(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE We are winding things down, or winding things up I'm not quite sure here at the Conga Connect West event 3,000, all dancing with their headphones on silent disco. We're excited to have the launch of a brand new magazine SF Society magazine. The managing director, Nadio Granata. Nadio, congratulations you just launched this today. >> We did yes, thank you, Jeff, yeah. >> So what is the objective, what is this all about? SF Society >> SF Society. It's about raising the profile of the partners in the SalesForce, I can see these guys, >> Like these guys, their profile is raised, so, so what was missing, what motivated, it's a lot of work to do a magazine. >> Okay, it is, it is. It's been a labor of love, I got to tell you that, but, SalesForce is a fantastic job, for SalesForce for its employees, within SalesForce but the partners, we want to raise an independent voice of the partners. And we talk about success, we talk about philanthropy, we talk about all the great things that going on, and most importantly the community. So that's what the magazine is about. >> There's just one problem though, Nadio. How many of these did you print? (laughing) >> Well, you know, I've got to be cautious, I had to be cautious, but we've printed, we've printed 5,000 for today, it's online and we expect to generate about 100,000 readership very, very quickly. >> Okay good, but I got good news and bad news. >> Go on. >> Did you hear the keynote? >> Yes I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> How many people are here? >> Oh I know there's a lot of people here. >> 171,000. So you, 5 plus 100, you got to go back to the printer. >> We're cautious, we're cautious. >> Alright, alright good. >> Thank you. >> So who's supporting this? Are you getting advertising to support it, how's it being supported? >> Yes, it's sponsored by advertisers, so Conga of course a great advertiser in there, we've got NataBox in there, we've got New Voice Media, we've got FRG, we've got loads of companies >> Have you got more magazines? >> Very positive, very positive >> Get those out of here. >> So, sponsored by advertising and that's the way forward. >> And how often does it come out? >> Quarterly. It's a quarterly magazine. >> A quarterly magazine. >> Ya it's global, we've got content from all over the world and we're looking to grow, it's a 48 page production, we're looking to grow that as we go forward. >> Kay, what's the online address, for people who need more information. >> Okay www.sfsocietymagazine.com >> Sfsocietymagazine.com check it out >> Yeah, that's not easy to say >> Quick, there's only 4,999 of em left and you're competing with 170,000 people. Alright. >> But get it online, guys, get it online. >> Get it online. Alright, Nadio thanks for taking a few minutes and nothing but best of luck on this thing. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Alright, he's Nadio, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE we're at Conga, Connect West and SalesForce downtown San Francisco, come on down the party's just beginning. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're coming to the end of a long day here at the Conga Connect West Event. It's at The Thirsty Bear, just a couple doors down from Moscone South. And as you can see behind me, the silent disco has begun. You can't hear it, but they're all dancing. So, we're excited to have our next guest. He's Steve DeMarco, the chief revenue officer of Conga. Steve, great to see you. >> Great to be here, Jeff, thanks. >> So how about, your first week on the job you get to come on The Cube. Not a bad deal. (Jeff laughing lightly) >> It's fantastic. I'm a big fan of you guys, and it's great to be here. >> Thank you, and they're spending all your money on this big, expensive party. >> I know, I better go sell something. >> You better sell something. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, you just started. I'm teasing you, but what attracted you? You've been in the valley for a long time, you see a lot of opportunities. What attracted you to Conga? >> Well, I've known these guys for a while. I've known Matt Shultz, our CEO, and Bob DeSantis. Those guys are veterans. I've known them for a while. I've known of Conga for a while. I know what they do, I know how they help customers. And when the opportunity came up to join them, I jumped at it. It's kind of my dream job, to be honest with you. >> Oh that's awesome. >> What they sell, helping customers be more productive, they have a great customer base, fantastic products, great reputation. I mean, I don't want to oversell it, but it was an easy decision for me. >> Yeah well there's a lot of good stuff going on, like you said. >> Yeah. >> They're attached to this rocket ship. Got a 65-story building just down the street. >> That's right. >> That's a good one to attach to. >> That's right. >> And really playing in a good space. >> Yeah that's it, I've been in the Salesforce ecosystem with one company or another, for about 13 years now and so, I'm really familiar with Salesforce, and the partner opportunities here. So it was a perfect fit for me. >> Good, so I wanted to take it up a notch and talk about something I think is pretty special and under-reported and that's really when, you've got an ongoing relationship and a SAS relationship-- >> Yeah. >> When you're paying monthly, or annually, or whatever your payment rate is, it's a very different conversation. Customer, vendor relationship, than if I send you some software. I send it off and then I'll see you in 12 months for the 15 percent. >> Right. >> It's a fundamentally different way of being associated with a customer. >> Yeah, and me, like a lot of veterans in technology, started out selling software products as a perpetual license, right? And we would go and try to get a big check up front and then, whether the customer used the software or not, we didn't care. We got our money up front. Salesforce was one of the pioneers of the cloud solution, or delivering it as a SAS solution. And SAS really puts the power in the customer's hands, because you don't get all that money up front, they pay for it as a subscription. And as such, they can shut you off if they're not happy. >> Right. >> That's a very powerful concept. So vendors like Conga have to continuously improve our product and make our customers happy, period after period after period, in order to keep them renewing. >> Right. >> So it's a great concept, puts the power in the customer's hands, and it really pushes us to be better for our customers. >> You know, we heard this story earlier today with one of your customers, was talking about a successful implementation they had on the document creation system, but then they wanted to get into a new product, which I guess the contract system was so early, hadn't even delivered it. But she said to her boss, "Hey listen, I trust these guys, "they're not going to let me hang." >> That's right. >> "So I'm willing to take that bet. "We need this, and this is a partner "that that I feel comfortable "in making this investment." >> That's right, I mean Jeff, that's just a testament to Conga's place in the market. They've geen doing this for many years. They have thousands and thousands of extremely happy customers. Customers trust us. Customers trust Conga. That was another attraction to me. And for a customer to be able to take that kind of leap with a vendor, it's a very special thing. Conga's reputation proceeds itself, and that's how our customers feel about us. >> Right, and also Salesforce knew you were coming. So they baked a couple of your core products into their core products. >> Right. >> That worked out pretty well. >> That's huge. Salesforce now, I've known them for 12, 15 years, they don't do that. They do not do that very often. I mean, you can count on one hand how many partners they've actually baked into their product set. And so it's a special relationship we have with Salesforce. We're proud of it. But it's going to be a really good thing for them and their customers, working with Conga in that capacity. >> So last question, I think you've been here a week, you said? You're just getting going. So what are some of your priorities? You're coming in, fresh breath of air, a lot of enthusiasm, as you look forward, what is some of the stuff you're itching to get to work on? >> Well we're going to expand our partnerships, our SI partners, our systems integrated partners. We're going to continue to work really closely with Salesforce. It's all about growth. Grow, grow, grow. We have a great sales team today. We're going to really attack the market. We've got some great competition out there, so we're going to face them, and it's going to be a lot of fun. >> Alright well Steve, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. I'll let you get back to the customers, the party. Get some headphones on and start dancing. >> Alright, thank you. >> He's Steve, I'm Jeff, and you're watching The Cube, we're at Conga Connect West at Salesforce. