>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the CUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona, Spain, this is the CUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host Stuart Miniman, Analyst at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Shaun Coulson, who's the Vice President of Storage for IBM Europe. He is the one on the ground, leading the team for IBM and the Cisco relationship. Driving the storage, which is driving the cloud, and servers and everything else. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, and welcome to Barcelona. >> Thank you very much, great to have you. Want to get, you're close to the front lines, driving all the business for IBM storage. Congratulations, you had a great year. How's business going in Europe, what's the scene like here? Give a little color, and what's goin' on in Europe. >> Okay, yeah. 2017 was a bumpy year for IBM storage, across the board, across all, both our software and our hardware portfolios, but also our go-to-market with our partners as well, and Cisco's clearly one of those partners. We're in the setup mode for 2018. My worldwide boss would probably say, "We're already setup, Shaun, and you're behind, because it's nearly the end of January." So, it's a vibrant time. Ginni Rometty, mentioned storage specifically in her Address the Nation and the 2017 results and that's partly down to the work that we did in Europe. So, I'm pretty proud of where we're at right now and what we've done. >> Wow, good re-tooling of the product over the years, and now, sales are up, what's the driver of the business right now? We here Cloud, we here On-Premises, Private Cloud, True Private Cloud, as we keep on reports. Certainly Hybrid is there, what's the key customer success driver that you guys are having? >> I think the key success is really, you're correct, everybody's talking about Cloud. Mainly, the main driver in my view, is how do they prepare for Cloud? And that's a Hybrid solution, and, with that, you've also then got the On-Prem. The refresh, the technology Transform and Modernize, is a massive program for us and our customers right now. I was in the Nordics, just before Christmas, and I went to one of the big financial institutions, and they have a Cisco/IMB VersaStack solution there, and I said to them, what was they main reason you chose that, and why did you go with IBM, 'cause, they weren't an IBM customer before, so it was a big win-back account for us. And he was about reduction of risk, reduction of cost, and allowing me to transfer some of my operational skills to new work-loads and prepare myself for the cloud. And I think that message has been driven pretty hard by all our customer sales. >> The refresh is interesting, I didn't look at that angle, but, you can see the Digital Transformation story that we've been talking on the Cube for multiple years, playing out because people now see no perimeter with their networks, they're seeing real-time demands from applications. Now IOT. They had to modernize, right, I mean, this is the era of (laughs) not just PO's slappin' down storage, back-room, stack em' rack 'em, it's a new storage paradigm. >> I don't think I've ever been in the era where I sat by the fax machine and the orders come in, but, maybe one day >> What's a fax machine, what's a fax machine again? >> maybe one day (laughing) >> Ask a millennial, they don't even know how to use a fax machine. >> So coming back to this discussion in the Nordics, they really talked about the technology of Flash, the UCS server stacking and the network from Cisco how did that allow them to move some of their resource, reduce on their cost, and it was all around, every month they do net software patches from Microsoft. They used to have a team of 8 people that would take up to 5 working days, fully, to transform that. That, with the introduction of the system the UCS and the Flash, has gone from a 8 team to 2 team and it's done in 2 days. That's a massive reduction in cost but at the same time allowing them to move to that net-new. >> Shaun, bring us in to customers a little bit, 'cause, we've been tracking Converge since that wave started, a lot of it was just organizationally getting set because, I have a server refresh, I have the storage refresh, how do I get budgets, who owns it, but it's that simplicity that you mention, which is you know, we know if I can put it all together, you're talking the networking team. The networking team often doesn't update their code. They put it in, saying like, okay, it's all working, don't breathe on it, but when I go to Converge, really, it makes it easier for me to refresh, with security top of mind for almost every customer that I talk to, they need to stay more up-to-date and they need to, what we have said at Wikibon is, you need to be able to shift to platforms and partners to be able to take some of that burden off, I can't have 6 months of testing every time I need to roll something out, so, where are the customers in Europe, how are they doing along that journey, organizational dynamics you can share. >> I go to a Entertainment customer in the UK. They've taken, they integrated Stack and their deployment of systems out into the field has reduced by 90%. That is a real benefit, and then, we come back to that, how do you maintain, how do you drive, there's one single point, you can drive it through. It's done, it's moved on and I think there is a huge opportunity of customers starting to look at that simplicity because, that's the transformation that's the, I think for a long time this industry has, and the storage business has tried to make things complex. Because that's part of the art of where we've looked to sell, you know, "It's hard, it's not easy guys, therefore, you need us" and I think there's a