>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet engage here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We have Chris Marsh on the program. He is a research director of workforce productivity and compliance at four 51 research. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you have just completed a massive report that really looks at the future of work and, and the premise is that the future of work is changing dramatically because of the rise of digital technology. It's, it's, it's changing the way companies think about employees, the way employees think about their jobs. Give us, give us sort of the high level findings here. >>Yeah. So yeah, a big report took me most of my summer so I kind of hibernated for a good month and a half to do it. Um, and yeah, it crystallizes a lot of our views around how, you know, protest technology and culture coming together to, to ground new ways of working. Um, and I guess the basic premise is that, uh, we all know this pervasive friction across day to day work. I mean we've sort of dysfunctional accepted that as the status quo, but actually we seen a lot of our survey research that it's being regarded increasingly in the upper echelons of management within companies as a priority that needs to be, that needs to be addressed. In fact, we had some survey work, um, that came out of failed recently. It was to base it in line of business decision makers and it was what should IUTs priority be when it comes to transformation initiatives and number one was improving the productivity and collaboration experience. >>Now if you put that in the context of all the other things on its plate, the fact that that's number one when traditionally it hasn't been, it's insignificant. And actually we did the same question, same survey September last year. It was number one then. And that was the first time it blips on the radar. So this is, you know, written up the agenda, exec management, it leadership, um, and now looking at ways to address that pervasive friction. So, I guess the basic premise of, of our thinking is that a lot of the legacy technologies on, I mean, they've led to that friction in some ways, right? So most companies have organized in one way or another around the silos that applicate traditional applications have created. And that's created organizational silos and, and hence all of the friction. But we see a lot of interesting new technology trends and tooling that are allowing people to basically operationalize work in the seams between those legacy systems. So lifting some of the data information and potentially workflow workload out of those systems and having them in a, you know, some of the new types of work platform that we're seeing, you know, which Smartsheet's a good example to actually operate in a much more agile way. And we call that shift one from systems of record, which we kind of understand to what we call systems of delivery. Um, so that two, we'll have a big gravitational effects on the way the rest of the business application landscape evolve. >>So didn't, uh, it, uh, kind of grow up to support the silos that were defined before. There was it, there was always sales, there was marketing, there was the executive suite, there was accounting. Um, and, and the it and the apps grew to be aligned. So do you think now that the actual collaboration apps like Smartsheet can actually pull, can pull the silos of the organization into this more hybrid structure? >>Yeah, I think, I think that it certainly looks like, I think that's what companies want to happen. Um, I think it's still early days. I mean the w the way most companies are set up in know actually has a lineage going back a couple of hundred years. The industrial revolution and mechanization leading to standardization, leading to compartmentalization. And then you have lines of businesses we kind of currently understand it. And that's why this is such an interesting time at the moment because a lot of that is breaking down relatively quickly. Um, and obviously the competing area has been the prime catalyst for that. Um, so yeah, I mean, you know, other things that come out of our survey research, massive appetite from senior managers for more collaboration across departments. Right? So, not just within teams, which in and of itself is a challenge, but across departments. Um, so you know, marketing, speaking more often and more purposefully with finance, legal speaking more often with operations. So there is an appetite for higher order types of, not just collaboration but actually work, design, planning, work, execution, um, not just sitting in those departmental silos. >>What is driving this at this appetite? Because I mean it would seem like it was always there and maybe there's just a recognition that we have the tools and the technology to actually execute or is there something that's actually fundamentally changing about the global world that we're living in? >>Yeah, I mean, so we talk about it in the report about this era of personalization, right? Which is just everything we've seen explode in the consumer domain around technology and the climatization we've all had to new kinds of digital experience and how they are coming into the workforce. People want new people will have expectations when you come to digital experience as part of their day to day work. Um, and so that's one thing. The, obviously the related element to that is that companies need to be much more agile in responding to disruptions in their own market. And this is obviously vertical agnostic now. So if there's one thing that you really need to make sure you're good at in the digital age, it's being agile, right? Spotting the sort of signals in the market, understanding what they mean in terms of customer demand, and then you know, catering to that demand quickly with some kind of new products or service or experience. >>So I