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here at theCUBE, we're wrapping up a long day at Conga Connect West. The silent disco has started. If you've never done one of these, it's totally fun. You put it on, you can listen to the red, the green and the blue. >> We got three channels, that's right. >> Wow, great day today. >> Three DJs, three channels, I think you've got oldies, I've got top 40. >> I think I went EDM, I think I'm green. >> You got EDM, okay. >> I think, I know. >> I think red is oldies. >> Alright. >> So come on down to, well, it's probably too late, but-- >> Probably too late tonight. >> We're filling up the space here. >> Two more days at the Thirsty Bear. What do you have going on tomorrow entertainment-wise? >> Tomorrow, whole day of circus entertainment in the tent out back. Tomorrow night, Beats Antique which is a edgy, I think they played at Burning Man. >> Burning man. >> That's right. >> So they've got to have something going on. >> They're going to have something crazy going on. So we've got a circus tent out back, performances all day long. Open bar. >> Open bar. >> For everyone who's at Dreamforce. >> Open food. >> Food all day and by the way, we did not run out of food today. Unfortunately I heard Moscone did. (Jeff laughs) So, if you're hungry, come on down. Demo stations, solution stations. We've actually got a fire marshal in the house, so we're legal. >> Oh, did the fire marshal come on down? >> And we've got dancers right here. >> We got dancers. >> Dancers right here, he's on the red channel. >> You get the vibe. >> So the silent disco's pretty amazing 'cause you put the headphones on, only you can hear the music and you get to dance to your own beat. >> Except for your friends that have the same color. >> So you're green, I'm blue, We're all on our own. >> So we're on different beats. You get the message, it's Conga Connect West, Thirsty Bear. Free food, free drink, free entertainment and silent disco. Come on down. >> Come on down. >> Bob, great day. >> Thanks for being here. Great day today. >> Alright. Thanks for watching. >> Cheers. >> We're checking out, time to go dance, bye. (upbeat jingle)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with theCube. The Mark Benny office finished this portion of the keynote, so we can get back to business here. Special event outside of sales force, the 171,000 people over watching Mark and the keynote. We're here at a special Conga event, it's called Conga Connect West. It's about 3,000 people they said they had last year, 3 days of taking over the thirsty bear, they've got free food, free drink, free entertainment, lot of demos, come on over. The invitation is open. Just make sure you come early because the line is really long, but we're excited to get into it with a practitioner, we love to talk to customers. So, really excited to have our next guest, Susan O'Leary, she's a continuous improvement leader 6and program manager for Abiomed. Great to see you. >> Hey Jeff, thank you so much for that introduction. I'm so excited to be here. >> Excellent, and with her is Will Spindla, the VP of marketing from Conga. Will, great to see you. Warming up before your panel tomorrow. >> Exactly. (laughs) >> So, first off, impressions of this show, it never fails to amaze me when we come to Dreamforce, what happens to downtown San Francisco. >> It's insane, isn't it? >> It is crazy. It never disappoints, there is so much going on at every moment, and especially right here at Connect West. >> Right. So, what is Abiomed, for folks that aren't familiar with the company? >> So, Abiomed, we're a class-3 medical device company. We make the world's smallest heart pump and our corporate mission is to recover hearts and save lives. And more recently, we have some commercials for our flagship product, the Impella product, on T.V. So I feel like we've really arrived at some point in the company's maturity that we have television commercials. >> Right, so what does class-3 mean? >> So, it's a certain level of classification within the FDA, and class-3 means essentially, in the simplest way, that it goes inside the body. >> Okay. >> So, the rigor at which it's controlled, and how products are introduced into market, have a very rigorous path for patient quality and compliance and safety, it's a pretty exciting space to be, but it's not easy to bring a product to market. >> And you've got hardware, I imagine you've got all kinds of crazy software, you probably have all types of continuous monitoring, not a simple device. >> No. >> And a very important one. >> A very important one. That's right. >> So we're here at Conga, Connect West, what do you guys do with Conga, where does Conga play in your world? >> So Conga has enabled Abiomed to do amazing things. We're here at Dreamforce, obviously as Salesforce customers, and we began our journey with Salesforce back in 2009, and we discovered that we had some business processes that still resided outside of Salesforce, that people were struggling with these PowerPoint presentations and putting together their sales forecast, and all the data that would really drive that lives in the Salesforce orb. A tour on the app exchange back probably 2010 I would say, Will, and Jeff, I found the composer product, and it was a pretty easy sell to our VP of sales, a quick proof of concept, taking certain data that people were manually manipulating and with the click of a button, here is your forecast blown up in all kinds of colors and charts and graphs, it was a game changer. >> All right, so that's early intro, right, 'cause the biggest knock on Salesforce, always, is getting sales people to use it, right, and changing behavior is much harder than writing software or developing software. So, did you find that that app was the killer app to get the sales team to actually use the tool? >> Well, so they were using- >> 'Cause everybody's got the same story, right, everyone's got PowerPoint, and a lot of times people use Salesforce for reporting, not actually working, and now it's double data entry, I can't stand it, but it sounds like this composer was really a game-changer for you. >> Well, it brought the best of both worlds together because our field organization was using Salesforce, they're doing their work in that application, and yet the model that leadership wanted for delivering their weekly forecast in their update was very, very specific, and you couldn't do that in any Salesforce report. You can do it in Excel. >> So the forecast model was outside of Salesforce driven by the executive leadership, even though the day-to-day work was happening inside of Salesforce? >> You're right, you're right. >> And this was like, "Oh, it happens over and over again?" >> (laughs) It was the visualization that was impossible in standard Salesforce reports, but you could build it in Excel, and then merge the data with the composer product, so that was our first use case, and we have invented so many more, but that got us in the door, so to speak. >> So, Will, have you ever heard that story before? >> Well, what I was going to say, I think it's interesting because I worked at Salesforce for about six years before I came to Conga, and one of the things that we often saw was that sales people sometimes put their data in Salesforce, unless they're coaxed very greatly, but what they actually don't do a lot of the time is leverage the data that's inside there once it's there. And so the nice part about having a tool like Conga is that you can make it so the sales people don't have to do anything with the data, right? You can automate- >> Exactly. >> Creation of reports and charts and PowerPoint presentations, so that the sales reps, they don't have to do anything. >> They just click a button. >> Click a button. >> They click a button, they have the relationships with their customers, they know how to win the deals, they know how to take all those conversations to the next level, and why do we want them crunching numbers and doing that? We don't want them doing that. There's no value in that. So, you find great tools that take the data and put it in a button, and game changed. >> Yeah, and then you can ensure that whatever process or policy your company, like Abiomed has, every single sales rep is within that guideline, so they're not making their own decisions, they're doing what the organization wants them to. >> That's right, they're following a tested and validated model that delivers what leadership wants. And I'm probably not joking if I say half a day on Friday, if you were a cardiology account manager, you would be trying to cobble this together in a PowerPoint and then turn it in to the office. Half a day. >> So the office is asking for a PowerPoint presentation on the updated status of your pipeline, basically? >> This very specific visualization model. And, with Composer, with how people are with data, they think that this is all they really need, but once they saw what we could put in that output document from Composer, it has grown to be an enormous analytic tool set for the field team that drives their forecast. >> I'm just curious in terms of the scale and the size of team, don't tell me anything out of school but, are you talking tens of reps, hundreds of reps? >> Hundreds of reps. >> Hundreds of reps. >> Globally, we have over 100 sales territories, and so we have easily 450 feet on the street. And certain people have different roles, right, so the cardiology account manager role is that forecasting leader in the company, that person is really clicking that button to generate that document, and there's well over 100 in our organization. >> So, Will, you hear these stories all the time, I'm sure, is Composer the killer app to get people to start to embrace this tool? Do you see that time and time again? >> Yeah, I think one of the nice parts about Composer is that you can, in some respects, direct your entire sales or organization on the way the company wants to showcase themselves, whether it's in reporting, whether it's highly branded and pixel-perfect documents, what we've seen a lot of people do is you may have a monthly or a quarterly business review. >> Oh, we do that! We have Composer for that. We have this beautifully crafted merge template that delivers a business review to our customers. Yeah, that was the second thing we did with Composer. >> That's right. >> Where we first did the forecast then we did the business review. >> Business review. >> Wow! >> And you can do that in Excel, or in PowerPoint, or in Word, or even in HTML, it just gives you the ability to take data, that sits inside Salesforce, and push it out in any format you want. And the nice part, too, is you can pull data from other systems. >> Right. >> So it can be in your ERP or your accounting system and brings it all into one spot. >> I just can't help but think of the poor guy on the receiving end of the 450 PowerPoint decks on Friday afternoon, I mean how did that get rolled up? >> Yeah, we had another process for that. >> I don't want to hear that one, that one sounds scary. >> There's the regional, there's a country base- >> Too much. >> And it's all Composer. It's all Composer. >> Last question for you, Susan. So, have you been able to leverage the success of Composer to basically expand into more applications in the Salesforce suite with Conga or other, to actually get your adoption up, and now start to add more and more applications? