>> Announcer: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019, brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE, at Coupa Inspire '19. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground, at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE Michael Van Keulen, Global Procurement Director of Lululemon Athletica. Michael, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> I'm a big Lulu fan, have been for many, many years. If anybody doesn't know Lululemon, this is a three plus billion dollar designer, distributor, and retailer of really cool technical athletic apparel. You've been there for a few years now, came from a finance background. One of the things that I love about Lululemon is the inspirational messages on the bags. Anytime I'm in a grocery store and you have to bring your own bags, and I'm nearsighted and I can spot a Lululemon bag from a mile away. Talk to us about just one of the examples of this procurement transformation that you helped initiate, when you came in and found something really interesting about this iconic bag. >> Sure, yeah, so when I joined the company you start to do your basic spend cube analysis and trying to figure out where the big spend items are. And given that the bag is so visible for everybody, I figured that's really a big volume, lots of spend, very visible, and very important to our business. So I started to dig in to our shopping bag as a category. And I uncovered that it was single-sourced with one factory in Cambodia, with a nine month lead time. But nobody in the company really knew that. So when I was put in front of our senior executives to talk about where do I feel there's opportunity, there was some pushback on me digging into our shopper and there was even perspective in the senior executive teams that I didn't really understand how important our shopper is. And then when I asked the question, where does the shopper come from? Where is it made? How is it made? What's the lead time? What's the cost? There were lots of unknowns, and when I threw that on the table and said, "Well, it's single-sourced, "one factory, in Cambodia", you could immediately see a lot of people going like, "Wow, that's very interesting." And they started to realize that procurement is not just about saving money, which we also did, but it's also about de-risking our supply chain, being more nimble and more agile. >> Yes, I was going to say that what you discovered was a massive risk to the brand. I think the bag, is the number one brand asset? >> Michael: Totally. >> It's very visible. But that was really the tip of the iceberg of some of the things you came in saying, "You know, as procurement, "there is a massive, massive, many massive, "impact elements that it can have on the business." >> Michael: Right. >> So going from sort of a tactical to a strategic approach. How was the bag, as an example, able to start helping you transform the culture of Lulu to be more strategic and start looking at all of the other ways in which this business can derive value from a number of the other elements besides the bag. >> Yeah, so we started to identify, what are some of our core principles when it comes to how we source, and how we procure. Those are things to me, like fact-based decision making, analytics, knowing what you buy, how you buy, where you buy, competitive pressure, making sure the suppliers realize that we have options in the marketplace. I mean, those are some of the key components of running a competitive department that drives a competitive advantage. And that's really what we focus on at Lululemon in procurement. >> Some of the disruptors that we see in procurement and finance today are consumerization. Rob Bernstein talked about it this morning with some of the things that Coupa is now doing with the Amazon Marketplace. But as consumers, whether we're consuming Lululemon products or software, we have choice. We also have this expectation that we can go somewhere and find anybody that's selling this particular product, I can see the prices, I can see, the pricing pressures put on, I can see all the different suppliers. So the consumerization sort of disruptor, is really interesting to every industry. How are you leveraging that to, to really drive much more value. Not just saving costs, but even things like impacting shareholder value for Lulu? >> Yeah, I think table stakes today is just managing spend, right? Knowing where your money goes, and trying to make sure that we stretch the dollars as much as we can, I think is what every procurement function does. I think what distinguishes the world class from the let's say, the middle of the pack, is are you able to contribute to top-line growth? How are you able to innovate? Are you able to innovate through your suppliers? And so one example, this is how we implemented third-party gift cards at many grocers across North America. That was an idea generating from procurement, tying into gift cards that we already source and that we now have third-party gift cards at the Kroeger's and the likes. That just drive more traffic to our stores. And that's just through a really exciting, cool idea, that wouldn't necessarily come from a procurement, traditional procurement function, but one that really wants to contribute to future growth. >> One that wants to contribute to future growth, that has a strategic vision. When we look at the Coupa community, there's now $1.2 trillion of transactions going through that. There's a tremendous amount of data, and we go to so many conferences at theCUBE every year, and we hear very commonly, data is the new oil. >> Michael: Totally. >> Data is gold. It is those things if you have the right, if you have visibility and the opportunity to extract value from it and act on it immediately. Talk to me a little bit more about the third-party gift card approach, and was that something that you said we have so much more visibility, into our data, into our consumers, into our suppliers. There's an obvious low-hanging fruit opportunity here. How did that data help you make that decision? >> Yeah, no this was more an idea where you start to look at what value can procurement drive other than just managing and reducing cost? And every other big apparel retailer is already in this third-party space and Lululemon is not. And the