think it's that need to be able to respond really quickly because there's so much disruption that technology has brought to us. That means that companies are saying, okay, we can't any longer wait six months for this just project life cycle is work life cycle to, to, to run its course. We need to respond more quickly. We need to organize much more agile. We all need to be on the same page when it comes to what we're supposed to be doing. Right? So there's a big demand for a clear line of sight across work. Um, so I think that's, that's probably where it's coming from. All companies realizing we need to act quicker, respond quicker. >>I'm curious, you know, it took a long time for dev ops to really be accepted as the optimal way to create products. Right. Versus a PRD and an MRD and then a PRD and then we define it and we take these when we build in and shoot, we miss the market. Right. It changed in terms of actually running the business though. I mean, do you have any kind of point of view on how long it will take for people to figure out that yes, we can make micro adjustments on our strategy based on speed, competitive threats, but at the same time I've got to be executing on some of these longer term objectives as well, which I would imagine would be a push back on that, on that technique. >>Yeah. I mean it will take as long as the technologies need to have to emerge to support companies really operating in that kind of agile way. Um, I mean one of the things we talk about, um, is the, what we call the three A's, right? So the imperative to be agile operationally, I think there's growing realization that that means that there needs to be tooling to support more autonomy, which is the second, a while more autonomy for more of the workforce to do higher order types of thing. So rather than having the centralized teams of process specialists or you know, technical experts, that needs to be more capability in the tooling, the everyday tooling for, for people to design work and execute on it. But that really is dangerous if you don't have the alignment piece, which goes back to kind of what you were saying about we can't just have a distributed set of teams who are going off and doing their own thing. >>There needs to be alignment back to strategy. There needs to be alignment potentially back to governance and compliance and there needs to be alignment potentially also to work that's adjacent but relevant. It's happening in other teams maybe in other departments. So I think that's really the sweet spot. How do you balance those three things? Um, which is driving a lot of the new interesting technologies that we're seeing emerge. But you know, we're still in relatively early days I think. Um, so you know, give it some time to, to play out. There's different layers of abstraction I think in software that that needs to happen for organizations to really be able to operate in that agile way. There's resource management, this planning, this process automation. A lot of these things have been resident really in discrete kinds of tooling, but the broadly being democratized and Smartsheet's actually a good example of the type of company that's beginning to offer those kinds of capabilities. Workforce wide to Smartsheet users where as they were may, may be previously just to preserve certain types of specialists. User >>I want to ask about what you, what this means for the individual employee in terms of it sounds as though he or she will be more empowered to do more and execute a but also expected more of a moral be expected of that employee in terms of what his or her skill levels are. And then I also want to ask what you're seeing here at Smartsheet engage that is most interesting to you, particularly as it relates to the report. >>Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I guess it's inevitable that more will be expected of employees, but I think, you know, in a, in a sense what we're seeing is the balance of power shift, not in an absolute terms, but, and, and you know, relative to how, how it's looks historically towards the employee. So at definite strand of inquiry amongst our clients and four or five, one has been how do we create an employee engagement narrative, right? There's growing realization that we've talked about customer experience for a long time, but we've, we've, we've neglected the idea of an employee experience. Um, so more companies are realizing that happy employees tend to be the more productive ones. So how do we introduce the right combination of tooling technologies and then compensation and then career opportunities to allow people to feel more engaged and empowered so that they can do those higher order kinds of things. Um, and this, yeah, this is, this is happening in a very kind of organic way. So, um, you know, I, I don't see this as companies saying, you know, you need to now achieve more. It's a little bit more, we need to provide you with the ability to achieve more. That's really the role of anybody who's making a decision around technology and an enterprise at the moment. >>But it's interesting because the, because the company has so much more data than they had before on kind of execution and some of the demos in the, in the keynote in terms of what are utilization, how many hours are you applying to this task? So it almost feels like there's more of a, in a treating people like a resource versus treating people like people. And I'm just curious how that, you know, kind of place, cause you, you want to do that, you want to measure, you want to know how your resources are allocated. At the same time there they're people, they're not machines and they're motivated as people and that's how you keep them or lose them a lot of times is the people part, not necessarily the job or the tasks. So how does, how does that map end? If I'm aggressive and I'm feeling good, yeah I like doing more but