(bright intro music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to "theCube's" presentation of Women in Technology's global event celebrating International Women's Day, I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We have Rachel Thornton here, VP of AWS Marketing, CMO of AWS. Rachel, great to see you. Thank you for spending the time to come on and share your stories about mentorship, being a mentor, being a mentee. You've had a great career. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> You know, I'm super impressed with you, your super inspiration to a lot of people, your career in Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Amazon. You've worked in amazing companies that had great growth, great transformations, and business success and all employees that have all grown since then, you've been part of these great success stories and you've had a great career and the theme here is mentorship which is a super important topic. You've been a mentee. You've been a mentor. Everyone needs a mentor. Most people don't know how to do it and how to be involved. It's almost like a secret dark art of success that needs to be opened up. What's your thought on mentorship? >> Hopefully, people don't see it as secret dark art. I actually am a huge proponent of mentorship, both mentoring folks and actually encouraging people to seek out a mentor for themselves. Early on, you know, when I started working, I really thought about how can I navigate a particular situation or what do I want to learn more about? And even though I may have been nervous or a little shy at first to ask, I always thought, "Just ask," because really being able to have a mentor, someone who you can ask questions of, someone who can help, you know, help you with questions or help you with situations you're navigating or give advice I think is critical. As a mentor, I would just say, as a woman in tech over the years, I've realized the criticality of sort of finding your voice and using your voice and so I look at mentorship as a great way to help individuals, every individual that I mentor sort of find their voice and use it and then, ultimately, advocate on behalf of others, advocate on yourself, on behalf of yourself as well and I think it's just really, I think it's a great thing to mentor and I encourage everyone to do it by the way and it's also ask yourself, "Hey, who would I want to be my mentor? What do I think I want to get out of it," and then go forward. >> Well, let's start with the mentee side. When you were coming into your career as you grew through with mentorship, with a mentor, how did you find a mentor? How should people think about asking and finding? What's your thoughts on that? Because asking is great. People might be nervous. I mean, I know I'm nervous whenever I'm asking people am I interrupting them or confidence. It's a hard thing. How do you find a mentor? >> Uh-hmm, what I did and what I encourage other folks to do when they think about it is kind of write down what you're looking for in a mentor. What are the things you would like to ask or get help up with or get advice with? Is it career progression? Is it learning how to navigate maybe collaboration with different teams? Is it, hey, you have a couple of great ideas and you'd like to figure out a way to get them surfaced in the organization? But kind of write down what you're looking to get and then what I did and what I encourage other folks to do is really look around not only just at kind of your immediate team, but what are some of the other teams you're engaging with? I would even ask people in your organization. I did this early on like, "Hey, I'd like to get some more info on this or some help with this, who do I think would be or who do you think would be a good person?" We have a leadership principle at Amazon, learn and be curious. >> Yeah. >> And I think it dovetails so nicely into the whole mentor, mentorship, mentee relationship, because, you know, if you're looking for a mentor, it's good to sort of think, "Okay, what do I want to get out of it? Who would I ask if I don't don't know? Start asking, you know, people that you do know and I think that's going to lead you to the right person, but on the mentor side, I think as you're working with the person, keep asking questions. What do you, you know, really learn about them. Learn about what they're trying to do and help them learn about their selves, their opportunities, you know, where they can grow more. So I just think that's a great leadership principle for the whole construct of mentoring. >> It's a relationship, too. The mentee-mentor relationship. is one that's a give and take, but also this gains from both sides. How have you gained from your relationships with your mentors in the past and how should people think about that? Because it's just human, it's a human thing, but it's also kind of a cool thing and it helps everyone on both sides. Can you share that relationship, give and take and what people can gain from a good relationship? >> I think the biggest thing for me has been just the different perspective. I find that so valuable. I love the chance to get a completely different take on something, a completely different perspective, one that I maybe wouldn't have considered because I think if you are kind of, and we're all like this, you know? We all come to a decision or a situation with our own set of understandings, our own biases, if you will, our own frame of reference and I think it is a powerful thing to work with someone else and have them give you a completely different lens on a situation because it opens up, you know, not only how you think about something or how you react to something, but just how you would learn or, you know, maybe think about information or that situation going forward, right? And maybe, you know, probably do an even better job with handling it or processing it or considering it. >> You know, support is a huge thing in life, right? Having someone to support you and your career, same thing. Now that you're, seeing you're a leader at AWS, you're a mentor to many, I'm sure you get a lot of requests to be mentor. I mean, I'd love to have mentoring. Hey, you know, can you mentor me on this? So I'm sure you have your share of requests but you're also mentoring. Now you're the mentor. How do you view your assignment? What's new? What are your tricks? Is there some secret trade? Is there a way that you handle it? How should people think about being a good mentor? Is there a common vibe or practice that you see successful for you? >> I think on both sides, mentor or mentee, when I work with someone in a mentor capacity, I spend sort of the first time getting to know them and also what it is they want, kind of what they want out of it. Ask a lot of questions in the upfront, find out kind of what they're hoping to achieve. Like I think I said a few minutes ago. There could be folks that are like, "Hey, I want help with sort of career progression over the long term." I've also mentored folks who are like, you know, I have a great idea that I just want some help with sort of packaging up and maybe positioning and then helping me navigate who would be the best team to take it to." So I think that's good to know kind of upfront. Is it ongoing or maybe it's just in certain cases, you know, it can be a very time bound thing, but I think ask questions. You know, on the mentee side, I always sort of come at it when I have a mentor like here's what I want to get out of it. Here's what I'm looking for. Here are the three things I want to make sure I engage with you on and then it's really clear on both sides. If I do have someone who comes to me with a mentorship, you know, with a discussion around being a mentor, I will always ask, "Hey, have there other people, you know, that you've talked to because it could be that they're looking for, you know, input on a project, for example, and there could be a better person I think, you know that, "Hey, this person could be even better than me on helping you with this." >> Yeah. You're navigating, too. You're providing a little path and direction and the key is really to help someone in mentoring. >> Yes. >> Sounds like it. Now let's talk about the Amazon and AWS culture. You mentioned leadership principles. Is there programs within AWS? Is this part of the culture? I know being a good manager is mentoring, too, as well, but is there formal mentor programs within AWS? >> Yes, there's actually several different ones. Women in Amazon, which is an amazing group that we have. They have Amazon circles, which is a great mentor program. We have programs that are by country even. So, as you can imagine, Amazon's a global global company. One of the programs that I was really excited about 'cause I worked with the team that started it, but in the UK, we started to get IT program and it was interesting because we basically wanted to make sure that we were encouraging and aspiring girls between ages of 13 or 12 and 15, actually, to be interested in careers in tech and we sort of thought, "How do we do a good job with that? How do we get those girls excited? How do we get them mentors? How do we get them sponsors?" That was the other thing we thought about a lot of. So what we did was we aligned teams and individuals inside at AWS to schools and then within the schools to grades and then to individuals in the grades, girls in those grades, and over the course of a year, they would meet with their mentor. A team would have a specific school they would sponsor and then members on that team would be mentors to the girls in that school and then at the end of it, there would be sort of a project and an assessment and it was really exciting to see, you know, girls who were sort of, you know, they were thinking about it, but maybe they weren't sure and then at the end they were like, "I'm really excited about it and I actually know kind of the next steps if I wanted to continue on, you know, with university with kind of a tech job in my sights for my future career." >> You know, that's a great segue into the breaking bias, which is the theme this year of International Women's Day is getting that bias broke, getting people in early, and also creating a culture of inclusiveness where there's no bias and we see it and this is a good way to call it out this year, specifically, and it's been a theme I know in this area, but this year they're calling it out. How do you know when bias exists and how do you know when it's gone? When we're not talking about it anymore? I mean, that's it seem would be to me, but this is a big deal. >> Yeah. >> Share your thoughts on this bias piece and what we can do together to help aware and and solve it and break it. >> I think we all have bias. I think that you really do have to... I always in my head, I think whenever I'm meeting with teams or just meeting with people one on one, I'm meeting with customers, I think I sort of ask myself, "What's my take on the situation? If I weren't me, you know, if I was someone else, what their perception be? What am I bringing to this situation that's sort of based on my context to sort of who I am or my background and how is that different if I were to sit with someone that has a completely different background, a completely different set of context or a frame of reference?" I think that's so important across not only the teams I have here. You know, I have a global marketing team, so always asking myself, "I know I'm going to look at this one way. It's not the only way. So how do I make sure I have a great cross section of leaders, a great cross section of team members to bring the bear on a situation?" Because the more I can do that , the more diverse I can make those conversations, the better off we're going to be with whatever solution we come up with for our customer or solution, you know, to an internal problem is just not just looking at it through, you know, one lens or two lenses, but how do I get a group of people, a group of different frames of reference, if you will, to come to think about it and then say, "Okay, I've seen it this way. How are you seeing it?" And that just opens up so much more I think great ideas, great conversations, and ultimately great innovation. The more diverse those conversations are and the more diverse the audience is or the group is I'm having 'em with. >> That's a great take on how you feel and how you looked at that and I think that's to me a great call out because you get to be self aware and that's hard to do. You just basically walk through the mindset of stepping back and looking at perspectives other than your own and I think to me, that is hard for some people I've seen and that's one, self awareness, right? How do you do that and then how do you maintain it? (laughs) I mean, can you give some examples of how you've seen that in your career where it was just people weren't thinking before they were speaking or maybe driving too hard through conversations and then the ideal scenario that you just pointed out which is, "Okay, zoom out and understand and think and then align with at least, and you could do that in a debate. That's your philosophy at Amazon debate and align, but can you share some experiences where you've seen people just drive through too hard or didn't do that and scenarios where it did work? >> I definitely think that, you know, it's true. You can get folks in a meeting or in a conversation where like, "Oh, I think I'm right on this. I know I'm right on this. Let me explain to you how I'm right on this," and sometimes it's just, it's important that you take a moment and say, "Okay," but if we had someone in the room that wasn't you or didn't have the background, would there it be different? You know, would it be a different answer? I think when you get sort of locked into there's a right answer, that's not always the way it is. I think that there's, depending on the situation, there's definitely answers that yes, if we're trying to solve this problem, you know, we've looked at it a couple ways, we think there's a couple of different answers or a couple of different scenarios in which we can get the best outcome, but the more you can kind of move away from, at least I think, move away from, "Hey, there's a right here or there's only one way here," the better you're going to be ultimately on, "Hey, actually there turned out to be a couple of different ways that we could have addressed this issue or that we could have built this program," and so I do think that's important is not to kind lock yourself into one way, but think, "All right, let's take a beat and say, 'Hey, could there be another way we could have thought about this?'" >> Yeah, I mean, especially with room full of engineers, too, you can you imagine, "I'm right, this is the right answer," of different perspectives. You know, what's come out of a lot of these interviews is that, you know, diversity and inclusion and equity brings more power function. It's a step function. >> Yes. >> In value, right? It's a competitive advantage, too. I mean, it's the data's becoming clearer and clearer that more diversity, more inclusion, more equity brings more power to the conversations and products. >> 100%. >> And this is proven. How do we get there? As you're a senior leader now. You've got the helm at AWS on marketing. You've got a lot of influence as you go through your career. How are you going through that progression of keep driving that positive mindset, that change? >> Uh-hmm. I'm really, I love my team. When we sit down and talk about conversations, well, I always try to think about it is let everyone else speak first. Like I don't want to be the first person to comment on something, right? I always say, "Hey, let's hear from everyone else first," because then I think people feel free to kind of share what they think and I always do kind of look around and in my head just think, "Okay, have we got the teams here that we want to make sure we're including in the discussion," right? So kind of just saying, "Oh, we're going to roll out. Hey, we have a new idea for marketing program" For all of our customers? Great, it's a global program? Great, do we have global representation? Great, if we don't, hold on, we need to pause for a second. We're thinking about new messaging positioning. Okay, great, for our customers. Who's here to talk about it? Do we have, you know, marketing representation? How about, you know, PR? How about the engineers to your point? But just, again, I think the more diverse we can make that conversation, >> Yeah. >> You know, if I I'm in a room and I'm like, "You know, there's only a few of us and we all are going to have the same frame of reference for this conversation. Let's make sure we get some other folks in the room. So it's not just us with one set of context." >> Well, your customer, you guys have been so successful at AWS and Amazon, AWS in particular it's results you look at, just go back to our first cube event there in 2013, just enormous success and you get such a diverse customer base. It is global. It is, you know, 51% women, that's the statistic in the customer base in general, so super important and this is really a big deal. So I have to ask you, as you're the leader out there of AWS, you're an inspiration to many out watching. For the young folks out, the young girls and young women out there, who are going into their careers and thinking about tech, whether they're in early school or getting into the career path, what advice would you give them around how to be successful, how to find mentors, how to be a good citizen in the community, and how to contribute and how to move forward in a very positive way? >> When we started the conversation a couple of minutes ago, I mentioned finding your voice. I think that's really critical. I think, find your voice, use your voice. I know that sometimes, you know, early on, you know, in my career, I was maybe nervous about asking questions, but asked the questions. I think that the more questions you can ask, very oftentimes you'll ask a question and someone else, a bunch of other people in the room are like, "Oh, yeah, I would've asked that question." I think that, well, you know, I'm super proud of my leadership team. It's a 70/30 split, women, yay. >> Yeah. >> But I definitely think, "Look at who you're surrounding yourself with, think about your mentors, think about your team, think about your community, and just kind of, you know, ask yourself, 'Hey, how can I, you know, have this be an even broader community, an even more diverse community?'" Because having that, I think, is just going to help make whatever comes after it that much better and so I think that would be my big advice is just, you know, learn and be curious, like I said before. Ask a lot of questions, but definitely find your voice and share that voice with your community and make that community as sort of as broad as you can. >> Rachel, thanks, that's great insight. The word community resonates as all my interviews here on this International Women's Day, all comes back to community and being part of something, super important. Thank you so much for being part of our program and our community. We really appreciate it. Thank you for your time and insight and your mentorship and also your insights here on "theCube." We really appreciate it, thank you so much. >> Well, thank you, John. This was really great. Thank you for having me. >> Okay, this is "theCube's" presentation of Women in Tech's global event celebrating International Women's Day. More content coming, stay with us. I'm John Furrier, the host of "theCube." Thanks for watching. (bright outro music)

>>Hello. Everyone were here in the Data Cloud Summit, and we had a real treat for you. I call it the CMO Power Panel. We're gonna explore how data is transforming marketing, branding and promotion, and with me, a three phenomenal marketing pros and chief marketing officers. Denise Person is the CMO Snowflakes Scott Holden of Thought Spot and Laura Langdon, of which pro folks great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Think >>great to be here with you, David. Awesome >>did. He's Let's let's start with you. I want to talk about the role and the changing role of the CMO. It's changed a lot, you know, sports, of course, with all this data, but I wonder what you're experiencing And can you share us share with us? Why marketing, especially, is being impacted by data? >>Well, data is really what has helped turn us marketers into revenue drivers into call centers, and it's clearly a much better place to be. What I'm personally most excited about is the real time access we have to data today. In the past, I used to get a stale report a few weeks after a marketing program was over and a tough time, but we couldn't make any. Changes to the investments were already made. Today we get data in the midst of running a program so we can reallocate investments at the time of program is up and running, and that's really a profound today as well. I would say that adaptability has truly become the true superpowers or marketing today and data. It's really what enables us to adapt to scale. We can adapt to customers, behavior and preferences at scale, and that's truly a profound new way of working as well. >>That's interesting what you say because, you know, in tough times used to be okay. Sales and engineering put a brick wall around those and you know the name it. Marketing, Say Okay, cut. But now it's like you go to marketing and say, Okay, what's the data say? How do we have to pivot and Scott? I wonder what of data and cloud really brought to the modern marketer that you might not have had before this modern era? Well, >>it's ah, this era. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer than there is right now. and the primary reason is that we have access to data and insights like we've never had. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have 100 times more access to data than I had a decade ago. It's just phenomenal when you look at the power cloud search AI these new consumer experiences for analytics, we can do things in seconds. It used to take days. And so it's B comments that he said, Ah, superpower for us toe. Have access to so much data. And it's, you know, Kobe has been hard. Ah, lot of our marketing teams who've never worked harder, making this pivot from the physical world to the virtual world. But there, you know, at least we're working, and three other part of it is that digital she's created this phenomenal opportunity for us because the beauty of digital and digital transformation is that everything now is trackable, which makes it measurable and means that we can actually get insights that we can act on in a smarter way. And you know, it's worth giving an example. If you just look at this show right, like this event that we're doing in a physical world. All of you watching at home, you'd be in front of us in a room and we'd be able to know if you're in the room, right? We tracking the scanners when you walked in. But that's basically it. At that point, we don't really get a good sense for how much you like what we're saying. Uh, maybe you filled out a survey, but only 5 to 10% of people ever do that. In the digital world. We know how long you stick around, and as a result, like, it's easy people can just with the click, you know, change the channel. And so the bar for content has gone way up as we do these events. But we know how long people are sticking around. And that's what's so special about it. You know Denise and her team as the host of this show, they're going to know how long people watch this segment and that knowing is powerful. I mean, it's simple. As you know, using a product like that spot, you could just ask a question. You know how many you know, what's the average you time by session and boom and chart pops up, you're gonna know what's working, what's not. And that's something that you could take and act on in the future. And that's what our That's what customers were doing. So you know, snowflake and the spot that we share a customer with Lulu and they're tracking programs. So what people are watching at home, how long they're watching what they're watching next, and they're able to do that in a super granular way and improve their content as a result. And that's the power of this new world we live in. Uh, that's made the cloud and data so accessible. Folks like us. >>Well, thank you for that. And I want to come back to that notion to understand how you're bringing data into your marketing office. But I want to bring Laura and Laura were pro You guys partner with a lot of brands, a lot of companies around the world. I mean, thousands of partners, obviously snowflake in in thought spot are are, too. How are you using data to optimize these co marketing relationships? You know specifically, what are the trends that you're seeing around around things like customer experience? >>So, you know, we used data for all of our marketing decisions, our own as well as with our partners. And I think what's really been interesting about partner marketing data is we can we can feed that back to our sales team, right? So it's very directional for them as well in their efforts moving forward. So I think that's a place where specifically to partners, it's really powerful. We can also use our collective data to go out to customers to better effect. And then, you know, regarding these trends, we just did a survey on the state of the intelligent enterprise. We we interviewed 300 companies, US and UK, and there were three Interesting. I thought statistics relevant to this, um only 22% of the companies that we interviewed felt that their marketing was where it needed to be from an automation standpoint. So lots of room for us to grow right. Lots of space for us to play, and 61% of them believed that it was critical that they implement this technology to become a more intelligent enterprise. But when they ranked readiness by function, marketing came in six right, So H R R and D finance were all ahead of marketing was followed by sales, you know. And then the final data point that I think was interesting was 40% of those agreed that while the technology was the most important thing, that thought leadership was critical, you know? And I think that's where marketers really could bring. You know, our tried and true experience to bear and merging with this technology. >>Great. Thank you. So so did he say I've been getting the Kool Aid injection this week around Data Cloud? I've been pushing people, but now that I have the CMO in front of me, I wanna ask about the data cloud and what it means specifically for the customers. And what are some of the learnings? Maybe that you've experienced that, that that can support some of the things that that Laura and Scott were just discussing. >>Yeah, As Scott said before, right, he had 100 times more data than he ever has before. And that's again if you look at all the companies we talked to around the world, it's not about the amount of data that they have. That is the problem is the ability to access that data that data for most companies is trapped across Silas across the organization. It's It's in data applications, systems of records. Some of that data sits with your partners that you want access, and that's really what the data clouds comes in. Data Cloud is really mobilizing that data for you. It brings all that data together for you in one place so you can finally access that data and really provide ubiquitous access to that data to everyone in your organization that needs it and can truly unlock the value off that data. And from a marketing perspective, I mean, we are responsible for the customer experience, you know, we provide to our customers, and if you have access toe all the data on your customers, that's when you have that customer 3 60 that we've all been talking about for so many years. If you have all the data, you can truly, you know, look at their, you know, buying behaviors, put all those adults together and create those exceptional customer experiences. You can do things such as the retailers do in terms of personal decision for, for instance, right, and those are the type of experiences in our customers are expecting today. They are expecting a 100% personalized experience for them, you know, all the time. And if you don't have all the data, you can't really put those experiences together at scale. And that is really where the data cloud comes in again. The data cloud is not only about mobilizing your own data within your enterprise. It's also about having access to data from your partners or extending access to your own data in a secure way to your partners within your ecosystems. >>Yeah, So I'm glad you mentioned a couple of things. I've been writing about this a lot, and particularly the 3 60 that we would dying for but haven't really been able to tap. I didn't call it the Data Cloud. I don't have a marketing gene. I had another sort of boring name for it, but I think there's, you know, similar vectors there. So I appreciate that, Scott, I want to come back to this notion of of building data DNA in your marketing, you know, fluency on and how you put data at the core of your marketing ops. I've been working with a lot of folks in banking and manufacturing and other industries that air that are struggling to do this. How are you doing it? What are some of the challenges that you can share and maybe some advice for your your peers out there? >>Yeah, sure, it's, um Well, you brought up this concept of data fluency and it zone important one. And there's been a lot of talking industry about data literacy on being able to read data. But I think it's more important to be able to speak data to be fluent. And as marketers, we're all storytellers. And when you combine data with storytelling, magic happens. And so getting the data fluency is a great goal for us toe have for all of the people in our companies. And to get to that end. I think one of the things that's happening is that people are hiring wrong and they're thinking about it. They're making some mistakes. And so a couple of things come to mind when, especially when I look at marketing teams that I'm familiar with, they're hiring a lot of data analysts and data scientists, and those folks are amazing and every team needs them. Uh, but if you go to big on that, you do yourself a disservice. The second key thing is that you're basically giving your frontline focus, your marketing managers or people on the front lines. An excuse not to get involved data. And I think that's a big mistake because it used to be really hard. But with the technologies available to us now, these new consumer like experiences for Data Analytics, anybody can do it. And so we as leaders have to encourage them to do it. And I'll give you just a you know, an example. You know, I've got about 32 people on my marketing team, and I don't have any data analysts on my team across our entire company. We have a couple of analysts and a couple of data engineers, and what's happening is the world is changing where those folks, their enablers, they architect the system, they bring in the different status sources they use. Technologies like snowflake has been so great at making it easier for people to pull technology together, and they get access data out of it quickly. But they're pulling it together, and then simple things like, Hey, I just want to see this weekly instead of monthly. You don't need to waste your expensive data science talent. You know, Gardner puts a stand out there. 50% of data scientists are doing basic visualization work. That's not a good use of their time. You The products are easy enough now that everyday marketing managers can do that. And when you have a marketing manager come to you and say, You know, I just figured out this this campaign, which looks great on the surface, is doing poorly. From our perspective, that's a magic moment. And so we all need to coach our teams to get there. And I would say, you know, lead by example, give them an opportunity Thio access data and turn it into a story that's really powerful. And then, lastly, praised people who do it like use it as something to celebrate inside our companies is a great way to kind of get this initiative. >>E love it. You talk about democratizing data, making it self service. People feel ownership, you know, Laura did. He starts talking about the ecosystem, and you're kind of the ecosystem pro here. How does the ecosystem help marketers succeed? Maybe you could talk about the power of of many versus the resource of one. >>So, you know, I think it's a it's a game changer and it will continue to be. And I think it's really the next level for marketers to harness this. This power that's out there and use it. Um, you know, it's something that's important to us, but it's also something we're starting to see our customers demand, you know, we went from a one size fits all solution, Thio. They want to bring the best in class to their organization. Um, we all need to be really agile and flexible right now. And I think this ecosystem allows that, you know, you think about the power of a snow plate snowflake mining data for you, and then a thought spot really giving you the dashboard toe, have what you want. And then, of course, on implementation partner like a whip Roh coming in and really being able to plug in whatever else you need to deliver. And I think it's really super powerful, and I think it gives us, you know, it just gives us so much to play with and so much room to grow market. >>Thank you. Did he say, Why don't you bring us home? We were almost out of time here, but marketing, art, science both. What do your thoughts? >>Definitely Both. I think that's exciting. Part about marketing. It is a balancing act between art and science. Clearly, it's probably mawr science today than it used to be. But the art part is really about inspiring change. It's about changing people's people's behavior and challenging the status quo, right? That's the art part. The science part. That's about making the right decisions all the time, right? It's making sure we are truly investing in what's gonna drive revenue for us. >>Guys, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Great discussion. Really appreciate it. Okay. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Wall to wall coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on the Cube.

