But AI in and of itself is evolving. How do you describe AI as a service? How would you describe it to the layperson out there? >> I think, maybe its early stage, it's the team, and the technology. How many PhDs, you know, what are you looking at? What type of machine learns? That's, we have the more technical team. We build services. You know, my boss' boss is the head of services and he reports to the CTO of Docomo. His team and he, they look at that. Then on the other hand, though, I think its later stage, is vertical industries. Have people taken it apart, put it together, and then are monetizing that? So I think it's- >> John: It's a lot of machine learning. A lot of data-driven, So algorithms over data, or data over algorithms? Is there a philosophy there? I mean, that's a debate that people love to talk about. >> Maybe it depends on where you're applying it, who it's for, where do you get the data, how do you train the data? And, you know, what is the result? And are people happy with the result? I think the core infrastructure, I think once an AI company becomes hot, then it gets bought, and at that point, we all know who the players are. And people are probably looking for more and more of those, so I think those are harder to find. So then, like I've said, we've taken that apart, and maybe we've looked at mapping. What are maybe more the components underneath that that we can start to say this is going to be huge in the future? >> Yeah, and I think that's a great philosophy, too. If you look at how IBM has branded Waston, you could almost look at how successful that's been because people can get a mental model around that. And they've taken a similar approach, although I would say they've done very good on the vertical packaging. And a lot of work's going on, now, I think we're seeing down in the guts of the tech. I think there's a machine learning and more going on there, which is really cool. >> Which utilizes the cloud, right, and- >> That's where the power- >> That's where the power is. >> The compute. I mean Amazon has that. At the last re-invent, they announced the machine learning as a service. You're starting to see this now, where people can take a iterative approach to leveraging this AI as a service. I'm really impressed by that. Congratulations on a great strategy. I think that should be a winner. >> Yeah. Thank you. And that's going to be probably a core business model. I think other telcos should take notice of that. But maybe we shouldn't tell them we're alive. We can't put it back. Christina, thanks so much for coming in, appreciate it. Christina Ku, here, inside theCube. Special coverage of Mobile World Congress. Doing all the investments, checking out all the new business models, and really looking at AI as a service, and that really is cutting edge. That really is consistent with the data. It's theCube, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (tech music) (digital music)