there's probably a lot of people that aren't necessarily up for that. I mean there's been a lot of all of >>'em talk in this conference already. Um, but more broadly in, in other forums of, um, the implications of more data in the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the degree to which, you know, by automating things that may previously have been done manually, is that going to upset people? I think on the whole, um, you know for a lot of types of work that may be Smartsheet is enabling, that's not so much of a concern cause you'll see here from their users very engaged, very enthusiastic. They want to get as much value in leave, which out of the platform was possible because they realized that's allowing them to do things that previously hadn't. But there is that sort of dichotomy of um, at what point do we automate things and not give you a choice in the fact that that's been automated. But I think these guys and another, the industry broadly is, is very conscious of that. So where you see all the kind of data being leveraged to do intelligent recommendations, intelligent notifications, there's going to be a wary eye on doing that without either an optin aware. An optin maybe isn't required, at least having permission from the end user to accept the implications of whatever's being recommended to do. So. I think on the whole, you know, people are sort of trying to figure out what that balance, >>what do you think this means for the war on war for talent? Because, I mean, this is the, this is the topic that the technology industry in particular, it's really grappling with, particularly when there are so many, uh, high level skills that are needed skills in, uh, AI and ML and other kinds of specialized technology. How do you, how do you put your, your findings in that context? >>Yeah, I mean it's, it really came on the agenda, this theme, um, couple of years ago, if not a little bit sooner than that as, as a really strategic issue. And in fact we see that in our own survey research where we asked the question to, um, employees across the workforce manage non-managerial to C suite and it was, you know, strategically one, what one thing do you need to improve on? And it was, um, uh, it was basically recruiting, developing and managing talent. And that's a head of, you know, everything else, like improving our, um, product differentiation, improving our customer experience, um, coming up with a strategy that's more fit for purpose, right? It was all about talent and people and managing people. So it's definitely risen up the agenda. I mean, I think one of the things that companies definitely, uh, beginning to think about is how to um, increase the acquisition of skills in the existing workforce and their way that's quicker than the way that's being done now. >>So actually one of the other areas we cover in our research is the shift from like traditional learning management systems, which have been kind of compliance oriented. You need to do this course or training because we need to show that you've done it to the kind of new generation of Alec speeds. We're learning experience platforms which provide much more agile ways for people to understand skills gaps and take on those skills. So I think that's gonna be a big driver actually of of the agile ways of working that we're talking about. But also how people address talent. The talent was, if you can't find that externally or you can't find enough externally, um, you can look internally of course, to existing employees and make sure that they have the platform to, to acquire new skills. >>And it's almost by a rule, you can't find it externally. Cause right now, just the, the, just not that much labor out there to go get, it's just so competitive. So you've got to develop a lot of that inside. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um, and it's not just sort of technical skills, it's other kinds of skills. Right. Um, but I think there's a, I think there's a nascent appetite amongst a lot of the workforce just to do that from a career progression point of view. Right. If you know, and I think that's one of the implications of companies trying to find ways to be more operationally agile, manage resources and more kind of agile ways. You know, it might be the case that people who maybe wouldn't be considered for a particular role, um, might now be considered because they re they, you know, saw that there was a capacity problem, a resource problem. They learnt the skill they can be assigned to that kind of project. Whereas previously maybe lines of department lines of business prevented that visibility into who has skills across the workforce. >>That's interesting. Do you have a point of view about kind of workforce transformation and you're giving a talk tomorrow how to avoid the Frankenstein workforce experience just for effective workplace transformation. But it's an interesting play that digitally transform your people to digitally transform your business. People talk about doing it to the business, but they don't talk about doing it to the people. I talk about the workflows and the customer engagement. You're taking it down, you know, start at the base, start at the bed. >>Well this is, I mean this is a, a lot of the reasons as to why companies like Smartsheet came about. I mean digital transformation I think is a kind of narrative has done a good job of, of making companies realize they need to change and they need to change quickly. Technology is a big enabler of that, but it's tended to be kind of top down way of thinking about it. It's tended to be sort of, do you have like a center of excellence? Do you have a technology council? How do we sort of transform from core outwards? It's not really been grassroots from the bottom up, but increasingly tooling like Smartsheets enabling that to happen. Right. How do you get people really engaged using new