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Jeff, and certainly Composer was that early-adoption product that was such an easy sell, it had win-win written over it in capital letters, everybody really got it right away. "We're buying this, we're doing this." And then over the years, Conga in its development life cycle put out a couple other game-changing products that we also have, we have their Action Grid product, and their contract solution. >> Was that as easy of a sell? >> Yes. >> Okay. (laughs) >> Well, it wasn't IT organizations selling solution on business, business is saying, "We want a quoting platform, and we need something better than standard Salesforce." So, we started looking at what is now CPQ, but it was called Steelwork at the time, and then we needed to solve for the contract life cycle management part of that, and a contract product didn't even exist at the time. And we were looking at other solutions, and we were trying to make something work, and we learned about the contract product through a Connect event that a colleague of mine attended, and came back from that event, and just said "Sue, you've got to stop everything you're doing, you've got to go talk to Pete Castro at Conga, and you have to see this contract tool. Because I know we're almost at the end of this project, but literally you're going to rip out everything that we did before and you're going to want to do this." So guess what we did? We did it! >> Will, you can't let this one off your hip, I'm telling you. She's awesome. >> It was a tough timeline and that was part of the promise that we needed to hear back when we went to the table, was we can't miss our launch. >> Yeah, yeah. >> To do this pivot and switch and can we do it? >> But that's easy compared to getting sales people to change behavior, timelines are one thing, but if you got people to actually use the tool the way the tool is supposed to be used, then the ancillary benefits are tremendous. Thank you for sharing that story with us, Sue. >> You're very welcome, Jeff. We do have the Action Grid product, but I'm not the expert in that space, but I've seen some amazing things. >> You've got the sales people using Salesforce on a weekly basis, plant the flag and call it enough. Come on now! All right, so thanks again. He's Will, she's Sue, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube for Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are winding down a very busy day here at the Conga Connect West. We're here at Salesforce. Benioff confirmed it. In the keynote 171,000 registered people. Hard to believe. We got about 3,000 of 'em here, hosted by Conga. Free drinks, free food, a lot of entertainment. Come on down. Are open for three days and the invitation is open. We're really happy, have two very special guests here as we wrap up today. We have Matt Schulz. He's the CEO of Conga. Matt, great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> And with him as Ryan Westwood, the CEO and co founder of Simplus. Ryan great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So first off, Matt great event. You said you guys did this last year. >> Yep. >> Super way to get the community together, your customers together, your people together. Big investment. >> It's a big investment, but it's you know celebration of our customers and we have the most amazing loyal customers that I've ever seen. So we like to get together at least once a year. So this is not only our dream for celebration, but this is our Conga Connect user group here as well. >> Right. >> So now we're excited. >> So, It's interesting, right. We do a ton of shows and everybody wants to get customers on we loved to have customers on. Their hard to get on, either because they can't speak or it's your strategic advantage or, the whole bunch of reasons. I think we've only done about six or seven eight interviews here today and we had three customers on. So you know nice testament to what you guys are doing. >> Yeah. >> And Ryan. Tell us about Simplus. We've been hearing about Congo all day. Tell us about-- >> (laughs) Exactly, exactly. >> Thank you for the opportunity. Simplus started out as a Salesforce partner specifically to SteelBrick. So SteelBrick was an independent software vendor like like Conga, that was built on Salesforce and Salesforce acquired SteelBrick a few years ago. And we started out implementing SteelBrick and then when they were acquired by Salesforce, we took an investment from Salesforce and really have scaled alongside of Salesforce CPQ. But we kind of saw the emergence of CLM like we did CPQ, where we felt like this is this is the future. There is a big opportunity. There's a lot of wide space. And so when we met with Conga and the team, we were just even more excited. We knew that the technology in the market had a big opportunity, but then to have the experience of Matt and Bob and his team combined. We were excited to partner and go to market with Conga, just like we did with SteelBrick. So we've really made our brand on being kind of ahead of the market and, and really seeing what's happening and implementing the technologies that are the cutting edge of the Salesforce ecosystem. >> Yeah, and a big ecosystem it is, with the 170,000 people. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> And Matt you've got this crew together. We've heard time and time again today, a lot of people that have worked with you in the past. So you've got a pretty good formula, pretty good team of folks, that you've executed with. What about the importance of that, where, you know you've got trusted lieutenants, people you've kind of done this before with to be able to bring together coalesce relatively new team to take this thing to the next level. >> Yeah, we were talking a little bit off the air that you Ryan runs a services company. So everyone believes that the people business. Right? And then they meet me, I get it in social situations, what do you do? I'm CEO of a software company. They're like, oh, wow, it'd be great to have a technology like that. I'm like, wait a second, it's a people business. We don't have, I tell our employees that every time we get together, we don't have a factory that stamping out widgets. Like this is a people business. It's an interconnect with people business, actually. So I tell people, marketing sneezes, and, sales catches a cold, >> Right. >> We are all just completely joined at the hip. So for me to have the honor of working with people, second, third, fourth time and some of these companies, it's pretty incredible, very blessed, and it doesn't hurt that they're really good at what they do. >> Yeah, well, absolutely. And Ryan, you've got an interesting take too. Your, your kind of a leadership study, or you like to interview people. You've written lot of blog posts. So what is it about, kind of the leadership study that helps keep you going. Makes you tick. >> I think, I think as an entrepreneur, you realize over time how much you don't know. And it's amazing to surround yourself with other entrepreneurs or CEOs that have experienced things you haven't. And so through those platforms, Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, the writing I've done has been amazing for education. So I think I've interviewed 60 plus tech CEOs. public, private, all kinds of different different sizes of companies and I have learned so much. It's been a it's a really fun journey. The time I've spent with Matt and Bob and some entrepreneurs are CEOs like, like they are, there's just so much to learn. So I I've enjoyed sharing my journey with other people and writing about it, through the Forbes platform for the last four or five years. >> Such a great such a great lesson. I'm reading I pulled it up. I'm reading Sapiens right now. I don't know if you've read that book. Great book by Yuval Harari. Just come out with a new called the 21st Century. He's a historian, greatest historian. And he talks about one of the big changes to go to a scientific based world was when people decided they didn't know everything, and embrace the fact that we didn't know everything. And let's ask questions. Why does the sun come up over there? Why does the moon, and where before it was, kind of a deity from on high and everything is fine. And we'll just keep it though. So I think it's a really, smart, smart strategy to say; I love to learn from the people. So what I love about this job and get to talk to smart guys like you. Let's talk about kind about kind where Conga is going. You've got all these connected parts, talk to a bunch of people, you've got brought in through acquisitions, and you've got this thread that seems to weed through all the applications, workflow leaves to the applications. You got document creation, that ties back to managing your contracts. Interesting, how those things tie together. And now AI. You're going to have this kind of AI infusion. As we talked to people all the time, no one can go buy a pocket of AI. what I want is AI infuse, in all the applications that I interface to make them work better. So that's what's coming down. You got to be excited about that. >> Oh. it's incredible. I mean, the opportunity in front of us is amazing. This is the third company. I'm old, this is the third company I've been CEO of in the electronic documents space. So I've been in this space for 20 years now. And to see where we've come in 20 years. It's inspiring. It's amazing. If you look at just the sheer numbers and size of market. Congo really started in my mind, in our mind, and our