power of our company is we are vertically integrated. You can only buy our product at Lululemon, and some select strategic partners. But opening up the doors for people to be experiencing our brand in a different way, through purchasing a gift card or being gifted a gift card, I should say, and that audience then now comes into our store. It just could potentially be a completely new guest. And that is what is super exciting. >> So let's talk about some of the business impact of that. So, I would like to be on the receiving end of the Lulu gift card, for anybody who's watching my birthday's in March. (Michael laughing) But in terms of what are some of the things that you've seen map back to top line impact from that. Increase in new customers acquired, increase in customer lifetime value, what are some of those big impacts that procurement has made with what seems like an, aha, this is a simple idea, we should be doing this too. >> I think what Lululemon does better than any retailer on the planet is our educators. Right, our educators in our stores. And so, it's my job is how do I set these guys up for success? So I think one way we're now doing and leveraging the Coupa platform, is taking away administrative complexity. So the lesser the administrative burden is on our stores and our educators, the better they are with engaging with our guests. And educating them on our product, why we make it, what it does, so that our consumers that we call guests, ultimately, not just make the transaction, but also buy the right product, they know what the product is supposed to do for them. And how it's supposed to fit and how it's supposed to help them in their daily lives. And so what procurement really does is just take away that complexity that they have today, so that they can focus on what they do best. >> So walk me through who within, so one of the things that Coupa does, is more than I think any of their competitors, is it's procurement, it's invoices, expenses, payments. Tell me about all the different ways in which Lululemon is leveraging Coupa and walk me through kind of an average user experience. This is somebody, like an individual contributor in marketing or finance. Give me a little bit of a taste of that. >> Yeah, so we use Coupa for sourcing, contracting, requisitioning, purchase orders, and then flip that PO into pay, so we use the full suite of solution. The biggest focus for us is on the downstream, as we call, Procure to Pay. So it's a lot of people placing requisitions, and that can be in marketing, it could be in the store, it could be in any part of our business, really. And the downstream is the most important element, because that's where the visibility comes. And then from a procurement standpoint, we use the Sourcing and the CLM platform. But the downstream is where the magic happens. >> So is every business unit within Lululemon on the Coupa platform? >> So we launched North America on February 4th, we're live in 18 stores as a pilot, and we're going to roll out all of North America, the entire fleet, in August. >> So just February of 2019, so just what, five months or so ago. And the impact to the business that you've seen with just these first 18 stores? >> Yeah, it's not just the 18 stores, it's inclusive of our head office and our distribution centers in North America. We just now focus on supplier enablement, more suppliers on the platform, more spend through the portal, and with the stores it's a pilot. It's going really well and if the stores are going to get it I'm pretty sure they will be very pleased. >> So, we talked about kind of the consumer, the guest experience, supplier centricity. What have you achieved with respect to supplier centricity, using Coupa, and how is that affecting everybody up to the C-suite in your organization in terms of, wow, procurement is really a business engine, here we do invest in. >> Yeah I think our, if you look at our journey when we started three years ago where we literally had no real procurement as it is described today, we're still in that journey of maximizing our supplier relationships. And through our supplier relationships, really drive innovation. I think we're not entirely there yet, I think that is one of the next iterations, is how do we take procurement to the next level. >> And if you look back at the last few years, what surprises you about coming from a finance background, now being in charge of procurement for a major global brand. What are some of the things that surprise you about this future of procurement and where Lululemon is setup to be successful? >> I think the biggest surprise is that people never intentionally do business with a company that we may or we should be doing business with. People never intentionally do that, it's just because they don't ask the right questions around ownership structure and risk and sustainability, and reputational risk and environmental risk, and just cost aside. And what I think what procurement helps to do is to actually ask all those questions. So that we end up with the right company, with the right pricing, the right quality, the right specs, the right everything. I think that's what surprised me, is that missing link that procurement brings to the table. >> So if you had to give your peers, in any industry, some advice would it be first of all, help establish a culture that is willing to ask questions. 