kinds of tooling to do higher order things? How do you connect that with work that's being done elsewhere? So it's a much more bottom up movement. How I think about workforce transformation and digital transformation has been, and I think more more people are cutting onto the fact that that's the way you need to think about it. >>What's your number one advice for an executive who doesn't have time to read the 47 pages? >>Yeah, I mean I guess it goes back to the, to to maybe the um, those three A's I was talking about earlier. I think my, you know, certainly progressive companies, but I think it's mainstreaming that companies are realizing they need to be more agile. Um, you know, in a broad brush and obviously depends on the context that company, who their customers are and what they're trying to achieve. Um, but really I think it should be a consideration, especially when thinking about workforce tooling and like knowledge worker tooling. To what degree is that giving more autonomy to those people to do higher order things and but also, you know, again, can you tie that back to your goals as a company, right? Because we've had certain technologies in the past of decade that have created a bit of a wild West, right? People go off and do different things and then there's, there's a lack of visibility, a lack of line of sight back to strategy. But if you get the sweet spot in your technology choices between do that, do they help us be operationally agile? Are they giving people a highroad, you know, more ways to do higher order work. Can we tie that back in the way that we need to? Then I think you're at least thinking about it in the right way. >>Really analogous to shadow it is. As you're sitting here talking about kind of the ground swell up of people finding tools to enable them to do their job better and get around kind of the hierarchy that existed in got in their way before his son. You know, there's a lot of parallels to what happened there before. Finally the corporates figured out, okay, we actually need to do dev in public cloud. There's a lot of advantages, et cetera, etc. >>Yeah, there is, but it's kind of like a legitimate version of shadow it. Shadow it was like we call it, we don't like the tools we've been given. No, we don't have them. Let's go and find ones. Yeah. >>Right. Right >>now it's like the ones that are enterprise grade happens to be the ones we also are using. Right. So that's, that is the super interesting, um, sort of wave that companies like Smartsheet carrying these tools fundamentally appeal and they have lots of evidence that are appealing virally. >>Well, I mean the fact that you can collaborate with people outside your company on your license for free and I think Mark said 50% of their users are people that are outside of the organization of the licensee. That's a pretty, pretty, I don't want to say Trojan, uh, strategy, but certainly certainly feels like, you know, a great way to permeate, which I think back like at last, Ian with the way they got started with, you know, a $10 10 seat license and, and again, AWS and some of these early kind of backdoor ways in to deliver real value that people were willing to put the credit card down. Yeah. Right. >>But you know, I mean, so I guess the challenge for Smartsheet and others are as he became a more enterprise grade platform, how do you keep that user appeal? Right. Cause that could obviously be one scenario which has more features, more complication actually more difficult to use, more complex. These guys are very conscious of it. Others in that sort of environment are very conscious of it. Um, but yeah, I mean the whole can do thing which um, Anna talked about this morning in the keynote. It's interesting. It's like a really interesting sort of democratized way of talking about power users that we kind of used to talk about the sort of folks that have that technical ability. And they're the ones that drive some kind of work initiative. Um, you know, platforms like Smartsheet and others are giving more people the ability to be that power user. And that's, that's kind of cool. >>Awesome. Great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. You're watching the cube.

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington it's theCUBE covering SmartSheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by SmartSheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are continuing our coverage live from Bellevue, Washington. We're at SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. I'm with Jeff Frick here. This is the second annual ENGAGE event. Huge, doubled from last year. We've had a great day so far, Jeff, of execs from ShartSheet, customers. We're now excited to welcome an analyst from the 451 Group, Chris Marsh, the Research Director for WorkFresh Productivity and Compliance; welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you very much. >> So we have, as I was saying, this is the second annual event, some of the stats that Mark Mader, our CEO, shared in the keynote this morning, there are over 1100 companies represented here at the event, a couple thousand people, 20 countries. We've had some very enthusiastic SmartSheet customers, SmartSheeters themselves talking about this tool that's designed for the business user, that's not designed for the citizen developer, people that don't even need to know what API stands for. So talk to us about your role at 451, but then we'll kind of get into project management, program management, and some of the trends and the changes that you're seeing there. >> Sure, yeah, so, so I've had the workforce productivity compliance research practice in 451, so as a team of analysts, we cover, essentially, productivity software, right? So the different tools that members of the workforce are using to get work done. So in addition to work management companies like SmartSheet, we also look