team's mind back when we were all at DocuSign. As you know, I was CEO of DocuSign. Joined the company in January 2007. And we really put the team back together. They've built the early days of that company. But we had a vision back then around digital document transformation, and it included electronic signing, but electronic signing was a small part of that. And so we've been working really hard as you mentioned, building products. We've made some key acquisitions, and we built out the first digital document transformation suite in the industry. It's all the way from collaborating, creating documents to managing those documents and negotiating them to full contract Lifecycle Management with electronic signing a state of the art orchestration layer to build those productively for customers with a AI platform Conga AI supporting the entire platform. This product groups like a dream come true for us. It's 20 years in the making. And we're so excited. We've now released with the market. Companies growing like crazy. We've been named the fastest growing ISV in the entire Salesforce ecosystem. We have the highest volume downloaded app in the entire app exchange. And we've been rated the top from a customer satisfaction standpoint, the number one ISV in the entire Salesforce ecosystem. So either a blind squirrel found a nut or we were onto something there. this is a hot market. Customers like what we're doing. We're just going to keep growing and doing more. Yeah. >> And we heard the announcement earlier today about that Salesforce, actually integrating some of your product functionality directly into some of their offerings. Which is a great validation. >> Pretty excited and proud of that. Salesforce does not, I mean, with very few exceptions, like count them on three fingers kind of exceptions that I know of ever resells anyone else's product. Let alone resell it with their co branding. And so Salesforce announced here at dream force that they're reselling Conga's products now. Conga core generation is being co branded with Salesforce in Seoul along with invoice generation. I'm stumbling over the words because it's stunning that it's been a few years in the making, but we have a really strong relationship with Salesforce. We publicly announced they're an investor in the company, we're one of their top global ISV partners. So it was it was in some regards, a very natural thing for them to say, if we're going to build our document generation around our strongest partner. >> Right. Well, it's always good to hook your wagon to a rocket ship. And as evidenced by the very large building just outside these doors. >> Yeah. >> I think you picked a good one. >> Amazing I mean we are an amazing company, so my time with them dates back to when I was CEO DocuSign. So we did when I was there we did the first ISV deal of its kind with Salesforce. This was in 2009, and then brought them in as an equity investor in the company. So I've always Salesforce have been and always near and dear to my heart and a really amazing partner. This is my I think my 10th or 11th dream force. And so I'm all in. Like, well, the company's all in this is we're all all on the Salesforce bandwagon definitely. >> It looks like the bet's paying off. So congratulations to you and the team. >> Thanks, thanks. We got a lot of work to do, but it's going well. >> All right. Well thanks for taking a few minute. Ryan, Matt, and again, congratulations on a really great event. I think that things are turning people away the door. It's like, two people out two people in. (laughs) And thanks for having us. >> Like I said, it's nice to throw a party and have somebody show up. >> Absolutely. Thank you. >> Thanks for your time. >> All right. He's Matt, he's Ryan I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Where it's at Conga Connect West, at Salesforce dream force in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West event at the Thirsty Bear. It's Salesforce Dreamforce downtown San Francisco. Marc Benioff, he said it, 171,000 people. I don't know where they all fit. Please don't bring your car, but we're here, Thirsty Bear is a place to hang. There's no lines at the bar, no lines at the food, this a the place to be. So we're happy to be here. Have our next guest from Conga. We've got Sawyer Martin, he's the Director of Product Management from Conga. >> Sayer Martin. >> Sayer, I'm sorry. Sayer good to see you. Also Mason White, the Director of Product Strategy. Mason great to see you. >> Nice to meet you Jeff. >> Absolutely. So Sayer, you came in on an acquisition we're looking at almost exactly six months ago. >> That's right. >> Orchestrate. So what is Orchestrate, and how's it been so far? >> Yeah, it's been really good. So Orchestrate started as really a wealth management tool for process orchestration, so inside of Salesforce. So managing end to end processes for wealth management firms inside of Salesforce. That's the combination of human and automated work that are happening, tasks being generated-- >> So I was going to say, what type of tasks and stuff? What is it? >> So tasks to tell someone, so a tasks in Salesforce is essentially an instruction to have someone do something. >> Right, but I'm curious because you said very specifically it was for financial management. >> Yeah, so financial management, there's moving money, generating investment policies statements for clients, all kinds of different things that you might do, review meetings for clients. >> And how did you pick that vertical to get started? >> Well we came out up, so the company was actually spun out of a wealth management firm, and that wealth management firm was on Salesforce, couldn't find a way to automate their business basically. Wanted to take those processes that they were living everyday or that were in someone's head and put it down in a system that they could then use to train people as they grew. And so it was born out of that wealth management firm, and knowing that industry we thought, as a small company, let's establish a beachhead in that market and then move elsewhere. The tool's built generically so it applies to any industry really, but we knew that industry the best. So that we focused there. >> So did you spin out of, oh no you were, you spin out of the wealth management company or did those people who founded it left and figured if these guys need it there's probably few more that do as well. >> Yep, so it was the former. Spun out of the wealth management firm, and then took it as this independent entity, not doing wealth management at all, but doing technology exclusively. >> Right, and doing process flow and task management and those types of things. >> That's right. >> Alright, so Mason how does this fit in your portfolio strategy? >> That's a great question, and actually Sayer and I met at Dreamforce '17 last year. In terms of Orchestrate what we've done is really, certainly we are keeping the existing customer base, but we're bringing that type of work flow capability into other areas of Conga. So as you look at the Conga suite of products, that work flow and approval processes is really something that is vital for things like contract life cycle management. Who needs to be involved in reviewing and approving a contract depends greatly on the size of the contract, the level of complexity, the types of changes that are being asked for. So we're in the process of bringing Orchestrate capabilities into various of our product lines. First one we're showing to customers is how we've brought it into Conga contracts through Salesforce, and we'll be bringing it into other elements really through a suite type of play. We're calling it a platform internally, and as we mature that it will become available to other members of The Conga Product Suite. >> Right, so you guys have this interesting collection of products that I assume all started as silos, but they've all got this kind of interplay between the process flow, with the contracts, the document creation, the contract kind of management, they're all very very, you know, kind of different tranches of the same tree. >> Yeah very much so. In fact I'd throw in our recent acquisition of Counselytics with the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities related to contract analysis. There's a fairly consistent thesis in a lot of our recent, whether it's been product launches or product acquisitions around building out capabilities related to contract life cycle management. It's not the only place where those things come into play, but it's certainly the one that is exciting people as we go to market. >> Right, right, so Sayer you've been with him for six months now, how's been the absorption? >> It's been really good. We didn't fully understand when we were acquired that, sort of what the plan was, and we didn't get a lot of direction when we first came aboard, but we knew that contract life cycle management is a powerful piece of the business. It's a growing piece and it's one that's is increasingly important to customers. And so we looked at that from a process perspective, and we've really been focused on finding the gaps there and taking what was as you said, a silo, going from the contract management piece, generating the documents, doing the negotiations, and ultimately signing the documents, and tying it all together with the process engine we'd already built. >> Right, so is Orchestrate's go to market today still as a single product, or are you just getting completely embedded in the other ones? >> I think to Mason's point it becomes obvious to use more than one Conga product. When you buy one at least one other one will make sense for you, and Orchestrate included. >> Right, because Orchestrate is kind of like AI And I'm sure where and how you guys are going to apply AI in all these various applications. And I don't want to buy a bucket of AI, I want all of my applications to work better, work faster, auto-fill, auto-select, you know, take more and more of those manual steps out of the