'Cause there's that whole thing too, right? We always think, well maybe it's a dumb question. Have that culture that is, no question is a dumb question, ask, ask, ask. >> Yeah and Lulu is, fortunately enough, such a young company so I had a lot of great stakeholders, I still have them today, that are highly supportive. It's never just me or my team, it is collaboration, it's cross-functional. Everybody has to have something in it, right? So Lulu's a very young company. So if you're a very, maybe mature organization where people are set in their ways it just becomes a little. So I used to work for VF Corps, which is a slightly more mature, been around for 100 years. There it required more convincing than maybe at Lululemon where, again, people are just, the population is much younger. And we needed more structure and people recognized that. >> The appetite was there. >> The appetite was there, for sure. >> Last question for you, Michael. Some of the things that are being announced this week at Inspire, we heard this morning about, we mentioned a minute ago about the size of the Coupa community. The amount of data, the value that it's driving for customers and for suppliers. Also they talked about this Amazon Marketplace that they're expanding this relationship so that IT folks can have this full suite of visibility. What excites you most about the direction that Coupa is going in? >> I mean, it's the data, it's the native integrations with Amazon and the likes, absolutely. What excites me the most in terms of the different modules is Coupa Pay. I've been wanting to go after dynamic discounting, that's what Coupa Pay is going to enable us to do. Virtual pay is another big opportunity where we can start flowing a lot of our payments through a virtual payment system, our payment cards, that excites me. But it's the data, and it's how do we as a community start to leverage our spend, I think will be absolutely awesome. I look forward to that. >> Yes and that collaborative spirit this morning was really palpable. Well, Michael it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE today. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on what you've done at Lulu, and for Lulu being a Coupa Spendsetter. >> Thank you. >> For Michael Van Keulen, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire '19, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> 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 are winding down a very busy day here at the Conga Connect West. We're here at Salesforce. Benioff confirmed it. In the keynote 171,000 registered people. Hard to believe. We got about 3,000 of 'em here, hosted by Conga. Free drinks, free food, a lot of entertainment. Come on down. Are open for three days and the invitation is open. We're really happy, have two very special guests here as we wrap up today. We have Matt Schulz. He's the CEO of Conga. Matt, great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> And with him as Ryan Westwood, the CEO and co founder of Simplus. Ryan great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So first off, Matt great event. You said you guys did this last year. >> Yep. >> Super way to get the community together, your customers together, your people together. Big investment. >> It's a big investment, but it's you know celebration of our customers and we have the most amazing loyal customers that I've ever seen. So we like to get together at least once a year. So this is not only our dream for celebration, but this is our Conga Connect user group here as well. >> Right. >> So now we're excited. >> So, It's interesting, right. We do a ton of shows and everybody wants to get customers on we loved to have customers on. Their hard to get on, either because they can't speak or it's your strategic advantage or, the whole bunch of reasons. I think we've only done about six or seven eight interviews here today and we had three customers on. So you know nice testament to what you guys are doing. >> Yeah. >> And Ryan. Tell us about Simplus. We've been hearing about Congo all day. Tell us about-- >> (laughs) Exactly, exactly. >> Thank you for the opportunity. Simplus started out as a Salesforce partner specifically to SteelBrick. So SteelBrick was an independent software vendor like like Conga, that was built on Salesforce and Salesforce acquired SteelBrick a few years ago. And we started out implementing SteelBrick and then when they were acquired by Salesforce, we took an investment from Salesforce and really have scaled alongside of Salesforce CPQ. But we kind of saw the emergence of CLM like we did CPQ, where we felt like this is this is the future. There is a big opportunity. There's a lot of wide space. And so when we met with Conga and the team, we were just even more excited. We knew that the technology in the market had a big opportunity, but then to have the experience of Matt and Bob and his team combined. We were excited to partner and go to market with Conga, just like we did with SteelBrick. So we've really made our brand on being kind of ahead of the market and, and really seeing what's happening and implementing the technologies that are the cutting edge of the Salesforce ecosystem. >> Yeah, and a big ecosystem it is, with the 170,000 people. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> And Matt you've got this crew together. We've heard time and time again today, a lot of people that have worked with you in the past. So you've got a pretty good formula, pretty good team of folks, that you've executed with. What about the importance of that, where, you know you've got trusted lieutenants, people you've kind of done this before with to be able to bring together coalesce relatively new team to take this thing to the next level. >> Yeah, we were talking a little bit off the air that you Ryan runs a services company. So everyone believes that the people business. Right? And then they meet me, I get it in social situations, what do you do? I'm CEO of a software company. They're like, oh, wow, it'd be great to have a technology like that. I'm like, wait a second, it's a people business. We don't have, I tell our employees that every time we get together, we don't have a factory that stamping out widgets. Like this is a people business. It's an interconnect with people business, actually. So I tell people, marketing sneezes, and, sales catches a cold, >> Right. >> We are all just completely joined at the hip. So for me to have the honor of working with people, second, third, fourth time and some of these companies, it's pretty incredible, very blessed, and it doesn't hurt that they're really good at what they do. >> Yeah, well, absolutely. And Ryan, you've got an interesting take too. Your, your kind of a leadership study, or you like to interview people. You've written lot of blog posts. So what is it about, kind of the leadership study that helps keep you going. Makes you tick. >> I think, I think as an entrepreneur, you realize over time how much you don't know. And it's amazing to surround yourself with other entrepreneurs or CEOs that have experienced things you haven't. And so through those platforms, Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, the writing I've done has been amazing for education. So