>> Hello everyone, we're here at the Data Cloud Summit, and we have a real treat for you. I call it the CMO Power Panel. And we're going to explore how data is transforming marketing, branding and promotion. And with me are three phenomenal marketing pros and chief marketing officers. Denise Persson is the CMO of Snowflake, Scott Holden of ThoughtSpot and Laura Langdon of Wipro. Folks, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." >> Great to be here with you David. >> Awesome, Denise, let's start with you. I want to talk about the role and the changing role of the CMOs, has changed a lot, you know, I suppose of course with all this data, but I wonder what you're experiencing and can you share with us why marketing especially is being impacted by data. >> Well data's really what has helped turn us marketers into revenue drivers, into call centers. And it's clearly a much better place to be. What I'm personally most excited about is the real time access we have to data today. In the past, I used to get a stale report a few weeks after a marketing program was over and at that time we couldn't make any changes to the investments we'd already made. Today, we get data in the midst of running a program. So it can reallocate investments at the time a program is up and running and that's really profound. Today as well, I would say that adaptability has truly become the true superpowers of marketing today and data is really what enables us to adapt to scale. We can adapt to customer's behavior and preferences at scale and that's truly a profound new way of working as well. >> That's interesting what you say cause you know, in tough times used to be okay, sales and engineering, put a brick wall around those and you know, you name it marketing, say, "Okay, cut." But now it's like, you go to marketing and say, "Okay, what's the data say, "how do we have to pivot?" And Scott, I wonder what have data and cloud really brought to the modern marketer that you might not have had before through to this modern era? >> Well, this era, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer than there is right now. And the primary reason is that we have access to data and insights like we've never had before and I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have a hundred times more access to data than I had a decade ago. It's just phenomenal. When you look at the power of cloud, search, AI, these new consumer experiences for analytics, we can do things in seconds that used to take days. And so it's become in us, as Denise said a super power for us to have access to so much data. And it's, you know, COVID has been hard. A lot of our marketing teams who never worked harder making this pivot from the physical world to the virtual world but they're, you know, at least we're working. And the other part of it is that digital has just created this phenomenal opportunity for us because the beauty of digital and digital transformation is that everything now is trackable, which makes it measurable and means that we can actually get insights that we can act on in a smarter way. And you know, it's worth giving an example. If you just look at this show, right? Like this event that we're viewing. In a physical world, all of you watching at home you'd be in front of us in a room and we'd be able to know if you're in the room, right? We'd track to the scanners when you walked in but that's basically it. At that point, we don't really get a good sense for how much you like, what we're saying. You know, maybe you filled out a survey, but only five to 10% of people ever do that. In a digital world, we know how long you stick around. And as a result, like it's easy, people can just with a click, you know, change the channel. And so the bar for content has gone way up as we do these events but we know how long people are sticking around. And that's, what's so special about it. You know, Denise and her team, as the host of this show they're going to know how long people watch this segment. And that knowing is powerful. I mean, it's simple as you know, using a product like ThoughtSpot, you could just ask a question, you know, how many, you know, what's the average view time by session and Bloomer chart pops up. You're going to know what's working and what's not. And that's something that you can take and act on in the future. And that's what our customers are doing. So, you know, Snowflake and ThoughtSpot, we share our customer with Hulu and they're tracking programs. So, what people are watching at home, how long they're watching, what they're watching next. And they're able to do that in a super granular way and improve their content as a result. And that's the power of this new world we live in that's made the cloud and data so accessible to folks like us. >> Well, thank you for that. And I want to come back to that notion and understand how you're bringing data into your marketing ops, but I want to bring Laura in. Laura, Wipro, you guys partner with a lot of brands, a lot of companies around the world. I mean, thousands of partners, obviously Snowflake in ThoughtSpot or two. How are you using data to optimize these co-marketing relationships? You know, specifically, what what are the trends that you're seeing around things like customer experience? >> So, you know, we use data for all of our marketing decisions, our own, as well as with our partners. And I think what's really been interesting about partner marketing data is we can feed that back to our sales team, right? So, it's very directional for them as well and their efforts moving forward. So, I think that's a place where specifically to partners, it's really powerful. We can also use our collected data to go out to customers to better effect. And then you know, regarding these trends, we just did a survey on the state of the intelligent enterprise. We interviewed 300 companies, US and UK, and there were three interesting I thought statistics relevant to this. Only 22% of the companies that we interviewed felt that their marketing was where it needed to be from an automation standpoint. So lots of room for us to grow, right? Lots of space for us to play. And 61% of them believe that it was critical that they implement this technology to become a more intelligent enterprise. But when they ranked on readiness by function, marketing came in six, right? So HR, RND, finance were all ahead of marketing followed by sales. You know, and then the final data point that I think was interesting was 40% of those agreed that the technology was the most important thing, that thought leadership was critical. You know, and I think that's where marketers really can bring our tried and true experience to bear and merge it with this technology. >> Great, thank you. So, Denise, I've been getting the Kool-Aid injection this week around Data Cloud. I've been pushing people but now that I have the CMO in front of me, I want to ask about the Data Cloud and what it means specifically for the customers and what are some of the learnings maybe that you've experienced that can support some of the things that that Laura and Scott were just discussing. >> Yeah, as Scott said before, idea of a hundred times more data than he ever has before. And that's again, if you look at all the companies we talked to around the world it's not about the amount of data that they have that is the problem, it's the ability to access that data. That data for most companies is trapped across silos, across the organization. It sits in data applications, systems or records. Some of that data sits with your partners that you want to access. And that's really what the data cloud comes in. Data cloud is really mobilizing that data for you. It brings all that data together for you in one place. So you can finally access that data and really provide ubiquitous access to that data to everyone in your organization that needs it and can truly unlock the value of that data. And from a marketing perspective, I mean, we are responsible for the customer experience you know, we provide to our customers and if you have access to all the data on your customers, that's when you have that to customer 360, that we've all been talking about for so many years. And if you have all that data, you can truly, you know, look at their, you know, buying behaviors, put all those dots together and create those exceptional customer experiences. You can do things such as the retailers do in terms of personal decision, for instance, right? And those are the types of experiences, you know, our customers are expecting today. They are expecting a 100% personalized experience for them you know, all the time. And if you don't have all the data, you can't really put those experiences together at scale. And that is really where the data cloud comes in. Again, the data cloud is not only about mobilizing your own data within your enterprise. It's also about having access to data from your partners or extending access to your own data in a secure way to your partners within your ecosystems. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned a couple of things. I've been writing about this a lot and in particularly the 360 that we were dying for, but haven't really been able to tap. I didn't call it the data cloud, I don't have a marketing gene. I had another sort of boring name for it, but I think there's similar vectors there. So I appreciate that. Scott, I want to come back to this notion of building data DNA in your marketing, you know, fluency and how you put data at the core of your marketing ops. I've been working with a lot of folks in banking and manufacturing and other industries that are that are struggling to do this. How are you doing it? What are some of the challenges that you can share and maybe some advice for your peers out there? >> Yeah, sure, you brought up this concept of data fluency and it's an important one. And there's been a lot of talk in the industry about data literacy and being able to read data. But I think it's more important to be able to speak data, to be fluent and as marketers, we're all storytellers. And when you combine data with storytelling, magic happens. And so, getting a data fluency is a great goal for us to have for all of the people in our companies. And to get to that end, I think one of the things that's happening is that people are hiring wrong and they're thinking about it, they're making some mistakes. And so a couple of things come to mind especially when I look at marketing teams that I'm familiar with. They're hiring a lot of data analysts and data scientists and those folks are amazing and every team needs them. But if you go too big on that, you do yourself a disservice. The second key thing is that you're basically giving your frontline folks, your marketing managers or people on the front lines, an excuse not to get involved with data. And then that's a big mistake because it used to be really hard. But with the technologies available to us now, these new consumer like experiences for data analytics, anybody can do it. And so we as leaders have to encourage them to do it. And I'll give you just a you know, an example, you know, I've got about 32 people on my marketing team and I don't have any data analysts on my team. Across our entire company, we have a couple of analysts and a couple of data engineers. And what's happening is the world is changing where those folks, they're enablers, they architect the system. They bring in the different data sources. They use technologies like Snowflake as being so great at making it easier for people to pull spectrum technology together and to get access to data out of it quickly, but they're pulling it together and then simple things like, "Hey I just want to see this "weekly instead of monthly." You don't need to waste your expensive data science talent. You know, Gardener puts a stat out there that 50% of data scientists are doing basic visualization work. That's not a good use of their time. The products are easy enough now that everyday marketing managers can do that. And when you have a marketing manager come to you and say, you know, "I just figured out "this campaign which looks great on the surface "is doing poorly from an ROI perspective. That's a magic moment. And so we all need to coach our teams to get there. And I would say, you know, lead by example, give them an opportunity to access data and turn it into a story, that's really powerful. And then lastly, praise people who do it, like, use it as something to celebrate inside our companies is a great way to kind of get this initiative. >> I love it. And talking about democratizing data and making it self service, people feel ownership. You know, Laura, Denise was talking about the ecosystem and you're kind of the ecosystem pro here. How does the ecosystem help marketers succeed? Maybe you can talk about the power of many versus the resource of one. >> Sure, you know, I think it's a game changer and it will continue to be. And I think it's really the next level for marketers to harness this power that's out there and use it, you know, and it's something that's important to us, but it's also something we're starting to see our customers demand. You know, we went from a one size fits all solution to they want to bring the best in class to their organization. We all need to be really agile and flexible right now. And I think this ecosystem allows that, you know, you think about the power of Snowflake, Snowflake mining data for you and then a ThoughtSpot really giving you the dashboard to have what you want. And then an implementation partner like a Wipro coming in, and really being able to plug in whatever else you need to deliver. And I think it's really super powerful and I think it gives us you know, it just gives us so much to play with and so much room to grow as marketers. >> Thank you, Denise, why don't you bring us home. We're almost out of time here, but marketing, art, science, both? What are your thoughts? >> Definitely both, I think that's the exciting part about marketing. It is a balancing act between art and science. Clearly, it's probably more science today than it used to be but the art part is really about inspiring change. It's about changing people's behavior and challenging the status quo, right? That's the art part. The science part, that's about making the right decisions all the time, right? It's making sure we are truly investing in what's going to drive revenue for us. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Great discussion, I really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Wall-to-wall coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on "theCUBE."

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, full of preview of Actifio Data Driven, and with me is Brian Reagan who is a long time cube alumni, good friend. Brian, awesome to see you thanks for coming on and help us set up Data Driven >> Dave it's always a pleasure to be here, thanks for having me. >> So this is one of our favorite events of the season, not only because it's historically been in Boston, but it's a really good intimate event, lot of customer content. Unfortunately this year, of course everything has gone virtual but tell us about that, what do you guys got planned for Data Driven this year? >> Well again we're delighted to be able to put the show on, in spite of all of the challenges of travel and face to face. As you know from years past, Data Driven has always been sort of by the customers for the customers, very much an event that is driven around understanding how customers are using data strategically, and how Actifio is helping them do that to power their businesses. This year is no different, I think what we've done is we've taken the best of the physical events, which is really facilitating fireside chats and panels of people using our technology to move the business forward with data, but also added a lot of things that frankly are impossible to do when you're strained by a physical event, which is be able to run a series of on demand technical sessions. Our technical tracks are always standing room only, so now we can offer more content, more discreet package content that can be consumed the day of the event and on for a year plus after the event. So we're excited to really sort of mix the best of both worlds virtual and the forums that have worked so well for us in the physical events. >> Well it's like I said I mean, lots of these events are sort of vendor fests, but what you do with Data Driven is you bring in the customer's voice. And I remember last year in theCUBE, we had Holly st. Clair who was with the state of Massachusetts, she was awesome. We had a guest from DraftKings, which was really, really tremendous. Of course, you see what's happening with those guys now just exploding. >> Exactly. >> But we also had a lot of fun, when of course Ash comes on, and all the Actifio folk, but we had Frank Gens on, the first and only time we've ever had him on theCUBE, he's now retired from IDC, I guess semiretired. We had Duplessie on, which was a lot of fun. So it's just a good vibe. >> Yeah, we made a conscious decision to your point not to avoid the traditional vendor fest, and bludgeoning people with PowerPoint throughout the day, and really wanted to make it spin it around, and have the customers tell their stories in their own words, and really talk about the themes that are both common, in terms of challenges, ways that they've addressed those challenges, but also dig into the real implications of when they do solve these challenges, what are the unintended consequences? It's sort of like the... In a lot of ways I think about the journey that customers went through with VMware and with the ability to spin up VMs effortlessly, was a fantastic first step, and then all of a sudden they realized they had all of these spun up Vms that were consuming resources that they didn't necessarily had thought about at the very beginning. I think that our customers as they progress through their journey with Actifio, once they realize the power of being able to access data and deliver data, no matter how big it is, in any form factor in any cloud, there's incredible power there, but there also comes with that a real need to make sure that the governance and controls and management systems are in place to properly deliver that. Particularly today when everything is distributed, everything is essentially at arms length, so that's part of the fun of these events is really being able to hear all of the ways these unique customers are, adding value, delivering value, gaining value, from the platform. >> What's it's interesting you mentioned VMs, it was like life changing when you saw your first VM get spun up and you're like, wow, this is unbelievable, and then it was so easy to spin up. and then you just save VM creep and copy creep. >> Right. >> And you're seeing some similar things now with cloud I mean example is the cloud data warehouses is so easy to spin those things up now. The CFOs are looking at the bill going Whoa, what are we doing here? >> (laughs) >> You're going to see the same thing >> Exactly. >> with containers as you begin to persist containers, you're going to have the same problem. So you guys created the category, it's always a marketing executives dreams to be able to create a category. You guys created the Copy Data Management category, and of course, you've extended that. But that was really good, it was something that you guys set forth and then all the analysts picked up on it, people now use that as a term and it kind of resonates with everybody. >> Right, right. It was bittersweet but also very satisfying to start to see other vendors come out with their own Copy Data Management offerings, and so yes the validating that in fact this is a real problem in the enterprise continues to be a real problem in the enterprise, and by using technologies that Actifio really pioneered and patented quite a bit of foundational technologies around, we're able to help customers address those copy data challenges, those spiraling costs of managing all of these duplicate, physical instances of data. And to your point, to some degree when you're on-prem in a data center and you've already bought your storage array. Okay, I'm consuming 20% more of the Ray or 100% more of the array than I really need to be, but I've already paid for the array. When it comes to cloud, those bills are adding up hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and those are real costs, and so in many ways cloud is actually highlighting the power and frankly the problem of copy data, far more than the on-prem phenomenon ever did. >> Yeah I was on the phone with a former CIO, COO now of a healthcare organization, and he was saying to me there's a dark side of CapEx to OPEX, which is now that he's a COO he's like really concerned about the income statement and the variability of those costs, and so to your point I mean it's a big issue, the convenience seems to be outweighing some of that concern but nonetheless lack of predictability is a real concern there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And I think we see that... You mentioned data lakes, and whether you call it a data lake or you just call it a massive data instance, one of the speakers of Data Driven this year is a customer of our Century Data Systems down in Florida. And they have 120 terabyte database that actually they're using, and this is an incredible story that we're excited to have them share with the world during Data Driven. They're using it to help the federal government get better data faster on COVID treatments and the efficacy of those treatments, and so to even consider being able to rapidly access and manage 120 terabyte instance. It breaks the laws of physics frankly. But again with Copy Data Management, we have the ability to help them really extend and really enhance their business and ultimately enhance the data flows that are hopefully going to accelerate the access to a vaccine for us in North American and worldwide, quite frankly. >> That's awesome, that's awesome. Now let's talk a little bit more about Data Driven what we can expect. Of course, the last couple of years you've been the host of Data Driven. They pulled a Ricky gervais' on you >> (Laughs loudly) like get the golden gloves, he's no longer being invited to host, but I think probably for different reasons, but what are some the major themes that we can expect this year? >> Yeah, we were disappointed that we couldn't get Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. >> (laughs quietly) I think we decided that in a virtual construct, the host duties were pretty amenable. So among the many things I talked about Sentry Data Systems and we have many customers who are going to be joining us and telling their stories. And again from accelerating data analytics to accelerating DevOps initiatives, to accelerating a move to the cloud, we're going to hear all of those different use cases described. One of the things that is different this year and we're really excited. Gene Kim sort of the author and noted DevOps guru, author of The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, he's going to be joining us. We had previously intended to do a road show with Gene this year and obviously those plans got changed a bit. So really excited to have him join us, talk about his point of view around DevOps. Certainly it's a hugely important use case for us, really important for many of our customers, and actually registrant's between now and the event, which is September 15th and 16th, we'll get an eCopy an e-book copy of his Unicorn Project book. So we're eager to have people register and if they haven't already read him then I think they're going to be really pleasantly surprised to see how accessible his materials are, and yet how meaningful and how powerful they can be in terms of articulating the journeys that many of these businesses are going through. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I'm stucked I have not read that material, but I've heard a lot about it, and when I signed up I saw that, said great I'm going to get the free book. So I'm going to check that out, >> Yeah It's obviously a very, very hot topic. Well Brian, I really appreciate you coming on, and setting up the event. What are the details? So where do I go to sign up? When is the event? What's the format? Give us the lowdown. >> It is September 15th and 16th, actifio.com will guide you through the registration process. You'll be able to create the event based on the content that you're eager to participate in. And again not only on the 15th and 16th, but then into the future, you'll be able to go back and re access or access content that you didn't have the time to do during the event window. So we're really excited to be able to offer that as an important part of the event. >> Fantastic and of course theCUBE will be there doing its normal wall to wall coverage. Of course, this time virtual, and you'll see us on social media with all the clips and all the work on Silicon Angle. So Brian great to see you and we will see you online in September. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you. Go to actifio.com, sign up register for Data Driven, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Inspire. Because I'm in the UK, I have to say, you know of Sting, right? Well, guess who's here? Somebody cool enough to go by one name, it's Chandar, the CMO at Coupa. Welcome back! >> Great, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So, this morning kicked off with Rob's talk all about community. One of the interesting things about Coupa is this community that you guys have built. Talk to me about, I know $1.3 trillion of spend is going through the Coupa platform, the community. Talk to me about how you've cultivated this community at Coupa. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Now, if you take a step back, you know, people don't buy features, people buy tribal feelings. And if you think it, if you look at, like, you know, if you look at a product like Harley-Davidson. Anybody can go buy any bike, but people are not buying the features, they're buying the tribal feeling of being part of that community. If you look at a product like Peloton, you know, people can go buy, have any stationary bike or any workout bike today. But they want to be part of that community. And as my wife tells me, Sephora, right? I don't have a lot of experience with that-- >> She's right. >> She is right, great, (Lisa laughs) thanks for the endorsement there. But again, it is about being part of the community and people like that and stuff, and that's what we're doing is, it's the features or the capability, it's the community the tribal feeling, and that's what Rob was talking about, the inspirational attributes of these different people that are part of this community, and how we're trying to, how we are building this community by showcasing the great leaders and their attributes and how they're transforming change in their organizations, and that's what we're creating in this conference, the feeling, the #emotion, of I want to be part of this cool club, and that's what we're doing. >> You know, a lot of companies talk about customer first, customer centricity. The community here is really helping Coupa innovate on its own technology. Talk to me about some of the things that, you know, since we last spoke, a few months ago, that have been inspired by the voice of the community. >> Yeah, so, you know, there is this concept of co-creation that Rob talked about today with our community. And a lot of the community is inspired by the community and it's for the community. And we have a number of innovations, 80 plus innovations that have been inspired in the last one year by the community. And even a concept like Source Together that Rob talked about, and the idea of Source Together is how can we come together as one community and drive the best negotiated savings together with a supplier, this is an idea that's been co-created with the community. So there's a number of different things. You look at community intelligence, Rob talked about commodity insights, as well as a number of other capabilities that we are showcasing today, has been driven, co-created, inspired by the community. And that's what's great. You want to set the innovation agenda for the industry by having this community inspire us. In fact we had our customer advisory board at every conference that is happening for us, and that's what drives to a lot of the innovation that we do today. >> Speaking of customers, Rob shared a lot of examples during his keynote this morning. I lost count of how many of your Coupa Spendsetters were mentioned, other customers, all with very strong business, measurable business outcomes. I know tomorrow in your keynote, you're going to be talking with a number of customers. But some of the things that are interesting about what Rob shared is these are examples that aren't just about refining procurement and reducing spend and, it's much more transformative. Give me some of your favorite examples of where this is beyond improving procurement. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. And we have a number of stories, for example, tomorrow in my keynote, I'm going to be talking about storytelling, right. I'm going to be talking about how we can inspire the community through storytelling, and great storytelling starts with great storytellers. And these Spendsetters, and we can see them in the hallways here, we have found about 15 of them, and they're all great storytellers for one reason. They have great transformative stories in business spend management, but what makes them a great storyteller is that they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of the business spend management. Let me give a couple of examples, right. So one story that I'll highlight tomorrow is about Jarkko, the CPO of Telia. Now, I don't know if we know Telia, but 60% of the word's internet traffic goes through Telia. >> 60%? >> 60%. So everyday morning, checking out coupa.com that we all do. >> Every day. >> Or I'm looking at some less popular sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or anything else, you're probably on the Telia network, especially in this part of the world. And their challenge, their business spend management challenge is, they're pretty fragmented across the Nordics and the Baltics and other regions, and now with Jarkko, he's a strategic crusader, not a hired gun, but more of a driven crusader who's come in, transformed the sourcing function, made it more strategic, consolidated seven systems into one system with Coupa, and had 20,000 employees using that as well as all the different people for sourcing, so that they get the global benefits of scale across the regions. Now that's a great business spend management story, but what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management, because he's not talking about savings attainability, he's talking about environmental sustainability, and the story he talks about is what their initiative at a board level is, you know, zero emission and zero waste by 2030, and how the work that his team is doing is directly impacting that board level initiative on how are they driving a communication strategy across the supplier base to get their environmental plans into the Telia's operations, and how me measures plans and progress of every supplier in their CO2 emission, and how that's going to be an explicit part of how they work with their suppliers, and how he is the trusted advisor that he is actually challenging everybody to rethink this whole idea of source to pay. That is telling a boundary beyond the boundaries of business spend management, it's telling a story. So that's one example, right. >> Is that a gentleman who's in procurement in finance within an organization? >> He is the CPO, the procurement-- >> That is having an impact on the sustainability footprint of the company. >> That's right, so directly associating with the initiative at a board level, right. So he's shifted it, by shifting the storytelling from talking about savings attainability to environmental sustainability, he shifted the perception of the organization from something that's operational to something that's very strategic in the organization. So that's one good storytelling. The other one I'll highlight, an example, is Matthieu at Global Fund. Now the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of fighting malaria, AIDS, HIV in 100-plus countries. They disperse $4 billion every year for that. And they have this partner called OneWorld.org, it's powered by Coupa, that Matthieu and his team are doing. So he could get a great business spend management story. He can say, you know, I've driven digital transformation, I've done 99.9% of my POs are electronic, and I've come to this new age of where, you know, on contract spend is being done, et cetera. Now what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling the story beyond the boundaries of BSM again. He's talking about a story of how this, the work that his team is doing, is directly impacting saving 32 million lives. How they are treating millions of people, get the right treatment for HIV, help pregnant mothers or on HIV, they get the right treatment on time, so that the babies don't get infected with HIV, and how they're distributing hundreds of millions of mosquito nets throughout the world for preventing malaria, through this OneWorld tool that's powered by Coupa to get the right medication on time. So that's millions and millions of lives, but the speed and ease of every single medication to get there, has an impact on the life of that person, and that's the story he's telling. >> This is so interesting, because it's so common for businesses to tell the common success story, and a lot of what Coupa shares of customers holding those big white cards with big numbers of what they're saving are very impactful. What was the idea behind the Spendsetters program, 'cause when I was reading a few of them in preparation to come here, it seems like it was a little bit more about the person and how that individual has facilitated transformation. Tell me about the concept-- >> It's a great point. There's two components to it, right. One is empirical, two is emotive. And if you look at both concepts, one of them is the empirical value that, yes, ultimately Coupa is about driving value, and that has to be as a company, has a capability of driving value to our customers. And that's the empirical value of you have driven so much saving, so much percentage of spend, and you know, millions of dollars, billions of dollars savings et cetera. Procter & Gamble, for example, $2.5 billion in savings. That's the empirical value. It's very clear, that's the value. But behind that is a person, and that is the emotive story of what is that person, what is the personal story, what have they gone through in their life, what's their, you know, nurture and nature, and how that's influenced them that's becoming, that made them into the great leader today, and that's the emotive stories we're trying to also tell on the Spendsetters site. So there's the value side of the story, and then there is the emotive side of the story, and the spendsetters.com is purely on telling the human stories, because behind every purchase order is a person, and we're telling the story of that person. >> So as we look at the changing role of the Chief Procurement Officer, the changing role of finance decision makers, not just here in the UK, and I know Coupa recently did a study that showed that 96% of UK financial decision makers said, "Hey, I don't have complete visibility over all my spend", so big opportunity there, but even from a transformation perspective, the Spendsetters examples, how is that showing that Coupa can fundamentally help a business not just change procurement, but have such wide lasting impacts? >> Yeah, I think ultimately, if you look at procurement, you know, for it to go as going from operation to strategic, you're just getting that seat at the table. And getting that seat at the table in any executive discussion is about first aligning to some strategic initiative that is important at that executive table. So more as we align these value stories and the value that procurement is driving, through these strategic initiatives that are important at the board level, at the executive level, the more the profile and the more the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as we like to say, and get that seat at the table, and that's what this whole Spendsetters program is aiming to do is A, showcase the personal heroes, and B, showcase how they're telling stories that align to bigger level initiatives, that's getting them get that elevate their position and get that seat at the table. And that's what the plan is there. >> So, lots of growth. Second quarter results, I was taking a look at those, revenues up, billings are up, very high renewal rates. So from a customer satisfaction perspective, the data is there to show that Coupa is going in the right direction. From your perspective, how influential are your existing, your incumbent customers in helping prospective customers evaluate Coupa and go, this is the right decision for us. >> It's a great question. You know, I say we live in a peer-bound world, right, where it's really, we more and more, first of all, 80 to 90% of buyers' journeys are self directed, because buyers have more power than ever before, and second of all, anything we do within our personal lives as well as in business decisions, we rely more on peers and people we trust to help us make those decisions, right? From that perspective, our best sellers, the best sellers we have in this conference, are our customers. I just came from an executive luncheon, where we had 50% of the room was customers and 50% of the room was prospects, and we had our best sellers, not our salespeople, our customers talking to the prospects, in real, authentic conversations of what's value, what's their journey, what did they struggle with, and what are the lessons learned, and how did they get there. And those are really meaningful interactions that ultimately is going to make a prospect, influence a prospect on what decision they have to make. >> Absolutely. >> So that's very, very important from us, and then providing a platform for this authentic dialog and these authentic interactions. That's important for us. And also, I think, you know, ultimately in a SaaS business, the true measurement of success, I say is two things, right. One is what I call lifetime value, and two is the number of brand advocates. So the idea there if someone is staying with you longer and giving you lifetime value, and is shouting from the rooftop that I really love my interaction with this brand, then invariably you're driving value to them in a long term way. And that's really the true measure of success, and that's what excites us from our perspective. >> And is the foundation of that trust? >> The foundation of that is two things. It's trust based on value, right, and you've got to deliver value, and Rob has a great line where he talks about, it is not about customer satisfaction, it's about customer success. 'Cause many times a customer may be satisfied, may not really know what their success metrics really mean, but it's not about sometimes a customer may not be satisfied, but really be successful because you're driving the true metrics what is important to the customer. So once you get the value delivered, and do it in an open, authentic way, then, in that case, there's trust that build, and based on that trust, you earned that trust, and that becomes the foundation of the lifetime value. >> We were talking about, well, we, Rachel Botsman was talking about the importance of a brand, any brand, earning trust. A lot of times she gave that example in her keynote where she showed three brand logos, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, and said, trust is so contextual and so subjective, but clap for which brand you trust the most. And it's so interesting when she started talking about, Facebook got the least, in fact Facebook got no applause at all, I was expecting a few folks (Chandar laughs) to maybe do some clapping, but Amazon being the clear winner, and I thought, yeah, I trust Amazon to deliver whatever it is that I buy when they say they're going to deliver it, and she said she trusts them to do the same, but, would you trust them to pay their taxes on time-- >> Chandar: Sure. >> So when she started talking about trust being subjective and contextual, it really kind of changes the whole dynamic. >> Chandar: It does. >> So that earned trust, but also the ability to reduce the risk that your customers are facing, whether it's overpaying suppliers or paying duplicate invoices, that trust risk balance seems pretty critical as well. >> Ti does, it does. It's an interesting perspective. I think because, in that case of Amazon, I think there's operational trust, that they're going to get the job done and deliver the whatever you ordered in one day with frame or two days with frames, this is operational trust. But is there a trust in the sense of purpose is where she was going with, right. And today for organizations, especially with the millennial crowd, as being customers as well as employees, the question is, you can get operational trust, but you also have a sense of purpose that they trust in, and have that be, and be authentic as an organization. And that's why is say it is not being, you talk about AI, as artificial intelligence, the real AI is authentic interactions. >> Lisa: Authentic interactions. >> And that's really the authenticity as a brand, being open, and acknowledge your failures but strive for excellence for success, and have this open platform with your customers, and always look towards adding value. I think that invariably, over time, creates this trust feeling that ultimately drives long term lifetime value for us. So that I think is the most important thing. >> Absolutely. So tell me again, which three customers are going to be on stage with you tomorrow sharing their stories? >> It's great, I have three. One, Procter & Gamble, a company that my mom knows about, my 86-year-old mom. So one of the greatest brands, so that's a great story about, again, they have a great business spend management story, but they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management and it's a fun story. And then we're going to have the Global Fund. Again, I told you, one of the world's largest financier of fighting HIV, malaria and AIDS. And we're going to have Telia, one of the largest telecommunications providers. >> Excellent. So really kind of showing the breadth of the technologies and the industries that Coupa helps to transform. >> And the breadth of the personalities, and the people behind that are driving all this change. >> Excellent, well Chandar, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. I wish we were going to be here tomorrow to see your keynote, but it sounds exciting and the Spendsetter program is certainly one that I think is quite differentiated in terms of telling those transformative stories that you said are both empirical and emotional. >> Yes, thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. >> Likewise. >> Great. >> For Chandar, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Ciscolive! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our first day of three days of coverage for Cisco live for Europe. Lynn Lucas is here, she's the chief marketing officer for Cohesity. Lynn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent so, another first. >> Yeah, another first. >> So pleased to be in the US with you guys at multiple shows, and now we're here in Barcelona. >> So it's a great venue. We've actually done you know, a number of shows here and again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys in Cisco? You got some news? Let's talk about it. >> Absolutely. >> As you know, we don't stop innovating, continuous innovation at Cohesity, and a number of new things. So, last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with HyperFlex, and Cohesity integrating for Snapshot. Integration for backup, and of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure and we're calling it HyperSquared. So you get full hyperconvergence for your primary and of course, your backup and other secondary applications. >> And those guys this morning talked about HyperFlex anywhere Stu so, it's like infinitive hype and infinity HyperFlex. >> HyperSquared. >> So, HyperSquared, love it. So you guys will, how's that work? Obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider for multi-cloud. That's a huge opportunity for you guys. >> Absolutely. >> So how do you do that? You'll plug into whatever framework the customer wants, presumably a lot of customers want the Cisco framework, how does that all- >> No, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously one of the most respected IT leaders in the world. Tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm a Cisco Alum, love being back here at the old stomping grounds. And Cisco's been an investor in Cohesity now since our Series C, so they really saw the promise and the benefit of what Cohesity offers with hyperconverge solutions for modern backup, recovery, and two year point to the cloud. You know Cisco's talking a lot about multi-cloud here and Cohesity with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on, or those applications on HyperFlex. And then instantly move them to a cloud of choice and then as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that they're a very strong go to market partner with us. When customers want to buy a solution, they can get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesity. >> Yeah Lynn, glad we have you on. >> Because connecting the dots between something like hyperconverge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now and how that fits into multi-cloud is, it's a little clunky sometimes because like, when I've got my data center am I just doing backup to the cloud? Cause what we know is customers at Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de-centered. It's no longer in the data center, it's all over the place. Companies like Cohesity can give you that centralized data protection no matter where your environment is. Walk us through what you're hearing from your customers, how they look at their data center versus the multicloud environment and data production. >> Yeah so, I think it's you know, customers are now understanding that its not either or, right? There was a time when people thought "wow I'm going to move everything to the cloud" and I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud first world, what do I want to put there and then what am I going to keep on premises. So that's one of the things that Cohesity innovated; our core technology, a distributed webscale file system, spanning file system which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers are really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need to. Tiering and then most importantly, disaster recovery you know, in the event of something man made or natural. Many many organizations moving to the cloud for their second site and with Cohesity, it's very easy to make that transfer happen in a very seamless way with our capabilities set. So I think what we're seeing is this real maturing of how customers look at it as a real holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered, but we call this mass data fragmentation and then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now. >> Yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. >> I know its something that's in your product, there was a ransomware announcement that you made last week. Tell us how security fits into this world. >> Yeah well I think that we all hate to say it, but that old phrase the new normal, unfortunately ransomware and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. Here in Europe we had that awful situation with the NHS and the UK last year, and it's happening everywhere. So one element that these attackers are taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy, that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what Cohesity has introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's detect, prevent, and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right? And then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification. And then if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration, the spanning file system doing this instantly, and allowing an organization to basically say "sorry, not today attackers", we don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit if we could. The detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that? You're observing the behavior of the backup corpus, is that right? Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there. >> That's correct. >> So, last year we introduced Helios, which is our global sass space management system. It has machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the IT team. >> And then the recovery piece as well like you said, its got to be fast. You got to have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system is that what I'm hearing or the architecture? >> That's correct. >> That's one of the differences of our modern backup. Solution versus some of the non-hyperconverge architectures is the distributed web file system which our CEO, Mohit Aron, he was formerly at Google, helped with developing their file system, has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one VM. At Vmware a couple years ago we demonstrated thousands of VMs at a time and the reason for that is this web scale file system, which is really unique to Cohesity. And that's what allows an IT organization to not be held hostage because they can not have to potentially spend not just hours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate, you know, these backups. If they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ransomware may have been introduced not say yesterday, but it might have been several months ago. And that's one of the key advantages of this instant mass restore. >> I mean, this is super important right Stu? Cause we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up, dial down, you can tune it by application. A high value application, you can have much greater granularity. Some of the craplications, maybe not as important. So the flexibility is key there. How about customers? Any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. >> So one of the ones since we're here at Ciscolive! So Cisco along with Cohesity, we've been working with one of the largest global manufactures of semiconductors and other electronic equipment. Tokyo Electron based in Tokyo, but also here in the UK on the continent. They had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with the time it was taking them to backup, the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesity, running on Cisco UCS because we're a software defined platform. We offer our software on our customers choice of certified solutions and of Cisco UCS. So they've started with backup but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape, and to disaster recovery ultimately. So, super excited that together with Cisco, we can help this customer modernize their data center and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys are also protecting the Cisco live network here? Tell us about that. >> Yeah so you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here I mean, you've seen the operation center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things can go wrong potentially. And so, we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of the Ciscolive! Attendees here so should something happen, which I'm sure won't, Cohesity will be used to instantly recover and bring back up critical services like DNS and other areas that they're depending on to serve all of the thousands of show goers here. >> So, super hot space, we talked about this at VMworld. Actually last couple of years just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing and I wonder if you could comment. It used to be backup when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection, data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To us storage folks its pretty specific but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space, cloud clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind, and it requires you guys to respond as an industry. And Cohesity specifically as a company. So I wonder if you could talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and how you're leading. >> Yeah. Yeah I think, you know, folks have been a little bit surprised like wait a minute, what's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean our own Series D funding, middle of last year 250 million dollars, Softbank banked along with Sequoia of course. But really the trend is being talked about here at Ciscolive! Is data is, I don't want to say the new oil, but its the water of the world right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business these days. Other than your talent, it's your most important business asset and the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CIO in turn to be agile, to do more with that data, to know what you have, because here we are in Europe, GDPR increasing regulations, is super important. And so, you know, this has really brought forth the need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility to all of that data. And it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation, and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most peoples minds, you know. You think about your primary applications in data that's really only 20% and the other 80% in testev and analytics and backup, has been pretty fragmented and siloed and it hasn't yet had that vision of how can we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mohit Aron you know, founded Cohesity and applied those same hyperconverge techniques that he did at Nutanix. So I think this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protect it, and then ultimately do more with it. Gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that. >> One is you know, we always joke about data is the new oil, its even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places, you can only put oil in your car once. And so, companies are beginning to realize that. How valuable it is, trying to understand that value, how to protect that, and then GDPR. It's interesting, its really the fines went into effect in Europe last May. But its become a template, a framework globally. People, you know, US companies are saying alright we got to prepare for GDPR, and then local jurisdictions are now saying well that's a decent starting point. And so its not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is. >> You brought up the cloud before, and you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility in talking to a large CIO of Fortune 100, a large organization, he actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of testev, and that is creating more stress I would say in the system, and need for solutions to both provide and enhance that agility, move data to the cloud easily, move it out when you need to, but also with regulation be able to identify and delete as you know, with GDPR if needed, the information that your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah well, I love this conversation. >> I love following Cohesity because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now and the problem with data protection is there's always been a bolt on. And companies like Cohesity, both with the funding, your vision, you're really forcing the industry to kind of rethink data protection. Not as a bolt on but as a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategies. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you've got more to go. So thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and its always a pleasure to see you. >> Always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante from Ciscolive! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back everyone to Cube's live coverage, VMware Explorer, 2022 formerly world. I've been saying now I gotta get that out. Dave, I've been sayingm world. It just kind of comes off the tongue when I'm tired, but you know, wall to wall coverage, again, back to back interviews all day two sets. This is a wrap up here with the analyst discussion. Got one more interview after this really getting the analyst's perspective around what we've been hearing and seeing, observing, and reporting on the cube. Again, two sets blue and green. We call them here on the show floor on Moscone west with the sessions upstairs, two floors of, of amazing content sessions, keynote across ed Moscone, north and south SBI here, cloud strategists with the cube. And of course, what event wouldn't be complete without SBE weighing in on the analysis. And, and, and I'm, you know, all kidding aside. I mean that because we've had great interactions around, you know, digging in you, you're like a roving analyst out there. And what's great about what you do is you're social. You're communicating, you're touching everybody out there, but you're also picking up the puzzle pieces. And we, you know, of course we recognize that cuz that's what we do, but you're out, we're on the set you're out on the floor and you know your stuff and, and you know, clouds. So how you, this is your wheelhouse. Great to see you. Good to >>See you. I'm good guys. Thank you. Thank you for having >>Me. So I mean, Dave and I were riffing going back earlier in this event and even before, during our super cloud event, we're reminded of the old OpenStack days. If you remember, Dave OpenStack was supposed to be the open source version of cloud. And that was a great ambition. And the cloud AATI at that time was very into it because it made a lot of sense. And the vision, all the infrastructure was code. Everything was lined up. Everything was religiously was on the table. Beautiful cloud future. Okay. 20 2009, 2010, where was Amazon? Then they just went off like a rocket ship. So cloud ended up becoming AWS in my opinion. Yeah. OpenStax then settled in, did some great things, but also spawns Kubernetes. Okay. So, you know, we've lived through thiss we've seen this movie. We were actually in the trenches on the front lines present at creation for cloud computing. >>Yeah. I was at Rackspace when the open stack was open sourced. I was there in, in the rooms and discussions and all that. I think OpenStack was given to the open source like prematurely. I usually like we left a toddler on the freeway. No, the toddler >>Got behind the wheel. Can't see over the dashboard. >>So we have learned over the years in last two decades, like we have seen the open source rise of open source and we have learned quite a few lessons. And one lesson we learned from there was like, don't let a project go out in the open, tell it mature enough with one vendor. So we did that prematurely with NASA, NASA and Rackspace gave the, the code from two companies to the open source community and then likes of IBM and HPE. No. Now HPE, they kind of hijacked the whole thing and then put a lot of developers on that. And then lot of us sort of second tier startup. >>But, but, but I remember not to interject, but at that time there wasn't a lot of pushback for letting them it wasn't like they infiltrated like a, the vendors always tried to worry about vendors coming in open source, but at that time was pretty people accepted them. And then it got off the rails. Then you remember the great API debate. You >>Called it a hail Mary to against AWS, which is, is what it was, what it was. >>It's true. Yeah. Ended up being right. But the, the battle started happening when you started seeing the network perimeters being discussed, you starting to see some of the, in the trenches really important conversations around how to make essentially cross cloud or super cloud work. And, and again, totally premature it continue. And, and what does that mean today? So, okay. Is VMware too early on their cross cloud? Are they, is multi-cloud ready? >>No >>For, and is it just vaporware? >>No, they're not too early, actually on, on, on, on that side they were premature to put that out there, but this is like very mature company, like in the ops area, you know, we have been using, we VMware stuff since 2000 early 2000. I, I was at commerce one when we started using it and yeah, it was for lab manager, you know, like, you know, put the labs >>Out desktop competition. >>Yeah, yeah. Kind of thing. So it, it matured pretty fast, but now it it's like for all these years they focused on the op site more. Right. And then the challenge now in the DevOps sort of driven culture, which is very hyped, to be honest with you, they have try and find a place for developers to plug in on the left side of the sort of whole systems, life cycle management sort of line, if you will. So I think that's a, that's a struggle for, for VMware. They have to figure that out. And they are like a tap Tansu application platform services. They, they have released a new version of that now. So they're trying to do that, but still they are from the sort of get ups to the, to the right, from that point to the right on the left side. They're lot more tooling to helpers use as we know, but they are very scattered kind of spend and scattered technology on the left side. VMware doesn't know how to tackle that. But I think, I think VMware should focus on the right side from the get ups to the right and then focus there. And then how in the multi-cloud cross cloud. >>Cause my sense is, they're saying, Hey, look, we're not gonna own the developers. I think they know that. And they think they're saying do develop in whatever world you want to develop in will embrace it. And then the ops guys, we, we got you covered, we got the standards, we have the consistency and you're our peeps. You tend then take it, you know, to, to the market. Is that not? I mean, it seems like a viable strategy. I >>Mean, look at if you're VMware Dave and start, you know, this where they are right now, the way they missed the cloud. And they had to reboot that with jazzy and, and, and Raghu to do the databases deal. It's essentially VMware hosted on AWS and clients love it cuz it's clarity. Okay. It's not vCloud air. So, so if you're them right now, you seeing yourself, wow. We could be the connective tissue between all clouds. We said this from day one, when Kubernetes was hitting in the scene, whoever can make this, the interoperability concept of inter clouding and connect clouds so that there could be spanning of applications and data. We didn't say data, but we said, you know, creating that nice environment of multiple clouds. Okay. And again, in concept, that sounds simple, but if you're VMware, you could own that abstraction layer. So do you own it or do you seed the base and let it become a defacto organization? Like a super layer, super pass layer and then participate in it? Or are you the middleware yourself? We heard AJ Patel say that. So, so they could be the middleware for at all. >>Aren't they? The infrastructure super cloud. I mean, that's what they're trying to be. >>Yeah. I think they're trying, trying to do that. It's it's I, I, I have said that many times VMware is bridged to the cloud, right? >>The sorry. Say bridge to >>The cloud. Yeah. Right. For, for enterprises, they have virtualized environments, mostly on VMware stacks. And another thing is I wanna mention touch on that is the number of certified professionals on VMware stack. There it's a huge number it's in tens of thousands. Right? So people who have got these certifications, they want to continue that sort of journey. They wanna leverage that. It's like, it's a Sunco if they don't use that going forward. And that was my question to, to during the press release yesterday, like are there new certifications coming into the, into the limelight? I, I think the VMware, if they're listening to me here somewhere, they will listen. I guess they should introduce a, a cross cloud certification for their stack because they want to be cross cloud or multi-cloud sort of vendor with one sort of single pane. So does actually Cisco and so do many others. But I think VMware is in a good spot. It's their market to lose. I, I, I call it when it comes to the multi-cloud for enterprise, especially for the legacy applications. >>Well, they're not, they have the enterprise they're super cloud enabler, Dave for the, for the enterprise, cuz they're not hyperscaler. Okay. They have