process. >> That's right, augment the human mind in many ways. Right? Come in at those points in the process where it can add value or give you insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had. >> Right, right. So Mason I'm just curious from a product strategy point of view, you've guys have made a lot of acquisitions, got some new money in the war chest, and you know, a really solid team of senior execs that have worked together a lot. The band is back together is a big theme that I've seen all day today. So when you are looking at kind of buy versus build decisions what are some of the things you're thinking about as you kind of continue to build out this suite of kind of cross-functional capability? >> We're always looking at things whether in buy, build, or license. So there are things that as we're looking at them right now, and I'm not going to mention them, the decision is between buy, build, or license in certain types of capabilities. Really depends on what's the maturity of the technology out there, is it something that we need that others have right now and they've got strong, could be a strong OEM business model, or could be something that is a rapidly growing area that we need to get in on. Own it and tune it for our needs specifically. >> Right, well great story and I'm sure you're going to see that Orchestrate stuff all over the place. >> That's what we hope! >> That's what we're working towards. >> Alright, so Sayer, Mason, thanks for taking a few minutes to tell your story, and inviting us here to Conga Connect West. >> Great, thanks Jeff. >> It's nice to talk to you Jeff, thanks. >> Oh my pleasure. Alright, you're watching theCUBE, like I said we're at Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018 brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Thirsty Bear at Salesforce Dreamforce, 170,000 people, we're in a small side of it put on by Conga, it's called Conga Connect West, think they had 3000 people last year. if you can see behind us the Thirsty Bear is packed to the gills, they're here for three days with free food, free drink, theCUBE and some entertainment. But as you know, we like to get the smartest people we can, get the knowledge from them and we're really excited to have a super smart person from 451, she's Sheryl Kingstone, the VP of Research for Customer Experience and Commerce at 451 Sheryl, great to see you. >> Nice to see you, too and thanks for inviting me. >> Oh absolutely, so you've been coming to this thing you said for a number of years. Every time I come to Dreamforce, it's like oh my goodness, how can it get any bigger? >> So, I can think back to the year 2000 when I did roadshows with Salesforce and we couldn't even get 40 people in the room. >> Oh my goodness. >> And now we have what, 170,000? >> That was kind of the dark, the dark and... >> That was when we were convincing people >> The dark days. >> That SaaS was the way to go and everyone was like wait, what? >> Right. >> Saas? >> When ASP was not Average Selling Price >> Oh god. >> But Application Service Provider. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Very good. So let's jump into it. So now it's 2018, time flies. Digital transformation is all the rage and I know you do a lot of work on digital transformation. So where do people get started, what is digital transformation? >> Yeah, yeah >> So how do you help people kind of, you know, I got to do it, the boss wants me to do it, my competitors are doing it. >> Yeah >> Where do they go? >> And here's the thing, you could say digital transformation has been pretty much evolving for two decades, it really is leveraging software. But what's really changed is digital transformation is more than just an IT strategy, right? So digital transformation is a business strategy. It's a culture, it's understanding how to leverage these new, more modern technologies so that we're reducing customer friction points, or empowering employees, or helping our partners sell more. So it's really more of an overarching strategy instead of independent, I'm going to go out and get software A versus software B. >> Right, and there's so many components of it, in not only the technology piece, but as we always see at shows, also the people and the process. The technology by itself is just another tool. >> Yeah, and we've been also talking in decades about people, process and technology, and one of the things I've said for a long time is what's missing in that, is the overlying or underlying data element of it. And that's another thing that's changed, is what are we doing to harness the power of the data that we get through these digital transformation processes that were undertaken? >> Right. >> And data's absolutely critical. >> But data by itself's just data, right? And to turn it in for information you got to have context. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right data to the right person at the right time make the right decision. >> Yeah, but I've said all along, it's not about he who holds the right data, most data, it's really who has the right data. >> Right. >> So absolutely. >> Right. So as you look at some of the significant kind of glacial shifts in terms of infrastructure, in terms of CPU, in speed of CPUs compared again to 2000, you know, compared to the data that we have, the storage economics, and obviously Cloud. Now, finally, it seems like we're getting to the tipping point, where you've got enough horsepower, you've got enough storage, you Compute, and networking that you can start to implement some of these things that were just a pipe dream when you couldn't get 40 people, >> Yeah, well, >> In a room. >> So Compute has definitely changed and it's one of the things that's changed with respect to machine learning. The storage, because if you really think about intelligence, it's all about making sure you have all of that data. So yes, absolutely, that's changed. But one of the things that we really have to understand, and at 451 we just launched a lot of research around Foresight, right, and it's so about, hindsight is 20/20 and Foresight is 451, right? So it is all about looking more forward. >> Right, right. >> And one of the things that we talk about is just that. What are we doing with invisible infrastructure? Because no one really cares about what the infrastructure it is today, it's what's the intelligence that's coming out of it? So our four themes are around invisible infrastructure, pervasive intelligence, contextual experiences and then the ability to deal with the risk. So those four themes come together to create Foresight, and we actually launched that this week at our own conference, HCTS. >> I used to joke, we used to operate on a sample of historic data, right? Take a little bit of something that already happened. As opposed to now, you actually have the opportunity to get all the data and you have the opportunity to get it in real-time and have that feed your decision making processes. >> Well, what's really changed is we're no longer working from just operational data, we're bringing a lot more of that behavioral data that has to be streamed in real-time, and that's the architectural changes that have shift. >> Right. >> And the other thing you have to do with the infrastructure changes, if you're really making a decision, you have to make that decision on the edge. (announcements in background) >> So I think Marc Benioff is going to start speaking. >> Yeah, that's what we're going to have to adjust, to cut this off. >> So Sheryl, it's great to catch up and we'll see you next time. >> Not a problem, thank you. >> Marc Benioff's coming on. Thanks for watching theCube. (announcements in background) (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube covering Conga, Connect West 2018 Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick with the Cube, we're at Salesforce Dreamforce in downtown, San Francisco, 170,000 people. As I said before please take public transit, take a scooter, take a bird, but do not get on the roads. We're excited to be here. We have our first guest from Salesforce. We're so excited. It's Greg Gsell, he's the VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce CPQ and billing. Greg, great to see you. >> Really happy to be here. >> Along with him is Ken Cavallon the EDP of Conga. Great to see you. >> Nice to meet you as well, thanks for having us here. >> Oh, for sure. So first off, Greg, you've been with, said almost your 13th anniversary with Salesforce. >> That's correct, my 13th, been with the company for 12 years. First band I saw was Train and there was about 5000 people at the conference. >> I was going to say, I want to get your perspective. There was 5000 people at the conference. >> Yeah, maybe a little bit more than that, but it was right around there, so it was much smaller. We only had one of the Moscone buildings. We were still growing as fast as we could back then. >> Did they bring this cruise ship in this year? I can't remember. I remember Lynn Vojvodich brought the cruise ship in a couple of years ago for a room. >> The dream boat has not come back. It made one appearance and I have not been back for the conference yet. >> Okay, so a lot of stuff going on, obviously you guys work very close together, but today some big product announcements, over the last couple of days, what if you can kind of run through those for us? >> Yeah, it's been super exciting. So we've been working with Conga for a long time. They've been a great Salesforce partner since 2006, I think. Now we just announced a brand new product Conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ and Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing, which is a purpose filled application that allows our CPQ and billing customers to build pixel perfect quotes using Conga right inside a Salesforce CPQ. It's a great product announcement. >> So you've integrated the Conga functionality into the Salesforce application around that specific >> Exactly right. >> Application. >> Exactly