massive switch away to that simplified model. >> How do customers think of their data center in the context of Cloud in the industry there's been all this argument, what is Private Cloud? Virtualization? I talk to most customers, they have a cloud strategy and their doing Saas, their doing some Public Cloud, they think about their own data center, they don't get caught over the terms, but, I'm curious how they define it, how they do it do they have initiatives on codifying what they do? >> I think any large customer or small customer would be crazy not to have a cloud strategy some way, shape, or form and I think that has been going on for the last 2 to 3 years with all our major customers. Some are further down the track where everything is going to be Cloud on all their systems, especially the newer, more agile customers but there's also a lot of customers that, for security reasons, financial regulation reasons, are never going to be that far down the track on Cloud, so, I think it's a mixed bag. I think, while their is that transformation and that journey, there's opportunity for everybody and I think that's the bit that we see, where we have the skill set to help our customers going forward. >> I'm curious, usually when I come talk to a European audience, the governance is, a major sticking point has been one of the headwinds against moving to public cloud, we see the big public cloud players putting data centers in every country that they can, but is it still kind of challenge today? >> I think there will always be that concern from the regulatory authorities. And I think if you take the first uptake in Europe of what customers that really moved to the cloud. Then I would say it was the more commercial, mid-size customers that saw the attraction, especially the ability to have the variable cost rate that they can associate with the cloud. But, I think there are also parts of the larger government organizations that are now looking at what applications what workloads they can actually put on the cloud, where there is no regulatory governance to be followed. So, I think it's a bit of both. >> Shaun, talk about the European differences by country, because we've been covering the GDPR pretty hard, that deadline's coming up, that's going to have an impact on storage, obviously, and then also, networking, IP addresses can determine which country you're from, 'cause now each country will have their own little nuances. What is the impact to your job and as you execute your mission what does it mean for the customer? Because, a lot of people don't just live in one country, or work in one country. They span multiple regions. >> And you think of it, most international customers have offices in probably 20 or 30 of the countries that we cover in Europe. I think you can have a view from a technology point of view that some people will be early adopters and some people will be slower adopters. And what you can do, and what is very prevalent in the European marketplace is taking those learning lessons from the early adopters, finessing them, and then driving them out to the other ones, so, I would say for example, the Nordics, again, are probably an early adopter of a lot of the new technologies. They're very happy to try and drive and yet, some of the more traditional ones will wait and see and then think it through a little bit more carefully. But that's the beauty of the nature of Europe. >> What's the big change that you've seen over the past couple years? Obviously, software's at the center of it. Any observations that you can share that's different in the market for buyers? >> I think from a technology point of view, the indoctrination of Flash and there I say the commoditization of Flash has been prolific over the last 18 months. From the price point that it initially started to where we are today has meant that it has become more and more accessible for a lot more of the customer sets that we work with. And especially when you look at performance price point, it starts to become a no-brainer. I'm not sure, when we look at some of the stats in 4th quarter, we actually sold more core Flash modules than we did revenue-wise on traditional SSDs. Which is a kind of indication of where we've gone with the price performance. >> Any trends and patterns that you've seen with buyers that you can, that you see happening, what's the big takeaway? >> I think the big takeaway is storage is alive and kicking. The cloud is formed on the use of data. The use of data means you got to have good storage systems to go and drive that. And I think that is a major theme that runs through all our customer sets. >> And that's trying the modernization, big time. >> Shaun, are there any verticals that you're finding that are leading the charge in some of this transformation of data, leveraging data more than others. >> I think a lot of the smaller organizations which have more agility, they're actually leading in terms of willing to put their first foot forward, but, I think what happens is, then, once that is proven, then the larger organizations come in and work it, so, you're always going to have the big Toco, media companies that are always at forefront of technology. You'll also have the financial organizations that are looking at, where Cloud's good, where's not, block change, GDPR that we talked about earlier, and I think that is traditionally IBM's strength in those kind of marketplaces. >> Shaun, thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate the commentary and insight to Europe, congratulations-- >> Thank you. >> on your sales. Shaun Coulson is the Vice President of IBM Europe Storage. This is the Cube breaking down the European show for Cisco Live 2018, Europe, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more after this short break.