all the enterprise customers who come here, we see them, we speak to them. We know them will mingle, but >>They have really good relationships with all the >>Hyperscale. And so those, those guys need a way to the cloud in a way that's cloud operation though. So, so if you say enterprises need their own super cloud, I would say VMware might wanna raise their hands saying we're the vendor to provide that. Yes, totally. And then that's the middleware role. So middleware isn't your classic stack middleware it's middle tissue. So you got, it's not a stack model anymore. It's completely different. >>Maybe, maybe my, my it's >>Not a stack >>Industry. Maybe my industry super cloud is too aspirational, but so let's assume for a second. You're not gonna have everybody doing their own clouds, like Goldman Sachs and, and capital one, even though we're seeing some evidence of that, even in that case, connecting my on-prem to the cloud and modernizing my application stack and, and having some kind of consistency between your on-prem and it's just call it hybrid, like real hybrid, true hybrid. They should dominate that. I mean, who is who, if it's not it's VMware and it's what red hat who else? >>I think red hat wants it too. >>Yeah. Well, red hat and red, hat's doing it with IBM consulting and they gotta be, they have great advantage there for all the banks. Awesome. But what, what about the other 500,000 customers that are >>Out there? If VMware could do what they did with the hypervisor, with virtualization and create the new thing for super cloud, AKA connecting clouds together. That's a, that's a holy grail move right >>There. But what about this PA layer? This Tansu and area which somebody on Twitter, there was a little SNAR come that's V realized just renamed, which is not. I mean, it's, it's from talking to Raghu unless he's just totally BSing us, which I don't think he is. That's not who he is. It's this new federated architecture and it's this, their super PAs layer and, and, and it's purpose built for what they're trying to do across clouds. This is your wheelhouse. What, what do you make of that? >>I think Tansu is a great effort. They have put in lot of other older products under that one umbrella Tansu is not a product actually confuses the heck out of the market. That it's not a product. It's a set of other products put under one umbrella. Now they have created another umbrella term with the newer sort of, >>So really is some yeah. >>Two >>Umbrella on there. So it's what it's pivotal. It's vRealize it's >>Yeah. We realize pivotal and, and, and older stack, actually they have some open source components in there. So, >>So they claim that this ragus claim, it's this new architecture, this new federated architecture graph database, low latency, real time ingestion. Well, >>AJ, AJ that's AJ's department, >>It sounded good. I mean, this is that >>Actually I think the newer, newer stuff, what they announced, that's very promising because it seems like they're building something from scratch. So, >>And it won't be, it won't be hardened for, but, but >>It won't be hardened for, but, >>But those, but they have a track record delivering. I mean, they gotta say that about yeah. >>They're engineering focus company. They have engineering culture. They're their software engineers are top. Not top not, >>Yes. >>What? >>Yeah. It's all relatives. If they, if the VMware stays the way they are. Well, >>Yeah, >>We'll get to that a second. What >>Do you mean? What are you talking >>About? They don't get gutted >>The elephant in the room if they don't get gutted and then, then we'll see it happens there. But right now I love, we love VMware. We've been covering them for 12 years and we've seen the trials, not without their own issues to work on. I mean, everyone needs to work on stuff, but you know, world class, they're very proud of their innovation, but I wanna ask you, what was your observations walking around the floor, talking to people? What was the sense of the messaging? Is it real in their minds? Are they leaning in, are they like enthused? Are they nervous, apprehensive? How would you categorize the attitude of the folks here that you've talked to or observed? >>Yeah. It at the individual product level, like the people are very confident what they're building, what they're delivering, but when it comes to the telling a cohesive story, if you go to all the VMware booth there, like it's hard to find anybody who can tell what, what are all the services under tens and how they are interconnected and what facilities they provide or they can't. They, I mean, most of the people who are there, they can are walking through the economic side of things, like how it will help you save money or, or how the TCR ROI will improve. They are very focused on because of the nature of the company, right. They're very focused on the technology only. So I think that that's the, that's what I learned. And another sort of gripe or negative I have about VMware is that they have their product portfolio is so vast and they are even spreading more thinly. And they're forced to go to the left towards developers because of the sheer force of hyperscalers. On one side on the, on the right side, they are forced to work with hyperscalers to do more like ops related improvements. They didn't mention AI or, or data. >>Yeah. Data storage management. >>That that was weak. That's true. During the, the keynote as well. >>And they didn't mention security and their security story, strong >>Security. I think they mentioned it briefly very briefly, very briefly. But I think their SCO story is good actually, but no is they didn't mention it properly, I guess. >>Yeah. There wasn't prominent in the keynote. It was, you know, and again, I understand why data wasn't P I, they wanted to say about data, >>Didn't make room for the developer story. I think this was very much a theatrical maneuver for Hawk and the employee morale and the ecosystem morale, Dave, then it had to do with the nuts bolt of security. They can come back to get that security. In my opinion, you know, I, I don't think that was as bad of a call as bearing the vSphere, giving more demos, which they did do later. But the keynote I thought was, was well done as targeted for all the negative sentiment around Broadcom and Broadcom had this, the acquisition agreement that they're, they are doing, they agree >>Was well done. I mean, >>You know, if I VMware, I would've done the same thing, look at this is a bright future. We're given that we're look at what we got. If you got this, it's on you. >>And I agree with you, but the, the, again, I don't, I don't see how you can't make security front and center. When it is the number one issue for CIOs, CSOs, CSOs boards or directors, they just, it was a miss. They missed it. Yeah. Okay. And they said, oh, well, there's only so much time, but, and they had to put the application development focus on there. I get that. But >>Another thing is, I think just keynote is just one sort of thing. One moment in this whole sort of continuous period, right. They, I think they need to have that narrative, like messaging done periodically, just like Amazon does, you know, like frequent events tapping into the practitioners on regional basis. They have to do that. Maybe it's a funding issue. Maybe it is some weakness on the, no, >>I think they planning, I talked to, we talked to the CMO and she said, Explorer is gonna be a road show. They're gonna go international with, it's gonna take a global, they're gonna have a lot of wood behind the arrow. They're gonna spend a lot of money on Explorer is what, they're, what we're seeing. And that's a good thing. You got a new brand, you gotta build it. >>You know, I would've done, I would've had, I would've had a shorter keynote on day one and doing, and then I would've done like a security day, day two. I would've dedicated the whole morning, day two keynote to security cuz their stories I think is that strong? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. And I don't know the developers side of things. I think it's hard for VMware to go too much to the left. The spend on the left is very scattered. You know, if you notice the tools, developers change their tools on freaking monthly basis, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard to sustain that they on the very left side and the, the, the >>It's hard for companies like VMware to your point. And then this came up in super cloud and ins Rayme mentioned that developers drive everything, the patterns, what they like and you know, the old cliche meet them where they are. You know, honestly, this is kind of what AJ says is the right they're doing. And it's the right strategy meeting that develops where they are means give them something that they like. They like self-service they like to try stuff. They like to, they don't like it. They'll throw it away. Look at the success that comes like data, dog companies like that have that kind of offering with freemium and self-service to, to continue the wins versus jamming the tooling down their throat and selling >>Totally self-serve infrastructure for the, in a way, you know, you said they missed cloud, which they did V cloud air. And then they thought of got it. Right. It kind of did the same thing with pivotal. Right. It was almost like they forced to take pivotal, you know, by pivotal, right. For 2 billion or whatever it was. All right. Do something with it. Okay. We're gonna try to do something with it and they try to go out and compete. And now they're saying, Hey, let's just open it up. Whatever they want to use, let 'em use it. So unlike and I said this yesterday, unlike snowflake has to attract developers to build on their unique platform. Okay. I think VMware's taken a different approach saying use whatever you want to use. We're gonna help the ops guys. And that, to me, a new op >>Very sensitive, >>The new ops, the new ops guys. Yes. Yes. >>I think another challenge on the right right. Is on, on the op site is like, if, if you are cloud native, you are a new company. You just, when you're a startup, you are cloud native, right. Then it's hard for VMware to convince them to, Hey, you know, come to us and use this. Right. It's very hard. It is. They're a good play for a while. At least they, they can prolong their life by innovating along the way because of the, the skills gravity, I call it of the developers and operators actually that's their, they, they have a loyal community they have and all that stuff. And by the way, the name change for the show. I think they're trying to get out of that sort of culty kind of nature of the, their communities that they force. The communities actually can force the companies, not to do certain things certain way. And I've seen that happening. And >>Well, I think, I think they're gonna learn and they already walked back their messaging. Not that they said anything overtly, but you know, the Lori, the CMO clarified this significantly, which was, they never said that they wanted to replace VM world. Although the name change implies that. And what they re amplified after the fact is that this is gonna be a continuation of the community. And so, you know, it's nuanced, they're splitting hairs, but that's, to me walking back the, you know, the, the loyalty and, and look at let's face it. Anytime you have a loyal community, you do anything of change. People are gonna be bitching and moaning. Yeah. >>But I mean, knew, worked, explore, >>Work. It wasn't bad at all. It was not a bad look. It wasn't disastrous call. Okay. Not at all. I'm critical of the name change at first, but the graphics are amazing. They did an exceptional job on the branding. They did, did an exceptional job on how they handled the new logo, the new name, the position they, and a lot of people >>Showed >>Up. Yeah. It worked >>A busy busier than all time >>It worked. And I think they, they threaded the needle, given everything they had going on. I thought the event team did an exceptional job here. I mean, just really impressive. So hats up to the event team at, at VMware pulling off now, did they make profit? I don't know. It doesn't matter, you know, again, so much going on with Broadcom, but here being in Moscone west, we see people coming down the stairs here, Dave's sessions, you know, lot of people, a lot of buzz on the content sold out sessions. So again, that's the ecosystem. The people giving the talks, you know, the people in the V brown bag, you know, got the, the V tug. They had their meeting, you know, this week here, >>Actually the, the, the red hat, the, the integration with the red hat is another highlight of, of, they announced that, that you can run that style >>OpenShift >>And red hats, not here, >>Red hat now here, but yeah, but, but, but >>It was more developers, more, you know, >>About time. I would say, why, why did it take so long? That should >>Have happened. All right. Final question. So what's the bottom line. Give us the summary. What's your take, what's your analysis of VMware explore the event, what they did, what it means, what it's gonna mean when the event's over, what's gonna happen. >>I think VMware with the VMware Explorer have bought the time with the messaging. You know, they have promised certain things with newer announcements and now it, it, it is up to them to deliver that in a very sort of fast manner and build more hooks into other sort of platforms. Right? So that is very important. You cannot just be closed system people. Don't like those systems. You have to be part of the ecosystem. And especially when you are sitting on top of the actually four or four or more public clouds, Alibaba cloud was, they were saying that they're the only VMware is only VMware based offering in mainland China on top of the Alibaba. And they, they can go to other ones as well. So I think, especially when they're sitting on top of other cloud providers, they have to build hooks into other platforms. And if they can build a marketplace of their own, that'll be even better. I think they, >>And they've got the ecosystem for it. I mean, you saw it last night. I mean, all the, all the parties were hopping. I mean, there was, there's >>A lot of buzz. I mean, I pressed, I pressed them Dave hard. I had my little, my zingers. I wanted to push the buttons on one question that was targeted towards the answer of, are they gonna try to do much more highly competitive maneuvering, you know, get that position in the middleware. Are they gonna be more aggressive with frontal competitiveness or are they gonna take the, the strategy of open collaborative and every single data point points to collaborative totally hit Culbert. I wanna do out in the open. We're not just not, we're not one company. So I think that's the right play. If they came out and said, we're gonna be this, you know? >>Yeah. The one, the last thing, actually, the, the one last little idea I'm putting out out there since I went to the Dell world, was that there's a economics of creation of software. There's economics of operations of software. And they are very good on the operation economics of operations side of things that when I say economics, it doesn't mean money only. It also means a productivity practitioner, growth. Everything is in there. So I think these vendors who are not hyperscalers, they have to distinguish these two things and realize that they're very good on the right side economics of operations. And, and that will go a long way. Actually. I think they muddy the waters by when DevOps, DevOps, and then it's >>Just, well, I think Dave, we always we've had moments in time over the past 12 years covering VMware's annual conference, formally world now floor, where there were moments of that's pat Gelsinger, spinal speech. Yeah. And I remember he was under a siege of being fired. Yeah. There was a point in time where it was touch and go, and then everything kind of came together. That was a moment. I think we're at a moment in time here with VMware Dave, where we're gonna see what Broadcom does, because I think what hop 10 and Broadcom saw this week was an EBI, a number on the table that they know they can probably get or squeeze. And then they saw a future value and net present value of future state that you could, you gotta roll back and do the analysis saying, okay, how much is it worth all this new stuff worth? Is that gonna contribute to the EBITDA number that they want on the number? So this is gonna be a very interesting test because VMware did it, an exceptional job of laying out that they got some jewels in the oven. You >>Think about how resilient this company has been. I mean, em, you know, EMC picked them up for a song. It was 640 million or whatever it was, you know, about the public. And then you, another epic moment you'll recall. This was when Joe Tuchi was like the mafia Don up on stage. And Michael Dell was there, John Chambers with all the ecosystem CEOs and there was Tucci. And then of course, Michael Dell ends up owning this whole thing, right? I mean, when John Chambers should have owned the whole thing, I mean, it's just, it's been incredible. And then Dell uses VMware as a piggy bank to restructure its balance sheet, to pay off the EMC debt and then sells the thing for $60 billion. And now it's like, okay, we're finally free of all this stuff. Okay. Now Broadcom's gonna buy you. And, >>And if Michael Dell keeps all in stock, he'll be the largest shareholder of Broadcom and own it off. >>Well, and that's probably, you know, that's a good question is, is it's gonna, it probably a very tax efficient transaction. If he takes all stock and then he can, you know, own against it. I mean, that's, that's, >>That's what a history we're gonna leave it there. Start be great to have you Dave great analysis. Okay. We'll be back with more coverage here. Day two, winding down after the short break.

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave Valante host of the cube. We're here on the ground floor, Moscone west two sets Walter Wall coverage. Three days. We heard Laura Heisman, the senior vice president and CMO of VMware, put it all together. Great to see you. Nice, thanks for, to see you for spending time outta your very busy week. >>It is a busy week. It is a great week. >>So a lot of people were anticipating what world was gonna look like. And then the name changed to VMware Explorer. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly known ASM world. Now VMware Explorer, bold move, but Raghu teased it out on his keynote. Some reason behind it, expand on, on the thought process. The name change, obviously multi-cloud big headline here. vSphere eight partnerships with cloud hyperscale is a completely clear direction for VMware. Take us through why the name changed. Exactly, exactly. And why it's all coming together. Think he kind of hinted that he kinda said exactly, you know, exploring the new things, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But take us through that. You've architected it. >>Yeah. It is a, a change of, we have a great past at VMware and we're looking to our future at the same time. And so when you come back from a pandemic and things changing, and you're really looking at the expansion of the business now is the time because it wasn't just to come back to what we were doing before. And every company should be thinking about that, but it's what are we gonna do to actually go forward? And VMware itself is on our own journey as expanding in more into the cloud, our multi-cloud leadership and everything that we're doing there. And we wanted to make sure that our audience was able to explore that with us. And so it was the perfect opportunity we're back live. And VMware Explorer is for everyone. That's been coming Tom world for so many years. We love our community and expanding it to our new communities that maybe don't have that legacy and that history and have them here with us at >>VMware. You did a great job. I love the event here. Love how it turned out. And, and a lot of interesting things happened along the way. Prior to this event you had we're coming outta the pandemic. So it's the first face to face yes. Of the VMware community coming together, which this is an annual right of passage for everyone in the customer base. Broadcom buys VMware. No, no, if you name change it to VMware Explorer and then Broadcom buys VMware. So announces, announces the, the buyout. So, and all the certainty, uncertainty kind of hanging around it. You had to navigate those waters, take us through, what was that like? How did you pull it off? It was a huge success. Yeah, because everyone showed up. Yeah. It's, it's, it's the same event, different name, >>It's >>Same vibe. >>The only thing constant is change. Right? And so it's the, we've gotta focus on the business and our VMware customers and our partners and our community at large. And so it's really keeping the eye on what we're trying to communicate to our community. And this is for our VMware community. The VMO community is here in spades. It is wonderful to have the VMO community here. We have tons of different customers, new customers, old customers, and it's just being able to share everything VMware. And I think people are just excited about that. It's great energy on the show floor and all >>Around. And it's not like you had years to plan it. I mean, you basically six months in you, you went, you said you went on a six month listening tour the other day. What was the number one question you got on that listening tour? >>Well, definitely about the name change was one, but I would say also, it's not just the question. It was the ask of, we have we're in what we call our chapter three here. And it's really our move into multicloud and helping all of our customers with their complexities. >>So virtualization, private cloud, and now multi-cloud correct. The third chapter. >>Yeah. And the, the question and the ask is how do we let our customers and partners know what this is, help us Laura. Like that was the number one ask to me of help us explain it. And that was my challenge and opportunity coming into explore, and really to explain everything about our, if you watched the gen session yesterday, these was, was going through our multiple different chapters where we are helping our customers with their multi-cloud strategies. And so it is been that evolution gets us today and it doesn't end today. It starts today. And we keep going, >>Like, like a lot of companies, obviously in you in this new role, you inherited a hybrid world and, and you've got, you got two years of virtual under your belt, and now you're running a completely different event from that standpoint. How does the sort of the COVID online translate into new relationships and how you're cultivating those? What's that dynamic like? >>Well, let's start with how happy everyone is to see each other in person. No doubt. Yeah. It is amazing just to see people, the high fives in the hallways, the hugs, oh, some people just the fist pump, whatever people mats are there masks aren't there, right? It is something of where everyone's comfort level, but it is really just about getting everyone together and thinking about how do, how was it before the pandemic? You don't necessarily just wanna repeat coming back. And so how do you think about this from an in-person event? People have been sitting behind their screens. How do we engage and how are we interactive? Knowing that attention spans are probably a little bit shorter. People are used to getting up and going get their coffee. We have coffee in the conference rooms, right? Things like that, making the experience just a really great one for everyone. So they're comfortable back in person, but I mean, honestly the energy and seeing people's smiles on their faces, it's wonderful to be back in person. >>It's interesting, you know, the cube, we've had some transformations ourselves with the pandemic and, and living through and getting back to events, but hybrid cloud and hybrid events is now the steady state. So, and in a way it's kind of interesting how hybrid cloud and now multi-cloud the digital aspect of integrating into the physical events is now key. First class citizen thinking. Yeah. For CMOs, you guys did a great job of preserving the, the, the, the best part of it, which is face to face people seeing each other and now bringing in the digital and then extending this. So that it's an always on kind of explore. Is that the thinking behind it? Yes. What's your vision on where you go next? Because if it's not, it's not one and done and see you next year. No anymore, because no, the pandemic showed us that hybrid and digital and physical together. If design as first class citizens with each other. Yeah. One sub-optimize me obviously face to face is better than digital, but if you can't make it, it shouldn't be a bad experience. >>No, not at all. Good's your vision. And, and we're in a point where not everyone's gonna come back, that everyone has what's going on with their life. And so you have to think about it as in person and online, it's not necessarily even hybrid. And so it's, what's the experience for people that are here, you know, over 10,000 people here, you wanna be sure that that is a great experience for them. And then our viewers online, we wanna be sure that they're able to, to know what's going on, stay in touch with everything VMware and enjoy that. So the gen session that was live, we have a ton of on demand content. And this is just the start. So now we go on to essentially multiple other VMware explorers around the world. >>It's interesting. The business model of events is so tickets driven or sponsorship on site on the location that you can get almost addicted to the, no, we don't wanna do digital and kind of foreclose that you guys embraced the, the combo. So what's the attendance. I mean, probably wasn't as big as when everyone was physical. Yep. What are some of the numbers? Can you give us some D data on attendance? Some of the stats around the show, cuz obviously people showed up and drove. Yes. It wasn't a no show. That's sure a lot of great stuff here >>We have. So it's over 10,000 people that are registered and we see them here. The gen session was packed. They're walking the show floor and then I don't have the numbers yet for our online viewership, but everything that we're doing to promote it online, if anyone missed it online, the gen session is already up and they'll see more sessions going live as well as all the on demand content so that everyone can stay in the loop of what's happening. And all of our announcements, >>You're obviously not disappointed. Were you surprised? A little nervous. >>So I will say one thing that we learned from others, thank goodness others have gone before us. So as far as coming back in person is the big change is actually registration happens closer to the event, right. Is a very big change from pre so, >>So it's at the end. Yes. >>The last three weeks. And we had been told that from peers at RSA and other conferences, that that's what happens. So we were prepared for that, but people wanna know what's going on in the world. Yeah. Right. You wanna have that faith before you buy that ticket and book your travel. And so that has definitely been one of the biggest changes and one that I think that will maybe continue to see here. So that was probably the biggest thing that changed as far as what to expect as registration. But we planned for this. We knew it was not going to be as big in the past and that that's gonna be, I think the new norm, >>I think you're right. I think a lot of last minute decisions, you know, sometimes people >>Wanna know, I mean, it's, what's gonna happen another gonna be outbreak or, I mean, I think people have gotten trained to be disappointed >>Well and be flexible >>With COVID I and, and, and weirded out by things. So people get anxiety on the COVID you've seen that. Yeah. >>Yeah. Yeah. I wanna ask you about the developer messaging cause that's one of the real huge takeaways. It was so strong. And you said the other day in the analyst session, the developers of the Kings and the Queens now, you know, we, when we hear developers, we think we pictured Steve Bama running around on stage developers develop, but it's different. It's a different vibe here. It it's like you're serving the Kings in the, in the Queens with, through partnerships and embracing open source. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached or, and you are approaching developer messages? Yeah, >>I, so, you know, I came from GitHub and so developers have been on my mind for many years now. And so joining VMware, I got to join this great world of enterprise software background and my developer background. And we have such an opportunity to really help our developer community understand the benefits of VMware to make them heroes just like we made sort of virtualization professionals heroes in the past, we can do the same thing with developers. We wanna be sure that we're speaking with our developer community. That was very much on stage as well as many of the sessions. And so our, we think about that with our products and what we're doing as far as product development and helping developers be able to test and learn with our products. And it's really thinking about the enterprise developer and how can we help them be successful. >>And I think, I think the beautiful thing about that message is, is that the enterprises that you guys have that great base with, they're all pretty much leaned into cl cloud native and they see it and it's starting to see the hybrid private cloud public cloud. And now with edge coming, it's pretty much a mandate that cloud native drive the architecture and that came clear in the messaging. So I have to ask you on the activations, you guys have done how much developer ops customer base mix are you seeing transfer over? Because the trend that we're seeing is is that it operations and that's generic. I'll say that word generically, but you know, your base is it almost every company has VMware. So they're also enabling inside their company developers. So how much is developer percentage to ops or is they blending in, it's almost a hundred percent, which how would you see >>That it's growing? So it's definitely growing. I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent, but it is growing. And it is one where every company is thinking about their developer. There's not enough developers in the world per the number of job openings out there. Everyone wants to innovate fast and they need to be able to invest in their developers. And we wanna be able to give them the tools to be able to do that. Cuz you want your developers to be happy and make it easier to do their jobs. And so that's what we're committed to really being able to help them do. And so we're seeing an uptick there and we're seeing, you'll see that with our product announcements and what we're doing. And so it's growing. >>The other thing I want to ask you, we saw again, we saw a lot of energy on the customer vibe. We're getting catching that here, cuz the sessions are right behind us and upstairs the floor, we've heard comments like the ecosystem's back. I mean not to anywhere, but there was a definitely an ecosystem spring to the step. If you will, amongst the partners, can you share what's happening here? Observations things that you've noticed that have been cool, that that can highlight some trends in the partner side of it. Yeah. What's going on with partners. >>Yeah. I mean our partners are so important to us. We're thrilled that they're here with us here. The expo floor, it is busy and people are visiting and reuniting and learning from each other and everything that you want to happen on the expo floor. And we've done special things throughout the week. For example, we have a whole hyperscaler day essentially happening where we wanna highlight some of the hyperscalers and let them be able to, to share with all of our attendees what they're doing. So we've given them more time within the sessions as well. And so you'll see our partner ecosystem all over the place, not just on the expo >>Floor, a lot of range of partners. Dave, you got the hyperscalers, you have the big, the big whales and cloud whales. And then you have now the second tier we call 'em super cloud type customer and partners. And you got the multi-cloud architecture, developing a lot of moving parts that are changing and growing and evolving. How do you view that? How you just gonna ride the wave? Are you watching it? Are you gonna explore it through more, you know, kind of joint marketing. I mean, what's your, how do you take this momentum that you have? And by the way, a lot of stuff's coming outta the oven. I was talking with Joan last night at the, at the press analyst event. And there's a lot of stuff coming outta the VMware oven product wise that hasn't hit the market yet. Yep. That's that's that's I mean, you can't really put a number on that sales yet, but it's got value. Yep. So you got that happening. You got this momentum behind you, you just ride the wave and what's the strategy. Well, >>It is all about how do we pass to the partner, right? So it is about the partner relationship. And we think about that our partner community is huge to us at VMware. I'm sure you've been hearing that from everyone you've been speaking to. So it's not even it's ride the wave, but it's embrace. Got it. It's embrace our partners. We need their help, our customer base. We do touch everybody and we need them to be able to support us and share what it is that we're doing from our product E evolution, our product announcements. So it's continuous education. It's there in educating us. It's definitely a two way relationship and really what we're even to get done here at explore together. It's progress that you can't always do on a zoom or a teams call or a WebEx call. You can't do that in two weeks, two years sometimes. And we're able to even have really great conversations >>Here and, and your go to market is transforming as well. You, you guys have talked about how you're reaching many different touchpoints. We've talked about developers. I mean, the other thing we've seen at events, we talked about the last minute, you know, registrations. The other thing we've seen is a lot more senior members of audiences. And now part of that is maybe okay, maybe some of the junior folks can't travel, they can't get, but, but, but why is it that the senior people come, they, they maybe they wouldn't have come before maybe because they're going through digital transformations. They wanna lean in and understand it better. But it seemed, I know you had an executive summit, you know, on day zero and Hawk 10 was here and, and so forth. So, okay. I get that. But it seems in talking to the partners, they're like, wow, the quality of the conversations that we're having has really been up leveled compared to previous years in other conferences. >>So yeah. Yeah. I think it's that they're all thinking about their transformation as well. We had the executive summit on day zero for us Monday, right? And it was a hundred plus executives invited in for a day who have stayed because they wanna hear what's going on. When I joined VMware, I said, VMware has a gift that so many companies are jealous of because we have relationships with the executives and that's what every company's startup to large company wants. And they're, they're really trusted customers of ours. And so we haven't been together and they want to be here to be able to know what's going on and join us in the meetings. And we have tons of meetings happening throughout >>The event and they're loyal and they're loyal. They're absolutely, they're active, active in a good way. They'll give you great feedback, candid feedback. Sometimes, you know, you might not wanna hear, but it's truthful. They're rare, engaging feedback gift. And they stay with you and they're loyal and they show up and they learn they're in sessions. So all good stuff. And then we only have about a minute left. Laura. I want to get your thoughts and, and end the segment with your explanation to the world around explore. What's next? What does it mean? What's gonna happen next? What does this brand turn into? Yeah. How do you see this unfolding? How do people, how should people view the VMware Explorer event brand and future activities? >>Yeah. VMware Explorer. This is just the start. So we're after this, we're going to Brazil, Barcelona, Singapore, China, and Japan. And so it is definitely a momentum that we're going on. The brand is unbelievable. It is so beautiful. We're exploring with it. We can have so much fun with this brand and we plan to continue to have fun with this brand. And it is all about the, the momentum with our sales team and our customers and our partners. And just continuing what we're doing, this is, this is just the beginning. It's not the, it's a global >>Brand explore >>Global. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>All right, Dave, that's gonna be great for the cube global activities. There you go, Laura. Great to see you. Thank you for coming on. I know you're super busy. Final question. It's kind of the trick question. What's your favorite aspect of the event? Pick a favorite child. What's going on here? Okay. In your mind, what's the most exciting thing about this event that that's near and dear to >>Your heart? So first it's hearing the feedback from the customers, but I do have to say my team as well. I mean, huge shout out to my team. They are the hub and spoke of all parts of explore. Yeah. VMware Explorer. Wouldn't be here without them. And so it's great to see it all coming >>Together. As they say in the scoring and the Olympics, the degree of difficulty for this event, given all the things going on, you guys did an amazing job. >>We witnessed >>To it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for a great booth here. It looks beautiful. Thanks for coming. Wonderful. >>Thank you for >>Having me. Okay. The cues live coverage here on the floor of Moscone west I'm Trevor Dave. Valante two sets, three days. Stay with us for more live coverage. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. Topic is MarTech: Emerging Cloud-Scale Experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. Talk about their value proposition and their company and all the good stuff that's going on. I'm your host, John Furrier. And today we're excited to be joined by Manyam Mallela who's the co-founder and head of AI at Blueshift. Great to have you on here to talk about the Blueshift-Intelligent Customer Engagement, Made Simple. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. >> So last time we did our intro video. We put it out in the web. Got great feedback. One of the things that we talked about, which is resonating out there in the viral Twitter sphere and in the thought leadership circles is this concept that you mentioned called 10X marketer. That idea that you have a solution that can provide 10X value. Kind of a riff on the 10X engineer in the DevOps cloud world. What does it mean? And how does someone get there? >> Yeah, fantastic. I think that's a great way to start our discussion. I think a lot of organizations, especially as of this current economic environment are looking to say, I have limited resources, limited budgets, how do I actually achieve digital and customer engagement that helps move the needle for my key metrics, whether it's average revenue per user, lifetime value of the user and frequent interactions. Above all, the more frequently a brand is able to interact with their customers, the better they understand them, the better they can actually engage them. And that usually leads to long term good outcomes for both customer and the brand and the organizations. So the way I see 10X marketer is that you need to have tools that give you that speed and agility without hindering your ability to activate any of the campaigns or experience that you want to create. And I see the roadblocks usually for many organizations, is that kind of threefold. One is your data silos. Usually data that is on your sites, does not talk to your app data, does not talk to your social data, does not talk to your CRM data and so forth. So how do I break those silos? The second is channel silos. I actually have customers who are only engaging on email or some are on email and mobile apps. Some are on email and mobile apps and maybe the OTT TV in a Roku or one of the connected TV experiences, or maybe in the future, another Web3 environments. How do I actually break those channel silos so that I get a comprehensive view of the customer and my marketing team can engage with all of them in respect to the channel? So break the channel silos. And the last part, what I call like some of the little talked about is I call the inside silo, which is that, not only do you need to have the data, but you also have to have a common language to share and talk about within your organizations. What are we learning from our customers? What do we translate our learning and insight on this common data platform or fabric into an action? And that requires the shared language of how do I actually know my customers and what do I do with them? Like either the inside silo as well. I think a lot of times organizations do get into this habit like each one speaks their own language, but they don't actually are talking the common language of what did we actually know about the real customer there. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great conversation because there's two, when you hear 10X marketer or 10X conversations, it implies a couple things. One is you're breaking an old way and bringing in something new. And the new is a force multiplier, in this case, 10X marketer. But this is the cloud scale so marketing executives, chiefs, staffs, chiefs of staffs of CMOs and their staffs. They want to get that scale. So marketing at scale is now the table stakes. Now budget constraints are there as well. So you're starting to see, okay, I need to do more with less. Now the big question comes up is ROI. So I want to have AI. I want to have all these force multipliers. What do I got to do with the old? How do I handle that? How do I bring the new in and operationalize it? And if that's the case, I'm making a change. So I have to ask you, what's your view on the ROI of AI marketing, because this is a key component 'cause you've got scale factor here. You've got to force multiplier opportunity. How do you get that ROI on the table? >> I think that as you rightly said, it's table stakes. And I think the ROI of AI marketing starts with one very key simple premise that today some of the tools allow you to do things one at a time. So I can actually say, "can I run this campaign today?" And you can scramble your team, hustle your way, get everybody involved and run that campaign. And then tomorrow I'd say like, Hey, I looked at the results. Can I do this again? And they're like, oh, we just asked for all of us to get that done. How do I do it tomorrow? How do I do it next week? How do I do it for every single week for the rest of the year? That's where I think the AI marketing is essentially taking your insight, taking your creativity, and creating a platform and a tool that allows you to run this every single day. And that's agility at scale. That is not only a scale of the customer base, but scale across time. And that AI-based automation is the key ROI piece for a lot of AI marketing practitioners. So Forrester, for example, did a comprehensive total economic impact study with our customers. And what they found out was actually the 781% ROI that they reported in that particular report is based on three key factors. One is being able to do experiences that are intelligent at scale, day in and day out. So do your targeting, do your recommendations. Not just one day, but do it every single day. And don't hold back yourself on being able to do that. >> I think they got to get the return. They got to get the sales too. This is the numbers. >> That's right. They actually have real dollars, real numbers attached to it. They have a calculator. You can actually go in and plug your own numbers and get what you might expect from your existing customer base. The second is that once you have a unified platform like ours, the 10X marketer that we're talking about is actually able to do more. It's sometimes actually, it's kind of counterintuitive to think that a smaller team does more. But in reality, what we have seen, that is the case. When you actually have the right tools, the smaller teams actually achieve more. And that's the redundant operations, conflicting insights that go away into something more coherent and comprehensive. And that's the second insight that they found. And the third is just having reporting and all of the things in one place means that you can amplify it. You can amplify it across your paid media channels. You can amplify it across your promotions programs and other partnerships that you're running. >> That's the key thing about platforms that people don't understand is that you have a platform and it enables a lot of value. In this case, force multiplier value. It enables more value than you pay for it. But the key is it enables customers to do things without a line of code, meaning it's a platform. They're innovating on top of it. And that's, I think, where the ROI comes in and this leads me where the next question is. I wanted to ask you is, not to throw a wet blanket on the MarTech industry, but I got to think of when I hear marketing automation, I kind of think old. I think old, inadequate antiquated technologies. I think email blasting and just some boring stuff that just gets siloed or it's bespoke from something else. Are marketing automation tools created equal? Does something like, what you guys are doing with SmartHub? Change that, and can you just talk about that 'cause it's not going to go away. It's just another level that's going to be abstracted away under the coverage. >> Yeah, great question. Certainly, email marketing has been practiced for two or three decades now and in some form or another. I think we went from essentially what people call list-based marketing. I have a list, let me keep blasting the same message to everybody and then hopefully something will come out of it. A little bit more of saying, then they can, okay, maybe now I have CRM database and can I do database marketing, which they will call like, "Hey, Hi John. Hi Manyam", which is the first name. And that's all they think will get the customer excited about because you'll call them by name, which is certainly helpful, but not enough. I think now what we call like, the new age that we live in is that we call it graph-based marketing. And the way we materialize that is that every single user is interacting with a brand with their offerings. So that this interaction graph that's happening across millions of customers, across thousands of content articles, videos, shows, products, items, and that graph actually has much richer knowledge of what the customer wants than the first names or list-based ones. So I think the next evolution of marketing automation, even though the industry has been there a while, there is a step change in what can actually be done at scale. And which is taking that interaction graph and making that a part of the experience for the customer, and that's what we enable. That's why we do think of that as a big step change from how people are being practicing list-based marketing. And within that, certainly there is a relation of curve as to how people approach AI marketing and they are in a different spectrum. Some people are still at list-based marketing. Some people are database marketing. And hopefully will move them to this new interaction graph-based marketing. >> Yeah and I think the context is key. I like how you bring up the graph angle on this because the graph databases imply there's a lot of different optionality around what's happened contextually both over time and currently and it adds to it. Makes it smarter. It's not just siloed, just one dimensional. It feels like it's got a lot there. This is clearly I'm a big fan of and I think this is the way to go. As you get more personalization, you get more data. Graphic database makes a lot of sense. So I have to ask you, this is a really cutting edge value proposition, who are the primary buyers and users in an organization that you guys are working with? >> Yeah, great question. So we typically have CMO organizations approaching us with this problem and they usually talk to their CIO organizations, their counterparts, and the chief information officers have been investing in data fabrics, data lakes, data warehouses for the better part of last decade or two, and have some very cutting edge technology that goes into organizing all this data. But that doesn't still solve the problem of how do I take this data and make a meaningful, relevant, authentic experience for the customer. That's the CMO problem. And CMO are now challenge with creating product level experience with every interaction and that's where we coming. So the CMO are the buyers of our SmartHub CDP platform. And we're looking for consolidating hundreds of tools that they had in the past and making that one or two channel marketers. Actually, the 10X marketer that we talk about. And you need the right tool on top of your data lakes and data warehouses to be able to do that. So CMO are also the real drivers of using this technology. >> I think that also place the ROI equation around ROI and having that unified platform. Great call out there. I got to ask you the question here 'cause this comes up a lot and when I hear you talking, I think, okay, all the great stuff you guys have there. But if I'm a company, I want to make my core competencies mine. I don't really want to outsource or buy something that's going to be core to my business. But at the same time as market shifts, the business changes. And sometimes people don't even know what business they're in at the end of the day. And as it gets more complicated too, by the way. So the question comes up with companies and I can see this clearly, do I buy it? Do I build it? When it comes to AI because that's a core competency. Wait a minute, AI. I'm going to maybe buy some chatbot technology. That's not really AI, but it feels like AI, but I'm a company, I want to buy it or build it. That's a choice. What do you see there? 'Cause you guys have a very comprehensive platform. It's hard to replicate, imitates, inimitable. So what's your customers doing with respect buy and build? And where do they get the core competency? What do they get to have as a core competency? >> Fantastic. I think certainly, AI as it applies to at the organization level, I've seen this at my previous organization that I was part of, and there will be product and financial applications that are using AI for the service of that organization. So we do see, depending upon the size of the organization having in-house AI and data science teams. They are focused on these long term problems that they are doing as part of their product itself. Adjacent to that, the CMO organization gets some resources, but not certainly a lot. I think the CMO organization is usually challenged with the task, but not given the hundred people data science and engineering team to be able to go solve that. So what we see among our customer base is that they need agile platform to do most of the things that they need to do on a day to day basis, but augmented with what our in-house data science they have. So we are an extensible platform. What we have seen is that half of our customers use us solely for the AI needs. The other half certainly uses both AI modules that we provide and are actually augmented with things that they've already built. And we do not have a fight in that ring. But we do acknowledge and we do provide the right hooks for getting the data out of our system and bringing their AI back into our system. And we think that at the end of the day, if you want agility for the CMO, there should not be any barriers. >> It's like they're in the data business and that's the focus. So I think with what I hear you saying is that with your technology and platform, you're enabling to get them to be in the data business as fast as possible. >> That's right. >> Versus algorithm business, which they could add to over time. >> Certainly they could add to. But I think the bulk of competencies for the CMO are on the creative side. And certainly wrangling with data pipelines day in and day out and wondering what actually happened to a pipeline in the middle of the night is not probably what they would want to focus on. >> Not their core confidence. Yeah, I got that. >> That's right. >> You can do all the heavy lifting. I love that. I got to ask you on the Blueshift side on customer experience consumption. how can someone experience the product before buying? Is there a trial or POC? What's the scale and scope of operationalizing and getting the Blueshift value proposition in them? >> Yeah, great. So we actually recently released a fantastic way to experience our product. So if you go to our website, there's only one call-to-action saying, explore Blueshift. And if you click on that, without asking, anything other than your business email address, you're shown the full product. You're given a guided tour of all the possibilities. So you can actually experience what your marketing team would be doing in the product. And they call it Project Rover. We launched it very recently and we are seeing fantastic reception to that. I think a lot of times, as you said, there is that question mark of like, I have a marketing team that is already doing X, Y, Z. Now you are asking me to implement Blueshift. How would they actually experience the product? And now they can go in and experience the product. It's a great way to get the gist of the product in 10 clicks. Much more than going through any number of videos or articles. I think people really want to say, let me do those 10 clicks. And I know what impression that I can get from platform. So we do think that's a great way to experience the product and it's easily available from the main website. >> It's in the value proposition. It isn't always a straight line. And you got that technology. And I got to ask from between your experience with the customers that you're talking to, prospects, and customers, where do you see yourself winning deals on Customer Engagement, Made Simple because the word customer engagement's been around for a while, and it's become, I won't say cliche, but there's been different generational evolutions of technology that made that possible. Obviously, we're living in an era of high velocity Omni-Channel, a lot of data, the graph databases you mentioned are in there, big part of it. Where are you winning deals? Where are customers pain points where you are solving that specifically? >> Yeah, great question. So the organizations that come to us usually have one of the dimensions of either they have offering complexity, which is what catalog of content or videos or items do they offer to the customers. And on the data complexity on the other side is to what the scale of customer base that I usually target. And that problem has not gone away. I think the customer engagement, even though has been around for a while, the problem of engaging those customers at scale hasn't gone away and it only is getting harder and harder and organizations that have, especially on what we call the business-to-consumer side where the bulk of what marketing organizations in a B2C segments are doing. I have tens to millions of customers and how do I engage them day in and day out. And I think that all that problem is only getting harder because consumer preferences keeps shifting all the time. >> And where's your sweet spot for your customer? What size? Can you just share the target organization? Is it medium enterprise, large B2C, B2B2C? What's the focus area? >> Yeah, great question. So we have seen like startups that are in Silicon Valley. I have now half a million monthly active users, how do I actually engage them to customers and clients like LendingTree and PayPal and Discovery and BBC who have been in the business for multiple decades, have tens of millions of customers that they're engaging with. So that's kind of our sweet spot. We are certainly not maybe for small shop with maybe a hundred plus customers. But as you reach the scale of tens of thousands of customers, you start seeing this problem. And then you start to look out for solutions that are beyond, especially list-based marketing and email blast. >> So as the scale, you can dial up and down, but you have to have some enough scale to get the data pattern. >> That's right. >> If I can connect the dots there. >> I would probably say, looking at a hundred thousand or more monthly active customer base, and then you're trying to ramp up your own growth based on what you're learning and to engage those customers. >> It's like a bulldozer. You need the heavy equipment. Great conversation. For the last minute we have here Manyam, give you a plug for the company. What's going on? What are you guys doing? What's new? Give some success stories, your latest achievements. Take a minute to give a plug for the company. >> Yeah, great. We have been recognized by Deloitte as the fastest growth startup two years in a row and continuing to be on that streak. We have released currently integrations with AWS partners and Snowflake partners and data lake partners that allow implementing Blueshift a much streamlined experience with bidirectional integrations. We have now hundred plus data connectors and data integrations in our system and that takes care of many of our needs. And now, I think organizations that have been budget constraint and are trying to achieve a lot with a small team are actually going to look at these solutions and say, "Can I get there?" and "Can I become that 10X marketing organization? And as you have said, agility at scale is very, very hard to achieve. Being able to take your marketing team and achieve 10X requires the right platform and the right solution. We are ready for it. >> And every company's in the data business that's the asset. You guys make that sing for them. It's good stuff. Love the 10X. Love the scale. Manyam Mallela, thanks for coming on. Co-founder, Head of AI at Blueshift. This is the AWS Startup Showcase season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. >> Thank you, John. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We're here to talk about the state of MarTech and AI. We're here with the co-founder and head of AI for Blueshift, Manyam Mallela. Welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me, excited to chat with you. >> Blueshift is a company you've co-founded with a couple other co-founders and you guys have a stellar pedigree going in data AI back before it was fashionable, in the old days, Web 1.0, if you want to call it that. So, you know, we know what you guys have been doing in your careers. Now you got a company on the cutting edge, solving problems for customers as they transition from this new, new way of doing things where users have data and power and control, customers are trying to be more authentic, got walled gardens emerging everywhere but that we're supposed to be away from walled gardens. So there's a whole set of new patterns, new expectations and new behaviors. So all this is challenging, but yet it's an opportunity. So I want to get into it. What is your vision? And what's your view on the MarTech today and AI, and how do you guys fit into that, that story? >> Yeah. Great question, John. We are still in the very early innings of where every digital experience is informed, both creatively from the marketing side of our organization, as well as the AI doing the heavy lifting under the herd to be able to create those experience at scale. And I think today every digital customer and every user out there are leaving a trail of very rich, very frequent interaction data with their brands and organizations that they interact with. You know, if you look at each of us, many, many moments and hours of our digital lives are with these interactions that we do on screens and devices, and that leaves a rich trail of data. And brands that are winning, brands that we want to interact with more, have user privacy and user safety at the center of it. And then they build that authentic connection from there on. And, you know, just like when we log into our favorite streaming shows or streaming applications, we want to see things that are relevant to us. They, in some sense, knowing kind of intimately our preferences or changing taste. And how does a brand or organization react to that but still make room for that authentic connection? >> It's an awesome opportunity. And it's a lot of challenges, and it's just starting, I totally agree. Let me ask you a question, Manyam, if you don't mind. How did you guys come up with Blueshift? I know you guys have been in this game before it was fashionable, so to speak, but you know, solving Web 1.0, 2.0 problems. And then, you know, Walmart Labs, everyone knows the history of Walmart and how fast they were with inventory and how they used data. You have that kind of trajectory. When you saw this opportunity, was it like the team was saying, wow, look at this, it's right in our wheelhouse, or, how did you guys get here, and then how did it all come together? >> Yeah, thanks for offering me an opportunity to share our personal journey. You know, I think prior to starting Blueshift with my co-founders, who I worked with for almost the past 20 years of my life, we were at a company called Kosmix, which was a Silicon Valley, early AI pioneer. We were doing semantics search, and in 2011, Walmart started their Silicon Valley innovation hub, Walmart Labs, with the acquisition of Kosmix. And, you know, we went into Walmart Labs, and until then they were already an e-commerce leader. They had been practicing e-commerce for better part of 12 years prior to that, but they're certainly you know, behind, compared to their peers, right? And the peers to be named! (laughs) But, they saw this lack of what it is that they were doing so well in brick and mortar that they're not able to fully get there on the digital side. And, you know, this was almost a decade ago. And when they brought in our team with a lot of AI and data systems at scale, building things at the cutting edge, you know, we went into it a little bit naively, thinking, you know, hey, we are going to solve this problem for Walmart scale in three months. (laughs) But it took us three years to build those systems of engagement. Despite Walmart having an enormous amount of resources being the number one retailer in the world and the data and the resource at their disposal, we had to rethink a lot of assumptions and the trends that were converging were, you know, uses for interacting with them across multiple formats and channels. And both offline and online, the velocity and complexity of the data was increasing. All the marketing and merchandising teams said even a millisecond delay for me is unconscionable. And how do you get fresh data and activated at the moment of experience, without delay, this significant challenge at scale? And that's what we solve for our organizations. >> It really is the data problem. It's a scale problem. It's all that. And then having the software to have that AI predictive and, you know, it's omnichannel when you think about it, in that retail and that brick and mortar term used for physical space and digital converging. And we saw the pandemic pull forward this same dynamic where events and group behaviors and just interactions were all converging. So this line between physical and digital is now blurred, completely blended, the line between customer experience and marketing has been erased, and you guys are the center of this. What does it mean for the customer? Because the customers out there, your customers, or potential customers. They got problems to solved. They're going all digital cloud-native applications, the digital transformation. This is the new normal, and some are on it, are starting it, some are way behind. What are they- What's the situation with the customers? >> Yeah, that's certainly the maturity of, you know, the, each brand and organization along that, you know, both transformation and from transformation to actually thriving in that ecosystem. And how do we actually win, you know, share of mind and then share of, like, that market that they're looking to does take a while. And, and many are, you know, kind of midway through their journey. I think, there was, initially there is a lot of, you know, push towards let's collect all the data that we can but then, you know, how does the actually data becomes something useful that changes experience for Manyam versus John is really that critical moment. And that moment is when, you know, a lot of things come into place. And if I look at, like, the broader landscape, there are certainly lines of powers like Discovery, like Udacity and LendingTree, and Zumper car pods across all these industries. Who would've thought like, you know, all these industries who you would not think of actually as solving a digital engagement problem are now saying that's the key to our success and our growth. >> Yeah. It's absolutely the number one problem. This is the number one opportunity for all businesses, not just verticals here and there, all verticals. So walk me through your typical customer scenario. You know, what are the challenges that they face? You're in the middle of it, you're solving these problems, what are their challenges that they face and how do you guys solve them? >> Absolutely. So I'll talk through two examples, one from a finance industry, one from online learning, you know, o One of our great customers that we partner with is LendingTree. They offer tens of millions of customers' finance products that span from home loans, students loans, auto loans, credits, all of that. And, and let these people come into their website and collect information that is relevant to the loan that they're considering, but engage them in a way for the next period of time. So if you typically think about engagement, it's not just a one interaction, usually that follows a series of steps an organization has to take to be able to explain all their offerings in a way that is digestible and relevant and personalized to each of those millions of customers and actually have them through the funnel and measure it and report on it and make sure that that is the most relevant to them. So in a finance setting that is about consuming credit products, consuming loan products, consuming reporting products in an online context. I'll give you an example of one of our customers, Udacity. Imagine you are a marketing team of two people, and you are in challenged with, how do you engage 20 million students. You're not going to write 20 million communications that are different for each of those students, certainly. I think you need a system to say what did actually all these students come for? How do I learn what they want at this moment in time? What do they want next? If they actually finished something that they started two months ago, would they be eligible for the right course? Maybe today we are talking about self-driving cars. That's the course that I should bring in front of them. And that's only a small segment of the students but someone else maybe on the media and the production side. How do I personalize the experience so that every single step of the way for that student is, you know, created and delivered at scale? And that's kind of the problem that we solve for our brands, which is they have these millions of touchpoint that are, that they have, how do they bring all their data, very fresh and activated at the moment of action? >> So you guys are creating the 10x marketer. I mean, kind of- >> That's right. That's a very (indistinct)- >> 10X engineer, the famous, you're 10X engineer. >> Right. >> You guys are bringing a lot of heavy lifting to short staffs or folks that don't have a data science team or data engineering team. You're kind of bringing that 10x marketing capability. >> Absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. I call it the mission impossible, which is, you know, you're signing up for the mission impossible, for every marketing team, it's like, now they're like, they are the product managers they're the data scientists, they're the analysts. They are the creator, you know, author, all of that combined into a role. And now you're entrusted with this really massive challenge. And how do you actually get there? And it's that 10x marketer who are embracing these technologies to get there. >> Well, I'm looking forward to challenging though because I can imagine you get a lot of skeptics out there. I don't believe you. It sounds too good to be true. And I want to get to that in the next segment, but I want to ask you about the state of MarTech and AI specifically. MarTech traditionally has been on Web 2.0 standards, DNS, URLs. It's the naming system of the internet. It's the internet infrastructure. So- >> Right. what needs to change to make that scale higher? Does, is there any new abstraction or any kind of opportunities for doing things in just managing you know, tokens that need to be translated? It's hard to do cross to- I mean, there's a lot of problems with Web 2.0 legacy that kind of holds back the promise of high availability of data, privacy, AI, more machine learning, more exposure of data. Can you share your vision on this next layer? >> Absolutely. Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of excitement about what Web3 would bring us there in the very early innings of that possibility. But the challenge of, you know, data that leads to authentic experience still remains the same whichever metaverse we might actually interact with a brand name, like, you know, even if I go to a Nike store in the Metaverse, I still need to understand what that customer really prefers and keep up with that customer as they change their preferences. And AI is the key to be able to help a marketer. I call it the, you know, our own group call it like IPA you know, which is ingest all possible data, even from Metaverse, you know, the protocols might change, the formats might change, but then you have to not only have a sense of what happened in the past. I think there are more than enough tools to know what happened. There are only emerging tools to tell you what might happen. How do I predict? So ingest, predict, and then next step is activate. Actually you had to do something with it. How do I activate it, that the experience for you, whether it's Web3 or Web2 changes, and that IPA is kind of our own brew of, you know, AI marketing that we are taking to market. >> And that's the enablement piece, so how does this relate to the customer's data? You guys are storing all the data? Are they coming in? Is there a huge data lake involved? Can I bring in third party data? Does it have to be all be first party? How is that platform-level enabling this new form of customer engagement? >> Absolutely. There's a lot of heavy lifting that the data systems that one has to you know, bring to bear upon the problem, data systems ranging from, you know, distributed search, distributed indexing, low latency systems, data lakes that are built for high velocity, AI machine learning, training model inference, that validation pipeline. And, you know, we certainly leverage a lot of of data lake systems out there, including many of the components that are, you know, provided by our preferred partner, AWS and open source tools. And these data systems are certainly very complex to manage. And for an organization that, with a, you know, 5 to 10 people team of marketers, they're usually short staffed on the, the amount of attention that they get from rest of the organization. And what we have made is that you can ingest a lot more raw data. We do the heavy lifting, but both data management, identity resolution, segmentation, audience building, predictions, recommendations, and then give you also the delivery piece, which is, can I actually send you something? Can I put something in front of the user and measure it and report on it and tell you that, this is the ROI? How do, if all this would be for nothing, if actually you go through all this and there's no real ROI. And we have kind of, you know, our own forester did a total economic impact study with us. And they have found, they have found 781% ROI for implementing Blueshift. And it's a tremendous amount of ROI you get once you are able to reorient your organizations towards that. >> You know, Manyam, one of the problems of being a visionary and a pioneer like you guys are, you're early a lot. And so you must be scratching your head going, oh, the hot buzzword these days is the semantic layer, in Khan, you see snowflake and a bunch of other people kind of pushing this semantic layer. It's basically a data plane essentially for data, right? >> Right. >> And you guys have done that. Been there, done that, but now that's in play, you guys have this. >> That's right. >> You've got all this semantic search built in into the system, all this in data ingestion, it's a full platform. And so I need to ask you how you see this vectoring into the future state of customer engagement. Where, where do you see this intersecting with the organizations you're trying to bring this to? Are they putting more investment in, are they pulling back? Are they, where are, where are they and where are you guys relative to this, this technology? And, and, and, and first of all let's get your reaction to this semantic layer first. >> Right, right. It's a fantastic, you know, as a technologist, I love, you know, kind of the ontology and semantic differences, you know, how, how, you know, data planes, data meshes, data fabrics are put together. And, you know, I saw this, you know, kind of a dichotomy between CIO org and CMO org, right? The CO says like, you know, I have the best data plane, the data mesh, the data fabric. And the CMO says like, but I'm actually trying to accomplish something for this campaign. And they're like, oh, that, does it actually connect the both of pieces? >> So I think, the- >> Yeah? >> The CMO org certainly will need purpose-built applications, on top of the data fabric, on top of the data lakes, on top of the data measures, to be able to help marketing teams both technical and semi-technical to be able to accomplish that. >> Yeah. And then, and the new personas they want turnkey, they want to have it self-service. Again, the 10x marketer is someone with a small staff that can do the staff of hundred people, right? >> That's absolutely- >> So that's where it's going. And this is, this i6s the new normal. >> So, we call them AI marketers. And I think it's a, it's like you're calling a 10x marketer. I think, you know, over time we didn't have, you know this word, business intelligence analyst, but then once the tool are there, then they become business intelligence analysts. I think likewise, once these tools are available then we'll have AI marketers out in the market. >> Well, Manyam, I'd love to do a full, like, one-hour podcast with you. You can go for a long time with these topics given what you guys are working on, how relevant it is, how cool it is right now, and with what you guys have as a team and solution. I really appreciate you coming on the CUBE to chat. For the last minute we have here, give a quick plug for the company, what you guys are up to, size, funding, revenues, what you're looking for. What should people pay attention to? Give the plug. >> Yeah. Yeah, we are a global team, spanning, you know, multiple time zones. You know, we have raised $65 million to date to build out our vision and, you know, over the last eight years of our funding, we have served hundreds of customers and continuing to, you know, take on more. I think, you know, our hope is that over time, the next 10,000 organizations see this as a very much an approachable, you know, problem to solve for themselves, which I think is where we are. AI marketing is real doable, proven ROI. Can we get the next 10,000 customers to embrace that? >> You know, as we always used to say in the kind of web business and search, it's the contextual and the behavioral, you got to bring 'em together here. You got all that technology for the, for the sites and applications for the behavior and converting that contextually into value. Really compelling solution. Thanks for sharing your insight. >> Yeah. Thank you John, really appreciate this. >> Okay, this is CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Okay. We're back at AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day four. Think it's the first time, at re:Invent, we've done four days. This is our ninth year covering re:Invent. Tom Miller is here. He's the senior vice president of alliances. And he's joined by Ankur Jain, who's the global cloud practice lead at Merkle. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Tom, tell us about Merkel, for those who might not be familiar with you. >> Yeah. So, Merkle is a customer experience management company that is under the dentsu umbrella. Dentsu is a global media agency. We represent one of the pillars, which is customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkle does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. >> So you're a tech company? >> Yes. >> Right? Okay. So there's some big tailwinds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously, the pandemic, the forced march to digital, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing, that you're trying to ride? >> So what we're seeing is, as a start, we've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on-prem, that we manage today, within a SQL environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment. To be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data, be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realizing they need, to be in a digital environment. And so, that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environment. >> And you're relatively you new to the AWS world, right? Maybe you can talk about that, Ankur. >> Well, actually, as a partner, we may be new. But Merkle has been working with AWS for over five years. >> Dave Vellante: As a customer? >> As a customer. >> Yeah. >> So what we did was, last year, we formalized the relationship with AWS to be an advanced partner now. So we are part of the re:Stack program, basically, which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialization of marketing. So, as Tom said, you know, we are part of a dentsu umbrella. Our core focus is on customer experience transformation. And how we do that customer experience transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us, to modernize the solutions that Merkle can take to the market. >> So, I mean, your on-prem databases, there's probably a lot of diversity on-prem. (laughs) A lot of tech... When the cloud, you know, more agility, infinite resources. Do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe your technical philosophy. >> Yeah, I could take that. What Tom just described... So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are, essentially, Merkle helping big brands, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 brands to modernize their marketing ecosystem. Especially, MarTech ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints, customer data from disparate sources. And they, basically, integrate that data in one central place. And then bolt-on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, on top of it. Helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about. And these databases, currently, sit on-prem, on Merkle's own data center. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernize them. Give all these AI, ML type of capabilities, advanced analytic capabilities, to our customers by using AWS as the platform to kind of migrate that. >> Dave Vellante: And you do that as a service? >> We do that as a service. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Strategically, >> Yes. >> you're sort of transforming your business- >> Yes. >> to help your customers transform their business. >> Right. >> Right? Take away, it's classic. I mean, it's happening. This theme of, you know, AWS started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, you guys in the media world, essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Absolutely. >> Superclouds, we call 'em. >> Superclouds, yeah. (Dave laughs) It's about helping our clients understand what is it they're trying to accomplish. And, for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey, where that customer is, how they're driving that experience with them, and understanding that experience through the journey. And doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical for 'em. >> Yeah, I was listening to the Snowflake earnings call from last night. And they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media. And all they keep talking about was direct-to-consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> Media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily, I mean, you don't want to go through a third-party anymore, if you don't have to. Technology's enabling that, right? Is that, kind of, the play here? >> Yes. Direct-to-consumer is a huge play. Companies which were traditionally brick-and-mortar-based, or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors, are now, basically, transforming themselves to be direct-to-consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalization becomes a big theme, especially in D2C type of environment. Because, now, those customers are expecting brands to know what's their like, what's their dislike, which products, which services are they interested in. So that's all kind of advanced analytics, machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems, that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkle is partnering with AWS, to bring all those technologies, and build those next generation solutions for our customers. >> So what kind of initiatives are you working on with AWS? >> So, there are, like, three, four areas that we are working very closely with AWS. Number one, I would say, think about our marketer's friend. You know, and they have a transformation like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, these type of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools, what technologies will be part of that ecosystem. So that's where Merkle provides consulting services. To give them a roadmap, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one, we are doing in partnership with AWS. To reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two, as Tom mentioned, migrations. You know, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernize their environment, by migrating them to cloud. Number three, Merkle has a solution called Merkury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are modernizing all that solution, making that available on AWS Marketplace for customers to, actually, easily use that solution. And number four, I would say is, helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing data lake. You know, leveraging AWS technologies like Glue, Redshift, and actually modernize their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms. Which is, bring on your first-party data, join it with Amazon data, to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on Amazon.com. Which gives insight to these brands, to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are, like, four, five focus areas. >> No, it's good. So, I was going to ask you about the data and the data strategy. Like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists, that... Your clients have first-party data. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> And then you might recommend bringing in other data sources. >> Yes. >> And then you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >> Well, ultimately, client owns the data, because that's their customer's data. To your point on, we help them enrich that data by bringing in third-party data, which is what we call as... So Merkle has a service called DataSource, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests. So we monetize all that data. And the idea is, to take those data assets and make them available on AWS Data Exchange. So that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first-party data, take this third-party data from Merkle, and then, segment their customers much more intelligently. >> And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile? >> Yeah. CMO is our main customer profile. And we'll work with the chief data officer, or we'll work with the chief technology officer. We bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing, and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get what they want. >> And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too? >> Tom Miller: Yeah, he fits in there too. >> CGO, chief dig. officer, CMO. Sometimes, they're one in the same. Other times, they're mixed. >> Yep. Yep. >> I've seen CIOs and CDOs together. >> Yes. >> Sure. >> It's all data. >> It's all data. (Dave laughs) >> Yeah. Some of the roles that come into play, as Tom mentioned, and you mentioned, CIO, CTO, chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the IT side. And then we have the CMOs, chief digital officers, from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkle brings to the table is that we know the language, what IT speaks and what business speaks. So when we talked about the business initiatives, like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, those are more business-driven initiatives. That's where Merkle comes in, to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years, on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then, at the same time, how do we translate those strategic initiatives into IT transformation? Because it does require a lot of IT transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >> So you've got data, you've got tools, you've got software, you've got expertise, that now, you're making that available as a service. Is that right? >> That's right. Yes. >> Yes. >> How far are you into that journey, of saasfying your business? >> Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, five to seven years ago at Merkle. >> Yeah. Where you began leveraging the cloud? >> That's right. >> Dave Vellante: And then the light bulb went off and- >> So cloud, again, we use cloud in multiple aspects. From general computing perspective, leveraging, you know, fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyze it, and derive intelligence. The second piece, on the cloud side, is SaaS offering, Software as a Service offerings, like Adobe, Salesforce, and other CDP platforms. So Merkle covers a huge spectrum, when it comes to cloud. >> And you got a combination, you have a consulting business, and also- >> So Merkle has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them. Where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives, and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have a data business, the data assets that I was talking about, that we monetize. We have promotions and loyalty, we have media. So we cover multiple services. >> Dave Vellante: Quite a portfolio. >> Yes. >> You mentioned analytics a couple of times, how do you tie that back to the sales function? I would imagine your clients are increasingly asking for analytics, so they can manage their dashboards and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? >> Yeah. So that's a very important line. Because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it, because that's the actionable part. So, few areas. I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to a set of customers. Now, who those set of customers are, you know, where they should target this, who their target customers are, what their demographics are, that's all done through analytics. And what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence, machine learning, those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell, and personalize the offerings that they want to offer to the customers. >> Used to be, really, pure art, right? It's really becoming- >> Not any more, it's all data driven companies. (Tom laughs) >> It's "Moneyball." >> Yes. Exactly. (Dave laughs) >> Tom Miller: Exactly. >> There's, maybe, still a little bit of art in there, right? It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair, still. >> Yes. >> But you got to go with the data. >> And that's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in. And how you take that science and combine it with the art, to present it to a end customer, that's exactly, you know, it's a combination. >> And we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves. Where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkle. >> You got to teach 'em how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in two to three years? Where do you want to take? >> I think future is cloud, AWS being the market leader. I think AWS has a huge role to play. We are very excited to be partners with AWS, I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS sales in, majority of the sales happen in IT. Our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that will be a very powerful story for us to tell. >> Yeah, that's good news for AWS. If a little of your DNA could rub off on them, it'd be good. >> Tom Miller: Yeah. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. >> It was great to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE. Day four, AWS re:Invent. We're theCUBE, the global leader in high-tech coverage. Be right back. (gentle music)

>>Okay, We're back at AWS Re. Invent. You're watching the >>cubes. Continuous coverage >>coverage. This is Day four. I think it's the first time it reinvent. We've done four days. This is our ninth year covering Reinvent. Tom Miller is here is the senior vice president of Alliances. And he's joined by Anchor Jane. Who's the global cloud? Practically practise lead at Merkel. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Tom. Tell us about Merkel. For those who might not be familiar with you. >>So Merkel is a customer experience management company. That is, um, under the Dentsu umbrella. Dense. Who is a global media agency? We represent one of the pillars which is global, our customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkel does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. They're a tech company. Yes. >>Okay, so there's some big big tail winds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously the pandemic. You know, the force marched to digital. Uh, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing that you're trying to ride? >>So what we're seeing is, uh we've got, uh, as a start. We've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on Prem that we manage today within a sequel environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment to be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data to be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realising they need to be in a digital environment. And so that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environments. >>And you're relatively new to the ws world, right? Maybe you can talk >>about that anchor actually, as a partner. We may be new, but Merkel works with AWS has been working with AWS for over five years as a customer as a customer. So what we did was last year we formalise the relationship with us to be, uh, an advanced partner now. So we were part of the restock programme, basically which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialisation of marketing. So as Tom said, you know, we're part of, uh Dentsu umbrella are our core focuses on customer experience, transformation and how we do that Customer experience. Transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us to modernise the solutions that Martin can take to the market. >>So your on Prem databases is probably a lot of diversity on a lot of technical that when the cloud more agility, infinite resources do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe >>your I can take that what time just described. So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are essentially Markle, helping big brands 1400 Fortune 500 brands to organise their marketing ecosystem, especially Martek ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints customer customer data from disparate sources, and they basically integrate that data in one central place and then bolt on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning on top of it, helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about, and and these databases currently set on Prem on Merkel's own data centre. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernise them. Give all these ai ml type of capabilities advanced analytic capabilities to our customers by using AWS is the platform to kind of migrate. And you do that as a service. We do that as a service. >>Strategically, you're sort of transforming your business to help your customers transform their business right? Take away. It's it's classic. I mean, you really it's happening. This theme of, you know a W started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing NASDAQ. Goldman Sachs. You guys in the media world essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. Yes, super clouds. We call >>them Super Cloud. Yeah, it's about helping our clients understand What is it they're trying to accomplish? And for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey where the customer is, how they're driving that experience with them and understanding that experience through the journey and doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical form. >>I was listening to the, uh, snowflake earnings call from last night and they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media and all. I keep talking about direct direct to consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot of media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily. I mean, you don't want to go through a third party anymore if you don't have to, Technology is enabling that is that kind of the play here? >>Yes, Director Consumer is a huge player. Companies which were traditionally brick and mortar based or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors are now basically transforming themselves to be direct to consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalisation comes becomes a big theme, especially indeed to see type of environment, because now those customers are expecting brands to know what's there like. What's their dislike? Which products which services are they interested in? So that's that's all kind of advanced analytics machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkel is partnering with AWS to bring all those technologies and and build those next generation solutions for access. So what kind >>of initiatives are you working >>on? So there are, like, 34 areas that we are working very closely with AWS number one. I would say Think about our marketers friend, you know, and they have a transformation like direct to consumer on the channel e commerce, these types of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools? What technologies will be part of that ecosystem. That's where Merkel provides consulting services to to give them a road map, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one we are doing in partnership with AWS to reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two as Tom mentioned migrations, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernise their environment by migrating them to cloud number three. Merkel has a solution called mercury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are Modernising all that solution of making that available on AWS marketplace for customers to actually easily use that solution. And number four, I would say, is helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing Data Lake leveraging AWS technologies like blue, red shift and and actually modernise their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms, which is bring on your first party data. Join it with Amazon data to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on amazon dot com, which gives insights to these brands to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are like four or five focus areas. So I was >>gonna ask you about the data and the data strategy like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists that your clients have first party data and you might recommend bringing in other data sources. And you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >>Well, ultimately, client also data because that that's their customers' data. Uh, to your point on, we helped them enrich that data by bringing in third party data, which is what we call is. So Merkel has a service called data source, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests so we monetise all that data. And the idea is to take those data assets and make them available on AWS data exchange so that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first party data. Take this third party data from Merkel and then, uh, segment their customers much more intelligently. >>And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile. >>Yeah, CMO is our main customer profile and we'll work with the chief data officer Will work with the chief technology officer. We kind of we bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get both get what they want. >>And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too. Yeah, he fits in their CDOs. Chief Digital officer CMO. Sometimes they're all they're one and the same. Other times they're mixed. I've seen see IOS and and CDOs together. Sure, you sort of. It's all data. It's all >>day. >>Yeah, some of the roles that come into play, as as Tom mentioned. And you mentioned C I o c T. O s chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the side. And then we have the CMOS chief digital officers from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkel brings to the table is that we know the language, what I t speaks and what business speaks. So when we talk about the business initiatives like direct to consumer Omni Channel E commerce, those are more business driven initiatives. That's where Merkel comes in to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years on on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then at the same time, how do we translate translate those strategic initiatives into it transformation because it does require a lot of idea transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >>So you got data. You've got tools, you've got software. You've got expertise that now you're making that available as a as a service. That's right. How far are you into that? journey of satisfying your business. >>Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, 5 to 7 years ago at Merkel, >>where you started, where you began leveraging the cloud. That's right. And then the light bulb went off >>the cloud again. We use clouds in multiple aspects, from general computing perspective, leveraging fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyse it and and derive intelligence. The second piece on the cloud side is, uh, SAS, offering software as a service offerings like Adobe Salesforce and other CDP platforms. So Merkel covers a huge spectrum. When it comes to cloud and you got >>a combination, you have a consulting business and also >>so Merkel has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have data business that data assets that I was talking about, that we monetise. We have promotions and loyalty. We have media, so we recover multiple services portfolio. >>How do you mentioned analytics a couple times? How do you tie that? Back to the to the to the sales function. I would imagine your your clients are increasingly asking for analytics so they can manage their dashboards and and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? Yes, >>So that's a very important line because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you know, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it? Because that's the actionable part. So a few areas I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to the to a set of customers Now who those set of customers are, You know where they should target this, who their target customers are, what the demographics are that's all done through and analytics and what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence machine learning those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell and personalised the offerings that they're going to offer to. The customers >>used to be really pure art, right? It's really >>not anymore. It's all data driven. Moneyball. Moneyball? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe still a little bit of hard in there, right? It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair still, but you've got to go with the data. >>That's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in and how you take that science and combine it with the art to present it to the end customer. That's exactly you know. It's a combination, >>and we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkel, >>teach them how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in 2 to 3 years. Where do you want to take it? >>I think future is Cloud AWS being the market leader. I think aws has a huge role to play. Um, we are very excited to be partners with AWS. I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS cells in, uh, majority of the sales happen in our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that would be a very powerful story for us to be >>good news for AWS. They little your DNA can rub off on them would be good, guys. Thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube Day four aws re invent. Were the Cube the global leader in high tech coverage? Right back. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

[Music] hello and welcome to this power panel where we go deep with three storage industry vets two from infinidat in an analyst view to find out what's happening in the high-end storage business and what's new with infinidat which has recently added significant depth to its executive ranks and we're going to review the progress on infinidat's infinibox ssa a low-latency all-solid state system designed for the most intensive enterprise workloads to do that we're joined by phil bullinger the chief executive officer of it finidet ken steinhardt is the field cto at infinidat and we bring in the analyst view with eric bergener who's the vice president of research infrastructure systems platforms and technologies group at idc all three cube alums gents welcome back to the cube good to see you thanks very much dave good to be here thanks david as always a pleasure phil let me start with you as i mentioned up top you've been top grading your team we covered the herzog news beefing up your marketing and also upping your game and emea and apj go to market recently give us the business update on the company since you became ceo earlier this year yeah dave i'd be happy to you know the uh i joined the company in january and it's been a it's been a fast 11 months uh exciting exciting times at infinidad as you know really beginning last fall the company has gone through quite a renaissance a change in the executive leadership team uh i was really excited to join the company we brought on you know a new cfo new chief human resources officer new chief legal officer operations head of operations and most recently as has been you know widely reported we brought in eric to head up our marketing organization as a cmo and then last week richard bradbury in in london to head up international sales so very excited about the team we brought together it's uh it's resulted in or it's been the culmination of a lot of work this year to accelerate the growth of infinidat and that's exactly what we've done it's the company has posted quarter after quarter of significant revenue growth we've been accelerating our rate and pace of adding large new fortune 500 global 2000 accounts and the results show it definitely the one of the most exciting things i think this year has been infinidat has pretty rapidly evolved from a single product line uh company around the infinibox architecture which is what made us unique at the start and still makes us very unique as a company and we've really expanded out from there on that same common software-defined architecture to the ssa the solid state array which we're going to talk about in some in some depth today and then our backup appliance our data protection appliance as well all running the same software and what we see now in the field uh many customers are expanding quickly beyond you know the traditional infinibox business uh to the other parts of our portfolio and our sales teams in turn are expanding their selling motion from kind of an infinibox approach to a portfolio approach and it's it's really helping accelerate the growth of the company yeah that's great to hear you really got a deep bench and of course you you know a lot of people in the industry so you're tapping a lot of your your colleagues okay let's get into the market i want to bring in uh the analyst perspective eric can you give us some context when we talk about things like ultra low latency storage what's the market look like to you help us understand the profile of the customer the workloads the market segment if you would well you bet so i'll start off with a macro trend which is clearly there's more real-time data being captured every year in fact by 2024 24 of all of the data captured and stored will be real-time and that puts very different performance requirements on the storage infrastructure than what we've seen in years past a lot of this is driven by digital transformation we've seen new workload types come in big data analytics real-time big data analytics and obviously we've got legacy workloads that need to be handled as well one other trend i'll mention that is really pointing up this need for low latency consistent low latency is workload consolidation we're seeing a lot of enterprises look to move to fewer storage platforms consolidate more storage workloads onto fewer systems and to do that they really need low latency consistent low latency platforms to be able to achieve that and continue to meet their service level agreements great thank you for that all right ken let's bring you into the conversation steiny what are the business impacts of of latency i want you to help us understand when and why is high latency a problem what are the positive impacts of having a consistent low latency uh opportunity or option and what kind of workloads and customers need that right the world has really changed i mean when when dinosaurs like me started in this industry the only people that really knew about performance were the people in the data center and then as things moved into online computing over the years then people within your own organization would care about performance if things weren't going well and it was really the erp revolution the 1990s that sort of opened uh people's eyes to the need for performance particularly for storage performance where now it's not just your internal users but your suppliers are now seeing what your systems look like fast forward to today in a web-based internet world everyone can see with customer facing applications whether you're delivering what they want or not and to answer your question it really comes down to competitive differentiation for the users that can deliver a better user customer experience if you and i'm sure everybody can relate if you go online and try to place an order especially with the holiday season coming up if there's one particular site that is able to give you instantaneous response you're more likely to do business there than somebody where you're going to be waiting and it literally is that simple it used to be that we cared about bandwidth and we used to care about ios per second and the third attribute latency really has become the only one that really matters going forward we found that most customers tell us that these days almost anyone can meet their requirements for bandwidth and ios per second with very few outlying cases where that's not true but the ever unachievable zero latency instantaneous response that's always going to be able to give people competitive differentiation in everything that they do and whoever can provide that is going to be in a very good position to help them serve their customers better yeah eric that stat you threw out of 24 real time uh and that that sort of underscores the need but phil i wonder how how this fits if you could talk about how that fits into your tam expansion strategy i think that's the job of of every ceo is to think about the expanding the tam it seems like you know a lot of people might say it's not necessarily the largest market but it's strategic and maybe opens up some downstream opportunities is that how you're thinking about it or based on what ken just said you expect this to to grow over time oh we definitely expect it to grow uh dave you know the the history of infinidat has been around our infinibox product targeting the primary storage market at the at the higher end of that market you know it's we've enjoyed operating in a eight nine 10 billion dollar tan through the years and that it continues to grow and we continue to outpace market growth within that tam which is exciting what this uh what the ssa really does is it opens up a tier of workload performance that we see more and more emerging in the primary data center the infinibox classic infinibox architecture we have very very fast as we say it typically outperforms most of our all-flash uh array competitors but clearly there there are a tier of workloads that are growing in the data center that require very very tight tail latencies and and that segment is certainly growing it's where some of the most demanding workloads are on the infinibox ssa was really built to expand our participation in those segments of the market and as i mentioned up front at the same time also taking that that software architecture and moving it into the the data protection space as well which is a whole nother market space that we're opening up for the company so we really see our tam this year with more of the this portfolio approach expanding quite a bit eric how how do you see it well those real-time applications that you talked about that require that consistent ultra-low latency grow kind of in in parallel with that that time curve you know will they become a bigger part of that the the overall storage team and and the workload mix how does idc see it yeah so so they actually are going to be growing over time and a lot of that's driven by the fact of the expectations that um steinhart mentioned a little bit earlier just on the part of customers right what they expect when they interact with your i.t infrastructure so we see that absolutely growing going forward i will make a quick comment about you know when all flash arrays first hit back in 2012 um in the 10 years since they started shipping they now generate over 80 of the primary revenues out there in in the primary storage arena so clearly they've taken over an interesting aspect of what's going on here is that a lot of companies now write rfps specifically requiring an all-flash array and what's going to be interesting for infinidat is despite the fact that they could deliver better performance than many of those systems in the past they couldn't really go after the business where that rfp was written for an afa spec well now they'll certainly have the opportunity to do that in my estimation that's going to give them access to about an additional 5 billion in tam by 2025 so this is big for them as a company yeah that's a 50 increase in tamp so okay well eric you just set up my my follow-up question to you ken was going to be the tougher questions uh which we've you and i have had some healthy debates about this but i know you'll have answers so so for years you've argued that your cached architecture and magic sauce algorithms if i caught that could outperform all flash arrays we're using spinning disks so eric talked about the sort of check off item but are there other reasons for the change of heart why and why does the world need another afa doesn't this cut against your petabyte scale messaging i wonder if you could sort of add some color to that sure a great question and the good news is infinibox still does typically outperform all flash arrays but usually that's for average of latency performance and we're tending to get because we're a a caching architecture not a tiered architecture and we're caching to dram which is an order of magnitude faster than flash or even storage class memory technologies it's our software magic and that software defined storage approach that we've had that now effectively is extended to solid state arrays and some customers told us that you know we love your performance it's incredible but if you could let us effectively be confident that we're seeing you know some millisecond sub half millisecond performance consistently for every single io you're going to give us competitive differentiation and this is one of the reasons why we chose to call the product a solid state array as opposed to merely an all-flash array the more common ubiquitous term and it's because we're not dependent on a specific technology we're using dram we can use virtually any technology on the back end and in this case we've chosen to use flash but it's the software that is able to provide that caching to the front end dram that makes things different so that's one aspect is it's the software that really makes the difference it's been the software all along and still on this architecture still mentions going to across the multiple products it's still the software it's also that in that class of ultra high performance architecturally because it is based on the infinibox architecture we're able to deliver 100 availability which is another aspect that the market has evolved to come to expect and it's not rocket science or magic how we do it the godfather of computer science john von neumann all the way back in the 1950s theorized all the way back then that the right way to do ultra high availability and integrity in i.t systems of any type is in threes triple redundancy and in our case amazingly we're the only architecture that uses triple redundant active active components for every single mission critical component on the system and that gives a level of confidence to people from an availability perspective to go with that performance that is just unmatched in the market and then bring all of that together with a set it and forget it mentality for ease of use and simplicity of management and as phil mentioned being able to have a single architecture that can address now not only the ultra high performance but across the entire swath of as eric mentioned consolidation which is a key aspect as well driving this in addition to those real-time applications that he mentioned and even being able to take it down into our our infiniguard data protection device but all with the same common base of software common interface common user experience and unmatched availability and we've got something that we really think people are going to like and they've certainly been proving that of late well i was going to ask you you know what makes the the infinibox ssa different but i think you just laid it out but your contention is this is totally unique in the marketplace is that right ken yes indeed this is a unique architecture and i i literally as a computer scientist myself truly am genuinely surprised that no other vendor in the market has taken the wisdom of the godfather of computer science john von neumann and put it into practice except in the storage world for this particular architecture which transcends our entire realm all the way from the performance down to the data protection phil i mean you have a very wide observation space in this industry and a good strong historical perspective do you think the expectations for performance and this notion of ultra low latencies you know becoming more demanding is is there a parallel so first of all why is that we've talked about a little bit but is there a parallel to the way availability remember you could have escalated over the years um because it was such a problem and now it's really become table stakes and that last mile is so hard but what are your thoughts on that i i think i think absolutely dave you know the the hallmark of infinidat is this white glove concierge level customer experience that we deliver and it's it's affirmed uh year after year in unsolicited enterprise customer feedback uh above every other competitor in our space uh infinidat sets itself apart for this um and i think that's a big part of what continues to drive and fuel the growth and success of the company i just want to touch on a couple things that ken and and eric mentioned the ssa absolutely opens up our tan because we get to we get a lot more at bats now but i think a lot of the industry looks at infinidat as well those guys are are hard drive zealots right they've their architecture is all based on rotating disk that's what they believe in and it's a hybrid versus afa world out there and they were increasingly not on the right bus and that's just absolutely not true in that our our neural cache and what ken talked about what made us unique at the start i think actually only increasingly differentiates us going forward in terms of the the set it and forget it the intelligence of our architecture the ability of that dram based cache to adapt so dynamically without any knobs and and configuration changes to massive changes in workload scale and user scale and it does it with no drama in fact most of our customers the most common feedback we get is that your platform just kind of disappears into our data infrastructure we don't think about it we don't worry about it when we install an infiniti an infinidat rack our intentions are never to come back you know we're not there showing up with trays of disk under our arms trying to upgrade a mission-critical platform that's just not our model what the ssa does is it gives our customers choice it's not about infinidat saying that used to be the shiny object now this is our new shiny object please everybody now go buy that what where where we position our ssa is it's a it's a tco latency sla choice that they can make between exactly identical customer experiences so instead of an old hybrid and a new afa we've got that same software architecture set it and forget it the neural cache and customers can choose what back-end persistent store they want based on the tco and the sla that they want to deliver to a given set of applications so probably the most significant thing that i've seen happen in the last six months at infinidat is a lot of our largest customers the the fortune 15s the fortune 50s the fortune 100s who have been long-standing infinidat customers are now on almost every sort of re-tranche of or trancha purchase orders into us we're now seeing a mix we're seeing a mix of some ssa and some classic infinibox because they're mixing and matching in a given data center down a given row these applications need this sla these applications need this la and we're able to give them that choice and frankly we don't we don't intentionally try to steer them one direction or the other they they're smart they do the math they can pick and choose what experience they want knowing that irrespective of what front door they go through into the infinidat portfolio they're going to get that same experience so i'm hearing it's not just a an rfp check off item it's more than that the market is heading in that direction eric's data on on real time and we're certainly seeing that the data-driven applications the injection of ai and you know systems making decisions in in real time um and i i'm also hearing phil that you're building on your core principles i'm hearing the white glove service the media agnostic the set it and forget it sort of principles that you guys were founded on is you're carrying that through to this this opportunity we absolutely are in the reason and you ask a good question before and i want to more completely answer it i think availability and customer experience are incredibly important today more so than ever because data center economics and data center efficiency um are more important than ever before is as customers evaluate what workloads belong in the public cloud what workloads do i want on-prem irrespective of those decisions they're trying to optimize their their operational expenses their capex expenses and so one thing that infinidat has always excelled at is consolidation bringing multiple users multiple workloads into the same common platform in the data center it says floor space and watts and and uh you know storage administration resources but to do consolidation well you've got to be incredibly reliable and incredibly predictable without a lot of fuss and drama associated with it and so i think the thing that has made infinidat really strong through the years with being a very good consolidation platform is more important now than ever before in in the enterprise storage space because it is really about data center efficiency and uh administration efficiency associated with that yeah thank you for that phil now actually ken let me come back to you i want to ask you a question about consolidation and you and i and and doc our business friend rest his soul have had some some great conversations about this over time but but as you consolidate people are sometimes worried about the blast radius could you address that concern sure well um phil alluded to software and uh it is the cornerstone of everything we bring to the table and it's not just that deep learning that transcends all the intelligence phil talked about in terms of that full wide range of product it's also protection of data across multiple sites and in multiple ways so we were very fortunate in that when we started to create this product since it is a modern product we got to start with a clean sheet of paper and basically look at everything that had been done before and even with some of the very people who created some of the original software for replication in the market were able to then say if i could do it again how would i do it today and how would it be better so we started with local replication and snapshot technology which is the foundation for being able to do full active active replication across two sites today where you can have true zero rpo no data loss even in the face of any kind of failure of a site of a server of a network of a storage device of a connection as well as zero rto immediate consistent operation with no human intervention and we can extend from that out to remote sites literally anywhere in the world in multiples where you can have additional copies of information and at any of them you can be using not only for protection against natural disasters and floods and things like that but from a cyber security perspective immutable snapshots being able to provide data that you know the bad actors can't compromise in multiple locations so we can protect today against virtually any kind of failure scenario across the swath of infinibox or infinibox ssa you can even connect infinite boxes and infinibox ssas because they are the same architecture exactly as phil said what we're seeing is people deploying mostly infinibox because it addresses the wide swath from a consolidation perspective and usually just infinibox ssa for those ultra high performance environments but the beauty of it is it looks feels runs and operates as that one single simple environment that's set it and forget it and just let it run okay so you can consolidate with with confidence uh let's end with the the independent analyst perspective eric you know how do you see this offering what do you think it means for the market is this a new category is it an extension to an existing space how do you look at that uh so i don't see it as a new category i mean it clearly falls into the current definition of afas i think it's more important from the point of view of the customer base that likes this architecture likes the availability the functionality the flexibility that it brings to the table and they can leverage it with tier zero workloads which was something that in the past they didn't have that latency consistency to do that you know i'll just make one one final comment on the software side as well so the reason software is eating the world mark andreessen is basically because of the flexibility the ease of use and the economics and if you take a look at how this particular vendor infinidat designed their product with a software-based definition they were able to swap out underneath and create a different set of characteristics with this new platform because of the flexibility in the software design and that's critical one if you think about how software is dominating so today for 2021 68 of the revenue in the external storage market that's the size of the software defined storage market that's going to be going to almost 80 by 2024 so clearly things are moving in the direction of systems that are defined in a software-defined manner yeah and data is eating software which is why you're going to need ultra low latency um okay we got to wrap it eric you've just published a piece uh this summer called enterprise storage vendor infinidat expands total available market opportunities with all flash system introduction i'm sure they can get that on your website here's a little graphic that shows you how to get that but so guys thanks so much for coming on the cube congratulations on the progress and uh we'll be watching thanks steve thanks very much dave thank you as always a pleasure all right thank you for watching this cube conversation everybody this is dave vellante and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit, brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin here live in Napa Valley at the Fortinet Championship. This is the site of kickoff to the 2021-22 FedEx Cup regular series. We're here with Fortinet and we're here with one of our distinguished alumni, John Madison, the CMO and EVP of products. John, it's great to see you in person. >> Yes, Lisa it's been a while. >> It has been a while. >> Good to be back here, live. >> I know, you're not on Zoom, you're actually right six feet across from me. >> Yep, look, yes, it's definitely physical. >> It does, talk to me about the PGA and Fortinet. What are some of the synergies? >> There's a lot. I think one of the biggest ones is the culture of the two companies. So I mean, PGA tour, I think they've donated almost $3 billion to charities over the last 15 years, 20 years and we're the same. We would definitely want to give back to the community. We want to make sure we're providing training and education. We're trying to re-skill some of the veterans, for example, over 2000, also women in technology, you may have heard one of the key notes today about that, attempts from a education and training perspective. So there's a lot of synergies between the PGA Tour, and Fortinet from a cultural perspective. >> I love that. Cultural synergy is so important but also some of the initiatives, women in tech, STEM, STEAM, those are fantastic. Give our audience a little overview of what's going on here. We've got over 300 partners and customers here. What are some of the key themes being discussed today? >> Yeah, we're going to try and keep it smaller, this event. We don't want 10,000, 20,000 people. We'll keep it smaller. So about 300 customers and partners, and what we want to do is bring together, you know, the top people in cybersecurity and networking, we want to bring in customers so they can net with each other, we want to bring the partners here. And so, what you're going to see is you can see the tech expo behind you there, where people are talking technology. Some of the keynotes focus on areas like ransomware, for example, and cyber security in different industries. So definitely it's a smaller gathering, but I think it's very focused on cybersecurity and networking. >> Well, that's such an important topic these days. You know, you and I have spoken a number of times this summer by Zoom, and talking about the threat landscape and the changes-- >> Yep. >> And the work from anywhere. When you and I spoke, I think it was in June, you said 25% we expect are going to go back to the office, 25% permanently remote and the other 50 sort of transient. Do you still think given where we are now in September that that's still-- >> Yeah, I'm going to modify my prediction a bit, I think it's going to be hybrid for some time. And I don't think it's just at home or not at home or at work or not at work, I think it's going to be maybe one or two days, or maybe three days versus five days. And so, we definitely see the hybrid mode of about 50% for the next couple of years at least. I think that, you know, ransomware has been in the news a lot. You saw the Colonial, the ransomware has