at collaboration tools, digital workspaces, we cover the content management landscape, and we cover content creation, asset creation tools as well, so, really the focus for my team is to give perspectives on how the future of work is evolving, but really what those technology and dependings of that are. >> Such a busy space. You've picked a good area to specialize in. So how should people think of it? How should they categorize it, because from the outside looking in, a lot of the tools are very similar, you know, there's some overlap, some not overlap, there's some places where they can work together. Ya know, how should leaders be thinking about approaching this opportunity, 'cos you talk a lot about, you know, that's a great place to find untapped competitive advantage, but it seems to be very, kind of, confusing to the outsider. >> Yeah, it's a super interesting space, and it's probably more interesting than it's ever been. I think for many of us, it was, to be frank, kind of not interesting, right? There's lots of kind of legacy tools that people were struggling to figure out how to do new kinds of work with. >> Beyond email! (chuckles) >> Exactly, yeah, yeah. >> Was there anything beyond email 10 years ago? Yikes! >> Exactly, I mean we as a, I think, a research team find ourselves looking as much of intersections of those five areas that we cover as much as we go deep in them, for the very fact that, you know, it's a space that's going through a lot of innovation, a lot of disruption, and vendors and segments are learning from one another. Then, of course, we have, you know, broad, kind of transversal trends brought by technologies like AI and machine learning. Beginning to have more conversations around things like Block Chain, people beginning to talk about what may be some of the use cases are around AR, VR, and the kind of mixed-reality type technologies. So, you know, lots of innovation, lots of disruption. Um, in terms of what business leaders should be looking for, it obviously depends on what they're trying to do in their workforce. I think one of the big shifts that we're seeing is, um, you know, the sort of decentralization of ownership over more complex types of work to business users, right, whereas, I think, in a lot of companies, traditionally there are centralized teams of process specialists or project management folks, and, you know, tools have kind of mediated the relationship between those centralized, you know, teams and business users; where increasingly those tools are appealing to those business users. So in the panel moderation I did this morning, I showed some statistics around, you know, users of tools like SmartSheet, and it's not the type of people we would have seen using this type of tool four or five years ago. It's leaders were then legal teams, finance teams, HR teams, marketing teams, operations teams-- so that's sort of reflective of a broad shift in productivity software of, you know, virality in terms of how these tools enter businesses, right? Lots of organic adoption and it kind of runs contrary to how a lot of enterprise technology gets sold into enterprises, which is gone a little bit more top down or into specific buying centers. Increasingly, it's going in sort of the grass roots. People are finding new use cases for technology, and it sort of spreads from there, so, yeah, it's a super hot space right now. >> So one of the things we talk about is every place we go, right? Digital transformation and innovation, everybody wants more. And it seems pretty simple to say, but hard to do, that if you get more people more data, the tools to process it, and then the power to do something, that that just can unlock a tremendous amount of untapped innovation and execution and efficiency out of a company. That said, that's easier said sitting here than done. So are you seeing, you know, kind of a continual trend towards, you know, pushing down the data, pushing down the tools, and pushing down the authority to execute decisions? >> Yeah, I think so. And actually, the work management space is a very good example of that, right? So, um, you know, for some companies culturally that's not going to come very easy, because they just culturally may have a more sort of top-down kind of culture. But I think digital transformation for everyone, essentially means more agility, more speed, you know, more quickness in how work is executed and how it's designed. And that almost inevitably means that those closest to the delivery of the work are the ones that actually have the power to design the work in the first place and can, rather than sort of relying on IT for everything and/or central teams somewhere. So, it is a broad shift, but again, it comes, to your point, it comes more easily for some companies and some industries than others. >> And we talked about that with a number of the people from SmartSheet as well as users, that this is a massive cultural shift. I think Mark Mader, the CEO, this morning was telling us a quick anecdote of a 125-year-old oil and gas company, >> Yeah. >> That is, talk about, you know, probably really married to a lot of legacy processes and ways of thinking, not just tools, and how SmartSheet probably started in, you know, one function within the organization, probably, you know, quite low, and it started, to your point before, go viral, and we started, we started to hear a number of stories from PayPal, Sodexo, how this virality that you talk about is really kind of transforming from the bottom up. But that cultural change is essential. >> The cultural change is essential, I mean, in some cases it's just being led by the fact that that's happening anyway, right? Because, you know, gone are the days when IT chooses the tools, provisions them, and, you know, there's an awareness of what's going on in the environment. There are, and it's not just the work management space, we