right. >> So why did you go that way? Why didn't you just build it yourself? >> We do configure pricing quotes, you're generating a quote and a quote's not good unless it gets signed by a customer. So generating the documents is such an integral part of that process. Conga's one of the leaders so we decided to make this partnership to bring it all together. >> That's great. So Ken, you got to be pretty excited. You got to like that, huh? >> I'm extremely excited about this opportunity, I've been working with Salesforce for the last ten years, in many other capacities as a partner on the outside looking in. This has been an amazing experience, having Salesforce bring a partner to the inside saying help us solve these customers' problems. I mean Salesforce is all about customer success and helping customers be more successful. It was phenomenal to see an ecosystem owner like Salesforce realize that they could use a partner to actually drive more success for their customers. As the leader in document generation, on the Salesforce platform, we help make those pixel perfect format-friendly documents out of the customer's data in Salesforce applying their rules and their templates to their format, the way they want it. The CPQ team, the CPQ and billing team came to us and said as the best in doc gen we want you guys to produce the quotes that come out of our quoting system. The Salesforce CPQ system is amazing. We're also a customer. We use the technology, not just the Salesforce platform, but Salesforce CPQ as well. We know what it's like to actually need to satisfy a customer in getting that sale through the funnel faster. Being able to tie these two technologies together and allow the Salesforce themselves to take this to the customer, they now have one point of contact where they can get all of CPQ in the way they want it. >> It's really interesting as people think about the generation, kind of the mechanics of working through the configuration and all the options, that's a really simple thing to generate a document that somebody can actually sign. Pretty important step that a lot of people don't tie the whole bow back together. >> That's right, that's right. >> So now we've got the best of breed in both solutions coming together and being able to take to market by the Salesforce team. I actually am not really familiar with another opportunity where there's been a partner that can actually support Salesforce in that way. Generally Salesforce takes Salesforce products to market and then to have the us take to market on their price book and in their quotes to their customers is a great privilege. We treat it that way, working with Greg and his team on the product marketing side, with Dan and his team on the technology side, to build a new product on Lightning, as a Lightning component to take it to market. Great experience. >> So Greg, I'm just curious, that's a super development, you've been working on the CPQ and the billing for a while. What are some of the things on your road map, what are some of the priorities that you got as you look forward? >> Sure, on CPQ and billing we just launched billing about three weeks ago, so billing completes the last mile of the sales cycle, so it's where we've really been focused. Billing allows all of our customers to generate invoices to collect payment, to automate their renewals, it really transforms a new business model. Still enabling our customers to take advantage of the subscription based or recurring revenue based business model that we hear so much about in our consumer life. We're really bringing those business models into new companies and enabling them to launch new products. That's where our head's at, we've been really focused on billing, we're really excited to bring that to market here at Dreamforce. >> So I wonder if you can unpack some of the complexity around subscriptions and some of these new kind of business relationships between vendors and customers. Because it's not just the I buy it, get an invoice, and we can finish the transaction, but there's all these new variances. The subscription thing is huge and a growing piece of the economy. >> Subscriptions are nothing new, right, newspaper subscriptions have been around for hundreds of years. So it's not a new concept, but taking that and applying it in a B to B setting is actually is really new because it gets really complex. The devil is in the details here. A traditional back end systems, your ERP, were built to quote a widget, sell a widget, and bill for a widget, then you collect your money and you move on. It's not that recurring relationship. With billing, it was subscription based products and recurring relationships, now midway through that contract, you could upgrade, you could swap out a product, you could renew early. There's so many different variations that you could do and you actually have to go in and amend that contract. In the past, all of our customers had their contract, it's a piece of paper with an actual signature on it, long before Conga Sign, that sat in someone's folder, in a drawer in the basement. It's very, very difficult to actually go back in and amend that contract in your ERP system. So we see lots of challenges with scale, manual processes, manually updating data, that physically prevented companies from moving into this subscription model. But now with Salesforce billing, bill right on the Salesforce platform, we are able to unlock that, enable all these new dramatic changes. >> Then we talked earlier, Ken, with some other people from Conga about the contract management piece of that too that's got to dovetail in with the billing and everything else because the T's and C's depending on what you buy, how much you buy, and when you buy could be very, very different, right? >> It can govern the next sell. As Greg was talking about transforming that configure pricing quote process to modernize business, to allow for these new business models, Conga wraps around Salesforce CPQ and billing to help digially transform the sales business process. Better presentations, built out of data that are customized to a specific customer engagement, better proposals that can lead to the quoting process so that you can make sure that the customer really knows what they're buying and then is able to get a quote. Better set of reports that come afterwards to show that consumption and visualize for the customer and help them understand what to buy next. Then Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing generates that actual invoice document for them. This entire sales business process digitally transformation journey, a lot of customers are in that journey today and they just really don't know how to do it and they can unlock the power of Salesforce and all that technology they've got with the custom master records so they can move that throughout the entire sales process. That's what Conga's here to do and we're here to do in partnership with Salesforce CPQ and billing. >> Just curious, how much of the push to these types of development to the application are driven by the customer request like hey, we want to do some of these new things, can you please put it in, or is it more, hey, now you have this, classic chicken and egg, now you can start to explore some of these transformative ways of doing business? What do you kind of see in the field, is it more of we want it, or here you have it, now we can do it? >> Different customers are at different points in their journey in that digital transformation. This is the fourth industrial revolution where we're going from where we were in the past of that transactional business where it starts and stops and you have to restart it again to a constant flow of business that they have with their customers. Depending upon where they are in that journey, depends on whether or not they're pulling us along, saying I've got to innovate further, or we have to go explore with them what's possible, the art of possible. I have to give Marc and the Salesforce team a lot of credit. Salesforce over the last 20 years has done such an amazing job at helping business figure out how to unlock that potential that they've got, and this platform has allowed Conga to thrive. Conga was born on the AppExchange a little more than 10 years ago, we've grown with the AppExchange ever since and as you can see from this great event we've got going on here today, we're able to solve a lot of customers' problems. To answer your question directly, it's where they are in that journey depends on whether or not they need a little push, or they're going to pull us. >> Right, so Greg, a little shifting gears. I'm just curious from a product marketing, product development point of view, when you operate with such a robust ecosystem and you're making decisions as to what do we buy, what do we partner, what do we integrate, of the 100,000 plus whatever people here, a whole lot of them are partners. It's a super robust ecosystem, so as you look at that, how do you prioritize or you kind of looking for partners for new things or you looking for them to fill holes, how do you fit that portfolio into what you're trying to build natively in the product? >> Sure I mean it always just comes back to customer success. We listen to our customers and we see what is available out there and we look to partners like Conga and the rest of the three, four thousand plus applications, I think on the AppExchange to make sure that we're filling all of our customers' needs. It's always about what is going to help our customers be the most successful in the fourth industrial revolution like Ken was saying. >> Ken, Greg, congrats on the announcement, on the integration. I'm sure it will have tremendous success for both of you. >> Thank you very much. >> He's Ken, he's Greg, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Conga Connect West at Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, come on down, free food, free drink, and free I think entertainment. Thanks for watching.