increased. We did a threat report recently. Showed about a 10X increase in ransomware. So, I think customers are very aware of the cybersecurity threats. The damage now is not just sucking information out and IP, it's causing damage to the infrastructure. So definitely the, you know, the attack surface is increased with people working from home, versus in the office, and then you've got the threat landscape, really, really focused on that ransomware piece. >> Yeah, ransomware becoming a household word, I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that is. And talking about the nearly 11X increase in, what was that, the first half of 2021? >> Yeah, over the last 12 months. And I think what's also happened is ransomware used to be a broad attack. So let me send out, and see if I can find a thousand companies. Again, you saw with the Colonial attack, it's very targeted now as well. So you've got both targeted and broad ransomware campaigns going on. And a lot of companies are just rethinking their cybersecurity strategy to defend against that. And that work from home component is another attack surface. So a lot of companies that were operational technology companies that had air gaps and people would come to work, now that you can remotely get into the network, it's again, you can attack people at home, back into the network. >> Is that a direct correlation that you've saw in the last year, in terms of that increase in ransomware and this sudden shift to working from home? >> Well, I also think there's other components. And so, I think the ransomware organizations, the gangs, could use crypto more reasonably than checks and dollars and stuff like that. So they could get their money out. It became very profitable versus trying to sell credit card data on the dark web. So you saw that component. You also saw, as I said, the attack surface be larger for companies, and so those two things unfortunately have come together, and you know, really seen an exponential rise in attacks. >> Perfect storm. Let's talk about some of your customer conversations and how they've changed and evolved in the last 18 months. Give me a snapshot of when you're talking with customers, what are some of the things that they're coming to you for help, looking for the most guidance? >> Yeah, well I think, you know, the digital innovation transformation is almost accelerated because of, you know, COVID. They've accelerated those programs, especially in industries like retail, where it becomes almost essential now to have that digital connectivity. So they can't stop those programs. They need to accelerate those programs, but as they move those programs faster, again they expand their attack surface. And so, what I'm definitely seeing is a convergence of traditional kind of networking, connectivity, and cybersecurity teams like the CIO and the CSO working on projects jointly. So whether it be the WAN connectivity, or whether it be endpoint, or whether it be cloud, both teams are working much more closely going forward. >> Synergies there that are absolutely essential. Talk to me about what you guys announced with Linksys yesterday, speaking of work from home and how that has transformed every industry. Talk to us about the home work solution powered by Fortinet. >> Yeah, well, we definitely see work from home being there for some time. And so the question is, what do you do there? So I think initially 18 months ago, what happened was companies turned on their, what they call a VPN, which gives them an encrypted access when they went from 5% to a 100% people on the VPN. I speak to customers now and they're saying, that was kind of a temporary solution. It puts an end point security there. It was kind of temporary and now I need a longer-term solution because I can see this at least 50% for the next two years, being this hybrid work from home, and some of them are saying, "Well, let's look at something. Let's try and take the best of enterprise networking and security, and then try and match that with an easy to set up Wi-Fi or routing system." So the two companies, you know, have come together with this joint venture. We're taking Linksys technology from an ease of use at home, it's very simple to set up, you can do it on an app or whatever. And then we integrate the Fortinet technology inside there from a security and enterprise networking. The enterprises can manage themselves, the enterprise component and the consumer can manage their piece. What's very important is that separation as well. So the privacy of your home network, and then to make sure the enterprise piece is secure, and then also introducing some simple, what we call quality of service. So for a business person, things like Teams or Zoom as preference over some of the gaming and downloads of the family. So I think it brings the best of both worlds: ease of use and enterprise security together. >> I'm sure the kids won't like that it's not optimized for gaming, but it is optimized for things like video conferencing which, in the last year we've been dependent on for collaboration and communication. Tell me a little bit about the tuning for video conferencing and collaboration. >> Yeah, so we announced both Zoom and Microsoft Teams, probably the two biggest apps, which I use from a work from home business perspective. And definitely if you've got a normal system at home and your kids they've been downloading something, a new game or something like that, they can just take the whole bandwidth. And so the ability to kind of scale that back and make sure the Zoom meeting or the Teams meeting is first priority, I think is very important, to get that connectivity and that quality of service, but also have that security component as well. >> Yeah, the security component is increasingly important. Talk to me about why Linksys, was COVID the catalyst for this partnership? >> Well, I think we looked at it and we have our own work from home solutions as well. I mean, our own gear. We definitely wanted to find something where we could integrate into more of a ease of use solution set. And it just so happened we were speaking to Linksys on some other things and as soon as we started talking, it was very, very clear that this would be a great relationship and joint venture and so we made the investment. Not just "here's some of our code", we made a substantial investment in Linksys and yeah, we see some other things coming in the future as well. >> Can you talk to me a little bit about what the go to market will be, how can enterprises and consumers get this? >> Yeah. So it's more of an enterprise sale. I know some people think Linksys, they think consumer straight away. For us, this is a sale to the enterprises. So the enterprises buy it, it's a subscription service. So they just pay a monthly fee and they can have different levels of service inside there as well. They will get, you know, for each employee they'll get one, two or three nodes. And then so the, so the enterprise is paying for it, which I think will help a bit and they will manage it through their system, but the consumer will get this kind of a game that's very easy to use, very high speed connectivity, mesh technology. So yes, Linksys will sell some of it as well. But I think, you know, actually Fortinet will be the major kind of go to market because of our 500,000 business customers we have out there. >> Right. And your huge partner network. >> Yes. >> So let's talk about, give me a little bit of a view in terms of the benefit that IT will get leveraging the Linksys home work solution. I imagine that centralized visibility of all the devices connected to the corporate network, even though, wherever the devices are? >> Yeah, it actually extends the corporate network. So not in this initial release, in the second release. In the first release, they can go to a cloud portal and they can manage what they can manage from an enterprise perspective. The employee can go to the same portal, but gets a different view, can manage their piece. In the second release, we'll actually have support in our management systems. So if you're an existing Fortinet customer and you've got our management systems and say you've got, I don't know, 250 sites, and you're managing some of our firewalls or SD WAN systems, You'll be able to see all the employees links as systems as well, in that same management system. But again, there's a separation of duty and privacy where they can just manage the enterprise components, not they can't see the traffic from the employees' side, from the non-business transactions. >> Good. That privacy is key there. Do you think that in a perfect world, would help quiet down some of the perfect storm that we're seeing with ransomware and this explosion, this work from anywhere, work from home, going to be persisting technologies, like what you're doing with Linksys, is going to help make a dent in that spike? >> I think it's a component. So for us, the long term strategy for users, end point, this kind of Linksys component is an element. We also feel like there needs to be a transition of VPN technology into zero trust. So you're limiting again, the access to applications versus the network. And then definitely the third component would be a technology like EDR, which is more behavioral-based versus signature-based. And so you bring all those three together. Absolutely we'll make a dent in ransomware because you're just reducing the attack surface greatly, but also scanning the technology to make sure if you see something, you can act straight away. >> And then pair that with what you guys are doing and the investment that Fortinet's been making for a while in training and helping to fill that cybersecurity skills gap, which is growing year on year. >> Yeah. I speak to a lot of CSOs and CIOs and they go "What's the latest technology? What can you do next?" I say, well, the most important thing you can do is train your people. Train them not to click on that phishing link, right? Because still our numbers are around 6% of employees click on things and it doesn't matter what company you are. And so the education and the training is the one of the core, the most basic steps. We're introducing what we call an IT awareness program as part of NSC, which allows companies to download some tools. And they'll try some phishing emails that go out there, they'll see the response, see how they can (mumbles). So I always say that the people, the social engineering is the first step to try and fix and reduce. That's the biggest attack surface you will have. >> It's getting so sophisticated and so personalized. I mean I've seen examples with training that I've done for various companies where you really have to look 2, 3, 4 times at it and have the awareness alone to know that this might not be legitimate. >> Yeah, especially when people are just clicking on more things because they're going to more places. And so you have to be very careful. You can stop a bunch of that with some rule sets. So the systems, but if they're faking the domain, spear phishing, where they know exactly the context of where the email's coming out, it's hard, but you've just got to be very, very careful. If in doubt don't click on it. >> I agree if in doubt, don't click it. Well, John, it's always great talking to you. Exciting to hear the growth of Fortinet, what you're doing with PGA tour, the synergies there, the cultural synergies and the growth in customers and partners, lots of stuff to come. Can't wait till our next conversation, which I hope is also in person. >> Yes, yes, yes, for sure. You know, I think this is a great venue in that it's- as you can see it's open, which helps a lot. >> Yeah. >> It's not far from our headquarters, just down the road there, we've committed to this event for six or seven years. And so this is our first time, but definitely we're hoping to get out a bit more as we go forward. >> Excellent. I'm glad to see to see a company like Fortinet taking the lead and you look like you're dressed for golf. You said you have meetings, but I'm going to let you go because you probably have to get to that. >> I have a few more meetings. I wish they would leave a little gap for some golf. I'll try and work one as we go forward. >> Yeah. Anyway, John, thank you for joining me, great to see you. For John Madison, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from the Fortinet Championship Security Summit in Napa. (Upbeat music)

(upbeat introductory music) >> Presenter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE CONVERSATION. >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE CONVERSATION I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios, we have a remote guest here talking about cybersecurity and all the industry trends and the recent news and announcements around Fortinet with John Madison CMO and Executive Vice President of products at Fortinet John, great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you back for some commentary around what's going on in the trends and your recent news. So thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, nice to see you again. >> So you guys had earnings, congratulations again another successful results, you guys are doing well. Cyber is super important and that's the top conversation, cloud computing, cloud native, we're living in a pandemic. New things are exposed. Clearly the environment has changed in the past four months in a major, major way. So a lot of demand, a lot of needs out there from customers. So you guys had some earnings and you also have an update on your Fortinet OS67.0 platform with major updates. Let's quickly hit the news real quick. What's the hot topic? >> Yeah, well you're right. Things have accelerated in some ways in this cybersecurity world and we had the recent solar winds incident that's also made people look really, really closely at their cyber security strategy and architecture. We announced our results yesterday for Q4. For Q4 we had over 20% product growth which is the key, of course, the future growth. We also, for the full year in 2020 past 3 billion in billings for the first time for the company. And we're really proud of that. We're proud for a lot of reasons with our people and our team, but also another company that goes and makes large acquisitions to boost revenue and billings growth. We've done it predominantly organically over the last 20 years. And so we're very proud of our achievement and obviously a big thank you to our partners, our employees, and our customers. >> We also have been covering you guys for many, many years. Congratulations, well deserved good products win the long game, as we say on theCUBE, and that's a great Testament, but now more than ever I really want to get your thoughts because everyone that I talked to is really kind of sitting back saying, "Wow, look what's happened in the past three, six months in particular, a lot of sea change in both on the technical landscape, the intersection with society obviously with cyber, you mentioned solar winds that's been kind of hanging around. More data's coming out about how pervasive that was and how native it was for many months. So what's out there, we don't even know what's next. So this is causing a lot of people to take pause and reevaluate their environment. Can you share your perspective and how Fortinet sees this playing out and how that you are advising your customers? >> Yeah, well, leaving compliance and regulatory to one side for now because that's also a driver cybersecurity and focus on the two main drivers. One is the threat landscape, and I hinted a bit around that supply chain attack which affects a lot of people in solar winds incident. They got hold or got onto a device that has privileged access across a lot of servers and applications. And that's exactly what they wanted to get to. So state-sponsored ABTs, there's still volume out there. We still see now ransomware doubling every six months but that's very scary. The threat landscape around state sponsored. Now, the other driver of cybersecurity is the infrastructure. And whether that be end point. So as you know people are working from home as I am for the last eight months. So there's a on and off network, end point kind of a zero trust architecture there that people are looking towards. On the network side, we've seen these edges develop. And so whether it be the WAN edge, LANedge, Cloud Edge, data center edge even OT edge, those need protecting. So that's a big challenge for customers. And then also on the cloud side where the applications have moved to cloud, but different types of cloud, multi-cloud I've even seen building cloud recently. So that's a very adaptive area. So challenging for the customer in the terms of the threats and weaponized threats as well as the ability to cover all the different parts of the attack surface going forward. >> It's interesting, we've been living in a generation in the technology business around, you just get a tool for that. Every hammer looks for a nail, that's the expression. Now more than ever when you have this no perimeter environment, which we've been talking about for many years, that's not new. What is new is that everyone's now thinking about architectural systems approach to this and thinking systematically around the platform of what their business is. So in your announcement that you guys just released for OS67.0, there's really some meat on the bone there. You have the secure access, edge SASE and then the endpoint protection which are defined categories by the analyst. But those are the areas that are super hot. Can you translate that into the architectural equation because you and I were talking before we came on camera around how it's not just one thing there's multiple layers to this. Could you break that out for us please? >> Yeah. If you look at historically and I'm now coming up to my 20th year in cybersecurity. Before Fortinet I worked for an end point company. If you go back a while and I can, between 2000, 2010, the Endpoint Vendors were the the big cybersecurity players because Endpoint was where the data was and everything else. And then over the last 10 years the network security vendors, the next gen firewalls have been the most important vendors out there. And it's also reflected in revenues and market cap and everything else. What we're going to see over the next 10 years is the platform. And that platform can't be just an endpoint platform. It can't be just a network security platform or just the cloud platform, because you only, you're only seeing and defending and protecting a part of the overall we call digital experience. Whether it be a device in the factory, whether it be a person dialing in from somewhere or connecting from somewhere through the network and through to the applications you've got to measure that digital experience. And so that's going to be very important to be able to provide a platform that sits across all your devices users, across your whole network including new networks like 5G and across the applications and in the cloud. So the platform to us extends across all those areas. We've been building that platform on what we call our FortiOS operating system. The latest release is 7.0, which released yesterday. It obviously upgrades and extends all parts of the platform but we did major parts of the release yesterday were around SASE, which of course is the CloudEdge. So we're adding that CloudEdge to our component. We did acquire a company Opaque Networks a few months ago that's now we've integrated that technology. And then just as importantly on the access side, a zero trust network access capability for giving access per application. In fact, again, with this, I've talked a bit about in the past about all these Gartner acronyms I don't think zero trust network access is the right wording for it. It should be application access, because that's all we are going to move to. Application specific access versus just getting on the network and getting access to everything. But something that gives you context. So those are the two big things, but there's 300 plus new features across networking end point in cloud across management, inside the resource. It's a major release for us. And it gives us our customers the capability to really protect that attack surface from the end point to the cloud. >> Yeah, there's a lot of meat in there, from that release, I've got to say. but it's basically you're saying devices and users have access. That's been around. There's been tools for that. You hire people, you get some tools. Network access, it's been around. It's getting evolving. Now apps in the cloud, cloud native is a hot area. And people that I talk to, I want to get your reaction to this comment that I hear from people and customers and CXOs and developers. "Hey, we bought a tool for that. We hired a bunch of people. They mainly left, or the environment changed. We bought another tool. And then we bought a tool for that. We bought a tool for that." And then you have this kind of tool shed mentality, where they have tools that don't even have people to run them. So you have this problem there kind of tools need to be upgraded. And then you have this hot trend of observability on the app side, where now you have new data coming in on the application side, those are new tools. You got all kinds of stuff and competing for that. How do you talk to that customer? Because this is what the customer hears all this noise, all this action. They need to have it. They got to have the staff, they got to be trained up. What's going on there? What's your reaction to that? And how do you talk to customers who have this problem? Well, it's a big problem for them. Because, and by the way when I speak to a lot of customers about cloud they don't go to cloud because it's cheaper. It's not, it's actually more expensive. But they go to cloud to give them more agility because they want flexibility in the way they deploy applications as they go forward. And again, this pandemic has made a lot of companies realize they need to be more flexible in the way they deploy IT resources and faster in the way they bring up new services and applications. And so, but there's quite a few elements I say of cybersecurity and networking, which to me and to us are just features. You shouldn't be buying 40 different networking and cybersecurity vendors. You just can't staff and maintain that. And so we do see some things consolidated and converging into a single platform. We're a leader in the magic quadrant for SD WAN or a leader for network security or a visionary in WIFI. And many of the times in each of those magic quadrants, it's a different vendor or if it's the same vendor it's a different platform. For us it's the same platform in each one. And we pride ourselves in building not only best of breed capabilities, but also it's the same platform same management system, same API. And that gives the customer some capabilities in trying to manage that. What we say to customers is not a question of going from 40 vendors down to one That's no good, but go from 40 vendors down to maybe seven or eight platforms but make sure those platforms can inter-operate. They can share policy, and they can share threat intelligence. And that's why customers are looking to more of an architectural approach to cybersecurity but also they feel cybersecurity and networking are starting to converge at the same time. >> One of the biggest stories we're covering these days in 2021 besides the pandemic and how people are going to come out with a growth strategy that's secure, trusted and scalable, is the rise of the new executive in business in the enterprise where they're more tech savvy, right? You see executives like Satya and Intel. Intel, rise with the CEO of Microsoft. Andy Jassy rise up to the CEO of Amazon and you're seeing lawmakers in DC become more techie, less lawyer-oriented. So you seeing the rise of a business techie person. And I think this speaks to this holistic fabric philosophy you guys have as you talk to customers, when they look at the business impact of cybersecurity, for instance you mentioned solar winds earlier. I mean, these are deadly company killing events. This is real. So it's not just an IT problem. It's a business problem. How do you guys talk to customers, obviously that you have the security fabric and you're stitching things together? What's the conversation when you talk to customers like that? >> One interesting thing I've noticed, and I do quite a lot of customer calls each week, executive briefings and pretty early on, I noticed that both the infrastructure networking with the CIO team and the cyber security the CSO teams run on the same video call and that's got more and more as we've gone on. And I think what companies have realized is that if they want to move fast, they can't have these silos or this layering of capabilities. Then when they build something they needed to build it securely from day one and have that as a joint team. And so I don't think the teams are not merged but they're definitely working more closely. And I think the responsibility of reporting back into the board level gain is not just, it's just an IT project. Oh, by the way, we've got a security project. It's the same project. And I think that's again, points to this convergence of networking and security. >> Yeah. The silos got to be broken down. That's been a theme that's been more highlighted more than ever the benefits and the consequences of doing it or not doing it are clear to people especially at all levels of the corporation and tech. That brings up my favorite conversation. I always ask you whenever you're back on theCUBE giving me an update on what's going on with Fortinet I got to ask you how it's going with data, because data again is the consistent theme we always talk about, how we're exposing that data, how we're protecting that data, the role of data as people continue to get more data and figure out how to use machine learning how to use AI, how to democratize it all kinds of things are happening around data. What's the latest in your opinion? >> Yeah, I think there's progress, but I always say there's progress on both sides. The cyber criminals, big AI networks and machine learning just to counter what the cyber security companies are doing. I think right now we're processing hundreds of billions of events on a weekly basis. We've got the largest install base of network security out there over 500,000 customers. And so processing that event, it's going well in that we're able to determine really quickly for specific threat vectors in specific geographies that this battle good. It's about a good file. It's about a good URL. It's a vulnerability that's associated with Stevia. So we're able to kind of do use machine learning and volume against a specific application to get a good result. The key going forward for us, and I think for the whole industry is using the AI to start to discover campaigns in the wild like the solar winds ones, which is going on without anybody knowing. And that takes a lot of compute, takes a lot of threat intelligence and the AI piece needs to understand the relationship between the different elements of threat vectors, the command and controls and everything else to get you that result. I do think a couple of things. One is the cybersecurity industry, and I've said this before on this broadcast is are not walking together as they should. And sharing this threat intelligence across the industry. As soon as they find something, I actually applaud Microsoft on the solar wind side, they got information out really quickly and did well. And so we did the same. I think the industry needs to do more of that more proactively. And then I do think that, again, that I see a lot of companies cybersecurity companies claim a lot of things without any evidence that it works whatsoever. >> The world's got to call them out the consequences of not having, things work as they're advertised and or sharing them, your point about sharing. There should be some recognition for folks that are actually being fast on the sharing side. It's not like... We need our own militia against the bad guys. That's what's kind of going on here. So great stuff. I got to get your thoughts on the edge real quick. I know we talked about it briefly. You broke it down to three categories device users, network, and then apps in the cloud. The hottest topic on our recent CUBE on cloud editorial virtual event we had was the edge. And edge being industrial edge. And also, just the edge of the network with humans and users and devices. How are you seeing the current situation out there? A lot of hype, obviously the reality of that, that we're in a distributed network, the internet and the web and the cloud cloud natives coming. What's Fortinet's thoughts? What's your thoughts on how the edge is evolving and what people should pay attention to when they look at as they're architecturally planning for building out and managing and securing the edge? >> Given this a zero trust conversation on users and devices and given that people are familiar with the cloud and how they're going to use cloud. I think the network is becoming a really important very important area. And some people say, "Oh, don't worry about the network, just go to the cloud." The network is very important in providing that digital experience, but what's happening with the network is it's being stretched. It's being extended into factories. It's opening up on the winning side. You've got people now working from home. You've got that edge that used to be just the data center edge is now CloudEdge and SAS edge. And so you have to pay close attention to those edges. Now what you can't do is say, "Oh, I know we've got all those edges there. Let me overlay some security on each edge," because it's going to be different the way you deploy that in on a wifi device versus a CloudEdge. And so what you need to look towards is convergence of a capability either of the CloudEdge or the WAN edge or the LTE edge, it's got to be converged networking, and security. Otherwise it's too operationally inefficient, too complex to do. And so I think this is a really important subject and area for customers because as I said at the beginning, it provides that digital, we acquired a company called (indistinct) a few months ago, which actually focuses on the digital experience monitoring marketplace. What are users actually going through in terms of availability and quality and performance all the way from their device, all the way back into the application? I think that's very important. And the network edges have to be secured, where you can only do it through a converged solution. >> Yeah, that's a great point Architecturally, you might have a good technology or product look on paper but the complexity is the vulnerability. That's a really, really great point. John always great to have you on. Thanks for coming on, sharing the update. Before we end, I'll give you a quick minute to plug the news you had. Quickly put a plug in for the release you guys just put out around the new FortiOS 7.0 the features. What's the most important point about that release? Share, take a minute to explain. >> Yeah. FortiOS 7.0 is our big release our operating system is big news because it allows us FortiOS to sit at any edge across the network, whether it would be the one edge CloudEdge, data center edge. We've extended it into the CloudEdge with SASE in this release. We're also bringing in zero trust network access capabilities but overall it includes 300 features across the network, Endpoint in cloud. So a very important release for us and our customers and partners. >> John, great to have you on theCUBE again and get the news. You guys doing a great job, congratulations on your earnings but more importantly, congratulations on the product success and how you guys are thinking about it as a platform. That's what customers want. And you guys are continuing to do a great job there and congratulations from the news. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Jim. >> Again, John Furrier here inside theCUBE for CUBE Conversation getting the update on Fortinet and cybersecurity. Look for our cybersecurity coverage on SiliconANGLE.com. And of course, theCUBE's coverage continuing to talk to the thought leaders and the people making things happen, securing our networks and our cloud and deploying cloud native applications. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)