also look at sort of, workflow automation tools. A lot of these tools are, you know, going into a company grass roots, there are then potentially hundreds if not thousands of work processes or workflows that are created on these tools before IT even figures that out, right? Which is not necessarily an ideal scenario, but it's increasingly, you know, one of the patterns that we're seeing in enterprises, so. It's a big cultural shift, but um, there's a certain amount of push and pull here. Some companies that realize that are looking proactively to give effect to it. Other people are going to be pulled, to be frank, to the fact that there are tools that enable new kind of work patterns, new styles to happen, and they almost have to get on board with that, so. So obviously you want to strike a balance, I think, somewhere in between of being the catalyst for those kind of new things to happen whilst making sure there is still the kind of centralized oversight that's required for you to maintain control over your overall technology estate, but also so that you can make sure the technologies are aligning to your strategic goals. So it's a delicate balance. >> And there's these pretty big forces at play here. There's a term that 451 Group has recently coined called a liquid enterprise. >> That's right, yeah. >> Liquid; I think of fluidity, you mentioned agility, we've heard nimbleness today, um, talk to us. What, by definition, is the liquid enterprise, and how are you helping customers to embrace it and maybe not fight the force, because the forces of pull are stronger and better; but what does that mean? >> Yeah, so liquid enterprise, I mean, you've encapsulated it very well, right? So it's all about, you know, when we speak of digital transformation, you almost always end up to about business agility. So in some ways, liquid enterprise is just our way of giving a little bit more flavor to what business agility looks like in the kind of digital age. So our kind of view is that, you know, a lot of the companies that we kind of laud now as those really interesting companies like the AirBnB's and the Uber's, those with kind of, massively scalable infrastructure and then a very simple UI. We think that whole pattern of what the, kind of, digital enterprise will look like is one that's much more able to fluidly marshal it's different resources in a way that allows them to respond much more rapidly to changes in their own market conditions, right? Because one of the things, obviously, that digital is doing is changing user behavior to user requirement. So your ability, as a company, to respond very quickly to that is becoming, you know, a primacy in most companies, and a big part of how we think about the liquid enterprise is the fact that companies will actually be able to change their own organizational structure. Not just what they offer to a market, not just the tools that enable them to do that, but actually, they'll begin to sort of re-tesselate their own organizational design, to enable that to happen. So, you know, we see early indicators of technologies that are beginning to allow companies to think in that way. I think for most companies, liquid enterprise is aspirational right now, but I think, certainly, it's a pattern a lot of companies are trying to tact towards. >> So, I'm just curious, you talk about culture as a competitive advantage. And how much of these tools are culture enablers to make that possible? How much of it are just critical, because if you don't have that culture you're going to lose? How much of it is tied to, kind of, the consumerization of IT, where again, your workforce has an expectation of the way apps work based on their interaction with Amazon and their interaction with Google and those types of things? >> Very much driven by the consumerization of IT trend. I mean, often, increasingly what we see happen in the consumer realm ends up happening in some kind of expression in the enterprise realm sooner or later. So, yeah, that's very much it. One of the other things we talk about in our research is the kind of hierarchy of employee motivation, right? So we kind of have this way of thinking about, you know, what companies need to do and what technologies need to enable to really satisfy that end user experience. I think in the productivity software space, you know, it's probably not hyperbolic to say that most tools really only satisfy end users, right? We have lots of tools, including lots of modern SAAS tools, that actually, you know, may have good usability, but aren't particularly flexible. There sort of better, more scalable versions of a lot of legacy tools. So we see this kind of passage towards tools actually doing things like, you know, decentralizing the ability to create workflows, so that, you know, business users, including non-managerial folks, can actually design work, and how that work actually happens, right? So there's a big element there in terms of motivation in your role, you know, actually making an impact, having that recognized and all of those kinds of things, which is driving a more, sort of, engaged relationship between people and technology, so we only see that continuing. And, the work management space in SmartSheet's very good examples of that. There's lots of conversations you can hear and engage where people are discussing, you know, what they're doing with their tool that they created themselves, some kind of local business team that has redesigned a certain process that is allowed better business value to be created; and they're the ones that are going to take credit for that. I think that trend is only going to accelerate. So again, from an enterprise perspective, embracing that, helping catalyze that, but again, having the ability to have central oversight over that kind of local team-based execution, it is obviously very important. >> What about just kind of the