I think I've interviewed 60 plus tech CEOs. public, private, all kinds of different different sizes of companies and I have learned so much. It's been a it's a really fun journey. The time I've spent with Matt and Bob and some entrepreneurs are CEOs like, like they are, there's just so much to learn. So I I've enjoyed sharing my journey with other people and writing about it, through the Forbes platform for the last four or five years. >> Such a great such a great lesson. I'm reading I pulled it up. I'm reading Sapiens right now. I don't know if you've read that book. Great book by Yuval Harari. Just come out with a new called the 21st Century. He's a historian, greatest historian. And he talks about one of the big changes to go to a scientific based world was when people decided they didn't know everything, and embrace the fact that we didn't know everything. And let's ask questions. Why does the sun come up over there? Why does the moon, and where before it was, kind of a deity from on high and everything is fine. And we'll just keep it though. So I think it's a really, smart, smart strategy to say; I love to learn from the people. So what I love about this job and get to talk to smart guys like you. Let's talk about kind about kind where Conga is going. You've got all these connected parts, talk to a bunch of people, you've got brought in through acquisitions, and you've got this thread that seems to weed through all the applications, workflow leaves to the applications. You got document creation, that ties back to managing your contracts. Interesting, how those things tie together. And now AI. You're going to have this kind of AI infusion. As we talked to people all the time, no one can go buy a pocket of AI. what I want is AI infuse, in all the applications that I interface to make them work better. So that's what's coming down. You got to be excited about that. >> Oh. it's incredible. I mean, the opportunity in front of us is amazing. This is the third company. I'm old, this is the third company I've been CEO of in the electronic documents space. So I've been in this space for 20 years now. And to see where we've come in 20 years. It's inspiring. It's amazing. If you look at just the sheer numbers and size of market. Congo really started in my mind, in our mind, and our team's mind back when we were all at DocuSign. As you know, I was CEO of DocuSign. Joined the company in January 2007. And we really put the team back together. They've built the early days of that company. But we had a vision back then around digital document transformation, and it included electronic signing, but electronic signing was a small part of that. And so we've been working really hard as you mentioned, building products. We've made some key acquisitions, and we built out the first digital document transformation suite in the industry. It's all the way from collaborating, creating documents to managing those documents and negotiating them to full contract Lifecycle Management with electronic signing a state of the art orchestration layer to build those productively for customers with a AI platform Conga AI supporting the entire platform. This product groups like a dream come true for us. It's 20 years in the making. And we're so excited. We've now released with the market. Companies growing like crazy. We've been named the fastest growing ISV in the entire Salesforce ecosystem. We have the highest volume downloaded app in the entire app exchange. And we've been rated the top from a customer satisfaction standpoint, the number one ISV in the entire Salesforce ecosystem. So either a blind squirrel found a nut or we were onto something there. this is a hot market. Customers like what we're doing. We're just going to keep growing and doing more. Yeah. >> And we heard the announcement earlier today about that Salesforce, actually integrating some of your product functionality directly into some of their offerings. Which is a great validation. >> Pretty excited and proud of that. Salesforce does not, I mean, with very few exceptions, like count them on three fingers kind of exceptions that I know of ever resells anyone else's product. Let alone resell it with their co branding. And so Salesforce announced here at dream force that they're reselling Conga's products now. Conga core generation is being co branded with Salesforce in Seoul along with invoice generation. I'm stumbling over the words because it's stunning that it's been a few years in the making, but we have a really strong relationship with Salesforce. We publicly announced they're an investor in the company, we're one of their top global ISV partners. So it was it was in some regards, a very natural thing for them to say, if we're going to build our document generation around our strongest partner. >> Right. Well, it's always good to hook your wagon to a rocket ship. And as evidenced by the very large building just outside these doors. >> Yeah. >> I think you picked a good one. >> Amazing I mean we are an amazing company, so my time with them dates back to when I was CEO DocuSign. So we did when I was there we did the first ISV deal of its kind with Salesforce. This was in 2009, and then brought them in as an equity investor in the company. So I've always Salesforce have been and always near and dear to my heart and a really amazing partner. This is my I think my 10th or 11th dream force. And so I'm all in. Like, well, the company's all in this is we're all all on the Salesforce bandwagon definitely. >> It looks like the bet's paying off. So congratulations to you and the team. >> Thanks, thanks. We got a lot of work to do, but it's going well. >> All right. Well thanks for taking a few minute. Ryan, Matt, and again, congratulations on a really great event. I think that things are turning people away the door. It's like, two people out two people in. (laughs) And thanks for having us. >> Like I said, it's nice to throw a party and have somebody show up. >> Absolutely. Thank you. >> Thanks for your time. >> All right. He's Matt, he's Ryan I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Where it's at Conga Connect West, at Salesforce dream force in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> 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)

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