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

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

>> From San Francisco, it's The Cube Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are at Salesforce Dreamforce, they say a hundred and seventy thousand people have descended into downtown San Francisco, it's absolutely bananas. We found a little respite, a little oasis if you will. Couple doors down to the Thirsty Bear's, the Conga Connect West event, come on down they've rented out The Thirsty Bear for three days of, I just was told, free food, free drink and a lot of entertainment, also a lot of great Conga people as well, and The Cube's here, so come on by. We're excited to have, for our next segment, people that are really getting close to the customer because at the end of the day, it's really about the customer. So we've got Natasha Reid, she is the senior product management for Conga, good to see you. And also Justin Mongroo, the VP of sales excellence from Conga, also great to see you. >> Thanks. Before we get in I got to ask you, Justin, that is a great title, VP of sales excellence. I mean there really, it says something about what you think is important which is being good at selling, not a used car sales approach at all. How did you come up with that title and what does that personify for your team? >> Yeah, well I didn't come up the title but I think for us, Conga, what it means, sales excellence is about selling with integrity, our product provides real benefits to customers and so unlike a lot of products where they can't talk about the full set, sales excellence to us is being able really let the product shine and identify how it's going to help the businesses we work with. >> Right, and Natasha that's what I hear you spend a lot of your time with customers on. You know, you're product management, but you're using a lot of customer input to drive what you prioritize how you're kind of setting out your road map, what you're working on. >> Yes, absolutely. So, from a customer perspective, we really pride ourselves on customer interviews. There's really nothing that helps you understand what customers are doing and using with your products than watching them firsthand in their own environment, and it really just provides invaluable feedback to help drive where we take our products in the future. >> It's funny, we did the Intuit Quickbooks Connect show a couple years ago, we had Scott Cook on, and he used to talk about it at Intuit, they would just go, like you said, and sit and watch people engage with the application, not even surveys but actually see how users use it and it's interesting even if you watch someone else just use Excel, we all use it in a very different way, so that must be incredibly valuable feedback. >> Yes, I mean you really see the good parts of the application, you see the parts that maybe need improvement as well, but it's feedback that you really can't gather in any way except watching somebody. >> Right, I think it also is the philosophy that's very very different than kind of looking at the competitors all the time, if you listen to Andy Jassy or Jeff Bezos at Amazon who are just kicking tail and taking names, they're maniacally focused on what the customer wants. They don't really look at the competition, they don't really talk about the competition, they're always looking at that customer. What do they need, what do they need next, and you guys continuing to evolve your product line to kind of continue to go down that path. >> Well, and the reality is is the customer defines the product in a lot of cases, right? What better way to understand your market than to talk to the people who are already working with you and finding out what they want to buy next? >> Right, right. So you guys have some exciting announcements here at Salesforce this year, Salesforce is now integrating some of the Conga functionality inside of some of their core applications if you could give us a little bit more color on that. >> Sure, so we just launched Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing, and Conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ. So, these two products are taking the power of the flagship document generation product Conga Composer, and we're leveraging that functionality for very purpose-specific built document generation with Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce billing. >> That's pretty awesome. >> Yes, that is pretty awesome. >> So why did pick you guys? What were some of the feature sets, or working with Conga that helped Salesforce come to this decision? >> Sure, so Conga Composer, well known for best in class document generation, pixel perfect documents, so when you need to get your formatting just right, when you need very sharp, clean lines, et cetera, leveraging things like the ability to provide more information or merge more product line items into your documents, as well as supporting the formats that people want, things like Word and PDF. >> Yeah, and I would say in addition to the functionality, Salesforce also is able to trust just by seeing our customer experience through our net promoter score and our reviews online knowing that they could partner with us and that we would take care of our joint customers they way they want them to be. >> That's a pretty significant move by them to adopt your guys' technology as part of the core within some of their offerings >> It is, it's not something that Salesforce does often, so we're very proud and we're very grateful that they looked to us to help provide these solutions. I think another component of this is just ease of use. So very easy to install, Lightning-ready, very forward thinking in that capacity. >> Yeah, the Lightning thing is interesting, you get used to the old, "Who moved my cheese?" I was the old school front end on Salesforce and they finally made me jump over to Lightning, but I'm sure that opened up all types of new opportunities for you to deliver new functionality in that. >> It does, and I'll empathize with that sentiment. I think change is always hard, right? People always struggle a little bit when they're used to doing something one way and Lightning is a very different look and feel from Salesforce Classic. I will say though that once you move to Lightning, Salesforce has done a really great job of, Lightning is more than just a CRM, It helps you do your job better. It makes suggestions, they put a lot of work into UI, user interface and user experience, you don't have to think about how to do your job better, it actually just helps you do your job better. >> Right. >> So being able to build and develop on the Lightning framework is actually a tremendous benefit. >> It has been, and in the last piece you guys are sitting on a bunch of different pieces in this document life cycle, if you will. You don't call it that, but you're into the contracts, you're into the document generation, you're into the life cycle management, so all these things too, I imagine now are coming together in a more kind of synchronized, cohesive way. >> Well I mean it's really if you think about the customer's story they need a generated document to communicate with their customers before they are a customer, and then they need to do a quote to show them how much it's going to cost, and they may or may not need to negotiate that and then they need to sign it, and every business has this sort of interaction with their customers, from, "Here's what we do." to "Do you like it "enough to buy it from us?" To, "Here's how we make it legally binding". I mean that's business, and Conga has met our customers along every stage of that journey that they go through in making a customer a customer, and doing that in a visually stimulating, professional way. >> So, fun fact about Conga Sign, our e-signature product we launched in February of this year. E-signature was the #1 feature request, or problem to solve that the conga customer base has provided in the last couple of years. So, everybody wanted e-signature. We listened, we heard, and we built you e-signature. >> So how long did it take you to get it out, from the time you decided, okay we'll go ahead? >> Well, as the original product manager I can actually answer that very specifically. So, we started building in July of last year and we launched on February thirteenth of this year. >> So, less than a year? >> Yes. >> Definitely less than a year. >> Okay, great. And just final thoughts on this event? Dreamforce, obviously a huge event for you guys, big investment in this Thirsty Bear celebration at Connect West. What do you hope to get out of this week, what are you excited to see from both the Salesforce folks across the street, as well as this kind of gathering with all your customers? >> You know, for me I hope to learn. I want to learn what our customers are interested in, I want to learn what our reps are seeing in the market as they walk around, and what other businesses are doing, and then learn from the ecosystem and what tools are available that we can use ourselves to better help our customer which is our employees. >> My favorite part of Dreamforce is actually the Conga booth at the Moscone main hall. So we actually get lots of our customers who come to find us, who come to find specific people. They'll come and ask for, "Hey, this support person "helped us", and they'll actually identify that person by name, or "Hey, this professional "service person helped us, can I meet them? "Are they here?" And it's just incredibly gratifying, like it's very difficult to describe. You have literally hundreds of people coming to find you to just say, "Thank you, we love your products, "it makes my life so much easier, "what else are you guys doing?" >> That's great, and it's always so gratifying to know that there's always someone on the other side that appreciates the work and it's always fun when you get some kind of an electronic relationship, to cement that with a face and a voice and a name and a handshake. Well, thanks again for stopping by and congratulations on the big announcement. >> [Natasha And Justin] Thank you. >> Alright, he's Justin, she's Natasha, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. We're here at Conga Connect West at Salesforce at Thirsty bear, see you next time.