competition from my desktop? You know, what apps are open while I'm working all day, and you know, we all wish if you're driving an app company that it's your app that is on top, but the reality is many, many apps open all the time. So do you see that evolving, do you see that aggregating, do you see a couple of kind of uber apps over the top of these integrations that you'll be doing your primary workplace, or is it just kind of horses for courses depending on the types of things that you do in your day-to-day job? >> Really good question, I mean, I think one of the background trends we've seen, especially with SAAS, is just the growth and the overall enterprise application estate. Right, so just more apps. And obviously catalyzed also by end users having positive experiences in consumer apps, and then being used to choosing the way that they do things, like that, that is transitioning into the enterprise environment, as well, so. I don't envisage that the total number of apps is going to decrease, but very good question as to, you know, whether we get consolidation. Time will tell, but I think, you know, to my point earlier, we spend a lot of time looking at intersections that cross existing segments, because, each segment is really transforming. And you see lots of examples of customers here at ENGAGE using SmartSheet as a displacement tool for other ones that they previously were using. They find the automation of SmartSheet a way to sort of disintermediate other tools that they were using. We're certainly seeing some of that, whether that means the total number of applications decreases, I don't know, because we're still yet to see play out lots of cool, new, innovative technologies that will obviously give rise to new kinds of applications. Question is out as to whether it will mean further apps, but we certainly seeing a changing in the, in the sort of preference for tools based on what new ones we're enabling. >> And I would imagine in very short order, the application of AI and machine learning behind the scenes in all these apps, is also going to change the UI experience dramatically, as more and more and more of the processes are automated on the back-end, there's more kind of smart suggestions as to what to do or completely automated processes. So even the face of the most popular apps today, I would imagine you see significant change with the application of AI and machine learning. >> Yeah, I would think so. One of the, sort of, big trends here, listening to customers and listening to some of the key notes, is, you know, the shift that comes with companies trying to make from low value work to high value work, so all of that kind of granular and manual work we're having to do is so most existing applications; people just want to abstract their way. They don't want to be doing that anymore, they want to be focusing on, um, sort of resource management, team coordination, creative ideation, they want to focus on strategy execution, they want to focus on things like, you know, risks to the business, actions that they need to take, decisions that they need to make, they don't want to be doing the whole, um, who did this, when did they do it, what do I need to do now, they don't want to be sort of manually moving information from applications, they don't want to be doing sort of manual reconciliations of data, and that kind of thing. >> Right. >> So um, heh, so yeah, the kind of low value to high value work is only going to be accelerated by AI and ML, to the point where we're beginning to see much more contextual work. So the ML is the basis on which work can be surfaced contextually to end users. So that is sort of automating the abstraction of that low value work, and that's hugely exciting, because that offers a whole new paradigm for how we interact with applications, what that end user experience is. Imagine, you know, sort of going into your office loading up your computer, opening up an application, and it surfaces to you what you need to focus on that day. >> Right. >> That's where a lot of productivity application vendors are trying to get to. >> That's the dream, right there. >> Not here is the application, you decide where you need to focus, it's the kind of, these are the things you really need to put your time in. I mean, that's pretty exciting. And that's what a lot of the companies would want. >> Well even, a certain CRN company that's got a large tower in San Francisco, why do I have to put the city and the state and the zip code, I mean, we have so far to go, can't I just put the zip code in and it fills in the city and the state, and those little, you know, simple things that take a lot of time and these are the kind of data entry tasks that just drive people bananas, and discount the value, the fundamental value of the tool, because you just get stuck in a data entry mode, or a double entry mode. It's this crazy opportunity that we still have in front of us to make improvements. >> Yeah, I think, huge opportunity, obviously. But it's not quite so easy as that, I think, really it's kind of how I would talk about it. You know, AI and ML will inevitably have a transformative impact on enterprise software; I don't think anybody would dispute that. But it does rely on large data sects, against which you have to train your algorithms and your models, and that takes time for individual companies to build that data sect. They need enough work in there, they need enough people, enough workflows in there, to generate those data sects so that they will actually be useful, right? So, it's going to take a bit of time to play out. But yeah, it's going to be very impactful in the longer term. >> Well Chris, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights on this new, emerging term of the liquid enterprise, we appreciate that. >> Pleasure, thanks very much. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)