(exciting electronic music) >> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Thirsty Bear. We're at Dreamforce. I can't get an official number, I keep asking, but the number they're throwing around is 170,000 people, so if you're coming, do not bring your car. It will take you four days to get here from AT&T and I think the Giants have a home game today, too, which just makes things even more interesting. But we're at a special side event, it's the Conga Connect West event here at the Thirsty Bear, three doors down from Moscone South, so we're excited to be here. It's our first time at Salesforce, and to kick things off, we've got Bob DeSantis, the chief operating officer of Conga, and with him, Jason Gabbard, the head of AI strategy. So gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Good morning, great to be here with you. >> So what a cool event. You guys have this thing rented out for three days. >> Yep. You've got entertainment, you've got the silent disco. I think tomorrow night, some crazy bands. >> Yeah, we've got an open bar, food going all day and all night, actually we did this last year, and we were so crowded that this year we rented the parking lot behind and we built two circus tents so we actually extend all the way out to the next block. We have multiple sponsors here helping us to bring their customers and their partners in. So, open bar, open food, meeting rooms, demo stations, a place to come and relax and kick back a little bit from the chaos of those 170,000 people just a block away. >> It's just crazy, so come on down and meet the Conga crew and all the people, you have a good time. Let's jump into it. The topic at hand is AI. We are all the buzz about AI, AI, AI, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and what we hear time and time again is no one, I just need to go buy some AI. Really that's not the way the implementation is going to work, but where we see it in a great example I like to use a lot that people are familiar with is Gmail, those little tiny automated responses back to that email, there's actually a ton of AI behind those setting context and voice, and this that and the other. How are you guys leveraging AI in your solutions? You've been at this for a while. AI represents a great new opportunity. >> Yeah, it really is, Jason do you want to? >> Yeah, sure, you may not be aware, but Conga has actually been developing AI inside of the contract management system for a few years now, and I came over to Conga in connection with the acquisition of a company I founded focused on AI, and so obviously, things are getting a lot more interesting, technology is getting a lot more robust. You know, I think you made a great analogy to Gmail. Inside of the Conga CLM, Conga Contracts, you'll actually see that we're starting to make suggestions around contracts, so you may load a document in and you might see a popup over in the margin that says, "Hey, is this a limitation of liability clause?" So that's one example of AI working in the background of CLM. >> Well, I was going to say, what are some of the things you look for? I had a friend years ago, he had a contract management company, and I was like, "How?" And this was before OCR, and it was not good. "How? How are you doing this?" He goes, "No, if we just tell them where's the document and when does it expire, huge value there." He sold the company, he made a ton of money. But obviously, time has moved along. A lot of different opportunities now, so what are some of the things you do in contract lifecycle management? >> Think of that example as phase one of contract lifecycle management. Just get all my contracts into a common repository, give me some key metadata, like what's the value, who are the counterparties, and what's the expiration date? That's huge. So, ten years ago, 15 years ago, that was the cutting edge of CLM, contract lifecycle management, now the evolution has continued, we're in what we think of as sort of the third phase of CLM. So now, how do we actually pull actionable data out of contracts? So having the contract, you mentioned OCR, having machine readable data in a repository is great, but what's actually in the contract? What did we negotiate six months ago that now could have an impact on our business if we knew it? If we could act on it? And so with Conga AI, and the machine learning technology that Jason's company developed, and that we've now embedded in our CLM products, we can unlock the data that's hidden in documents, and make it actionable for our customers. >> So one of the things that you used to trigger that action, because the other thing about contracts we always think about, right, is you negotiate them, it's a pain in the butt, you sign them, then you put them in the file cabinet, nobody thinks about it again. So in terms of making that more of a living document beyond it's just simply time to renew, what are some of the things that you look for using the AI? Are you flagging bad things, are you looking for good things, are you seeing deltas? What are you looking for? >> I'll give you a really concrete example. We recently had a customer that negotiated a payment term to their benefit with one of their suppliers, but that payment term was embedded in the document, and their payables team was paying on net 30 when their negotiators had negotiated net 90. That data was locked in the contract. With Conga AI, we can pull that data out, update the system of record, in that case, it would have been SAP, and now the payables team can take advantage of those hard fought wins in that contract negotiation. That's just one example. >> Yeah, so two obvious use cases we're seeing day in and day out right now, number one, I'll call an on ramp to the CLM, so that's likely a new customer or relatively new customer at Conga that says, "Hey, I have 50,000 contracts." I was on the phone this morning with this precise use case. "I have 50,000 contracts, really happy to be part of the Conga family, get my CLM up and running, but now I got to get those 50,000 contracts into the system, so how do we do that?" Well, there's one way to do that, get a bunch of people together and work for a couple years and we'll have it done. The other way is to use AI to accelerate some of that. Classic misconception is that the AI is going to do all of the work, that's just not the case. At Conga, we tend to take more of a human computer symbiosis sort of working side by side, and the AI can really do the first pass. You might be able to automate something like 75% of the fields, so you can take your reduced team of people then and get the rest of the information into the system and verified, but we may be able to cut that down from a couple years to 30, 60 days, something like that, so that's one obvious use case for the technology, and then I think the second is more of a stare and compare exercise. Historically, you would see companies come in and say, "If I'm going to sign an NDA, it's got to have the following ten features, and I'll never accept x, y, and z." So we can sort of key to that with our AI, and take the first pass of a document and really do the triage, and so again, while it may not be 100%, we'll get to 80-90% and say, "Here are the three or four areas where you need to let your knowledge workers focus." >> And are there some really discrete data points that you call out in a defined field for every single contract because there always are payment terms, I imagine, obviously dates and signatures, so some of those things that are pretty consistent across the board versus, I would imagine, all of the crazy, esoteric-y stuff, which is probably their corner cases that people focus too much on relative to the value that you can get across that entire pop, 50,000 contracts is a lot of contracts. >> I don't know what your view is, but for me, I think it's follow the money. Everyone always cares about dollars, when I'm getting my dollars, and the other is follow very high risk stuff. Like indemnities, limitations and liability, occasionally you're seeing people interested in change in control, what happens if I sell my company or take on a bunch of financing, does that trigger anything? >> What's interesting about contracts is there are hundreds if not thousands of different potential clauses that could live in a contract, but in general, sort of the 90-10 rule is that there's about 40 clauses that you find in most commercial agreements, most business to business, or even business to consumer commercial agreements, so with Conga Machine Learning, we train based on the sort of use cases that extend that for a specific domain. So for example, we've done a lot of work in commercial real estate, right? So those commercial real estate agreements have that core base, but then they have unique attributes that are unique to commercial real estate, so Conga Machine Learning, as part of the Conga AI suite, can be trained to learn so that we can reduce that cycle time. You know, when we go into our tenth commercial real estate use case, it's going to be a lot more efficient, a lot faster, and a lot higher initial hit than we start training it at the beginning. For us, it's about helping customers consume the documents that make sense for their business. And machine learning is intuitively about learning, so there is this process that has to take place, but it's amazing how quickly it can learn. You use the google example, I like to think of the Amazon.com suggestion service example. They literally know what I'm going to buy before I'm going to buy it. >> Right, right. >> That didn't just happen yesterday, they've been learning that from me for the last 20 years or 15 years. We're at sort of the beginning of that phase right now in terms of B to B CLM, but it's amazing how quickly it's moving, and how quickly it's having an impact on our customers businesses. >> Yeah, I was going to ask, so where are we on the lifecycle of the opportunity of using AI in these contracts beyond just the signature date and the renewal date for some of these things? And also I would imagine, you guys can tie some of that back into your document creation process >> That's right. >> So that you again remove a lot of anomalies, and get more of a standardized process >> Yeah, so Conga provides a full digital document transformation suite, and that includes, as you mentioned, document generation capabilities, contract management, Conga AI >> Signature, the whole thing, right? >> Conga sign. So we're not here yet, but imagine if through Conga AI, we're able to learn what type of clause structure actually has a higher close rate, or a faster cycle time, or a higher dollar value for a given book of business, so customer x is selling their products to consumers or other businesses, and if we can learn, we can, how their contracts streamline and improve their effectiveness, then we can feed that right back into the creation side of their business. So that's just over the horizon. >> And then the other thing, I would imagine, is that you can get the best practices both inter-department, inter-company, and then I don't know where the legal limits are in terms of using it anonymized and the best practice data to publish benchmarks and stuff, which we're seeing more and more because people want to know the benefits of using so many of these things. You know, what's next? And then do you see triggers? Will some day it will be a trigger mechanism or is it really more a kind of an audit and adjust going forward? >> From my perspective, I think the some day is more, we're extremely focused on the analytics and the kind of discovery of documents right now, but I think looking out over the one year horizon, it's less about triggers and more about more touchpoints in the work close, and so really optimizing the contracting process, so being able to walk into a company and say, "Hey, I know you would like for this to be in all your contracts, but as a matter of practice, it's not, so maybe we need to abandon that policy, and get to a signed document faster. So more of that type of exercise with AI, and also integrating with sibling systems and testing what you expected to happen in the document versus what actually happened. That may be vis-à-vis an integration with ERP or something like that. >> It's pretty amazing, because as we know, the stuff learns fast. >> It does. >> From watching that happen with the chess and the go and everything else, and you read some of the books about exponential curves, you'll get down that path probably faster than we think. >> Yes. >> Well, Bob, Jason, thanks for taking a few minutes, and again thanks for inviting us to this cool event, and everybody come on down, there's lots of free food and drinks. >> Come down to the Thirsty Bear. >> Thanks so much. >> Alright, he's Bob, he's Jason, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West event at Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, come on down and see us. Thanks for watching. (energetic electronic music)