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hi. >>And welcome to the Cube. Virtual in our coverage of aws reinvent 2020. We have a cube virtual, and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today, my guest is Shauna Wolverton, executive vice president of product at ZENDESK. And she's coming to us from Oakland, California. Shauna, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks so much for having me. It is >>It is lovely to be here. How's the weather over there? In Oakland, >>we just suddenly went from summer to winter, which, uh, after the weather we've had is no complaints. >>All right, Well, as as a resident of Melbourne, where we have four seasons in one day, I am very familiar with rapid weather changes. So, uh, hopefully it's not too cold for you, and you get a little bit of nicer weather just before you go fully into winter. Absolutely. Now Zendesk and Amazon have a pretty close relationship is my understanding, and we know that Amazon is famous for its customer center at attitude. Wonderful thing about customers, of course, is that they're never really happy with everything that we have. So zendesk fit in with that with that relationship with Amazon. And how is your approach to customer? >>Yeah. I mean, the relationship we have with them is I'm really excited. Really Have gone all in on our move to the cloud. There are sole provider on DWI run all of our services, um, on AWS. And in addition, we have some great partnerships with, uh, Jacob Amazon Connect, which allows us to provide great telephony and call center services to our customers. We have a great partnership around event bridge and a zwelling app connect. So I think there is a fantastic relationship that we have where we're able to deliver not just our basic services, but to really take advantage of a lot of the services that Amazon on AWS provide s so that we can sort of accelerate our own roadmap and deliver great new features to our customers. >>Now, a lot of people have gone through a pretty similar adoption of the cloud of the moment. Unfortunate reason for doing so. But it certainly has driven the adoption very, very quickly. Uh, zendesk, of course, as you say, has been has been doing this for quite some time. So what have you noticed that stayed the same eso from last year to this year? What were you already doing that you're now noticing? Everyone else's discovering. Actually, this is pretty good. >>Well, you know, I think you know the rumors of of the call center and and the telephone as a channel. Their demise are greatly exactly. I think, um, for us. Much as we're all excited about chat and messaging and all of the different ways that we can connect with our customers, there's something about having a phone number and allowing people to pick up the phone and talk to a human that refuses to go out of style. And so I think, um, you know, our partnership with, uh with Amazon connection has been hugely powerful and even, you know, recently when a lot of this sort of acceleration has picked up, we've seen, um, you know, we saw a customer who had a power failure kind of massive failure of their own phone system. Be able thio, come to us, get, get, connect up and running incredibly quickly and start taking thousands of calls a day and that kind of sort of quick time to value fast start ability for our customers. Just this hugely important. Um, now. But really, you know, that's always been true, right? >>Yeah. I mean, when people want to call you and they want to talk to you, then they're not really happy If they can't get through that and particularly right now, being able to make that human human connection for me, I know that that that's been a really important part of getting through this. I work remotely most of the time. So actually, speaking to humans as we're doing now is is really refreshing change from just seeing everything on on a text screen. Um, so yeah, so it's It's interesting that the phone has actually has been so resilient, even though we were here from Ah, lot of young people say, Oh, we never answer the phone when someone calls, uh, but a lot of people are actually calling into businesses when they wanna make contact or when they when they don't see things on the website. So >>how does >>zendesk help, too, to integrate with what people are doing in their online and digital channels through to what they're doing with phone system. >>Yeah, but I think fundamentally people want their questions answered. One of my favorite studies that we did was around our benchmark study and we talked to Millennials. They said the first place they go to get help to their phone, but when you push it a little deeper, it was clear that they actually didn't know that the phone was for making phone calls. It was just all of the other help centers like like the first way that a lot of people today are looking for. Answers is, you know I wanna google it. And for that you need a really great help center has all that information out there and then you want toe have, you know, communities where people can talk to each other and get help. And then, you know, Mawr and Mawr. We're seeing the rise of messaging as a channel, both through the social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger Aziz Well, Azaz native messaging kind of ongoing conversations. He you ordered your dinner. It hasn't arrived. It's so great to be able to go into those applications and just message to the business and figure out what's what's going on and get that sort of instantaneous response as well, >>right? And you shared some stats with this regarding how much has moved across to some of these things phone based messaging channels. So tickets coming in has risen about 50% on DCA, paired to some gains on on live chat. So people are really embracing the idea of being about a message, not just individual talking to your friends in the group chat, but actually using that to engage with with the companies that they would normally use websites or or phone. It's like text chat is a thing. >>Yeah, I mean, it was funny to me. You know, I think we're still, uh, in the U. S. Not quite as far along as a lot of our international friends. When I when traveling was a thing that we did, you know, I was always like it was cool to see that there were billboards and ads that had what that phone numbers on them is a really, you know, way that businesses were wanting to engage. I mean, you think about be wanting to be where your customers are today. So many of us, um do have you know what's happened? Wechat and line and vibrant. They're all in our pocket. And being able to provide all of those two businesses is a new way to engage. I think we're finding is hugely powerful, >>right? So with with all of these dynamic changes that have been happening, and it sounds like it's actually just sort of riding the wave of what customers were already doing, we're just doing it just that little bit mawr. But have you noticed any other larger changes? Possibly ones that aren't related thio a pandemic, Just general shifts that have been happening that you've seen in your customer base? >>Yeah. I mean, like I said, I think so much of what we're seeing is that people, uh, in general want answers quickly, and whether it's a phone call is great. And like I said, people are not going to stop calling. But I think people want to make sure less than like, I need a human to have a conversation I want. I want the answer quickly, and that's where we're really focused in both thinking about how we provide tools around automating some of getting those answers using, uh, a i N m l so that people can come to us, ask questions and we can get them the best answer very quickly without, um, having Thio engage a person. I think things idea of quick resolution is clearly becoming one of the most important things in customer sentiment. I think we know that, um, Mawr and Mawr. This idea of how quickly I can get my question's resolved or how easy it is for me to do business with you is a huge differentiator in how people make buying >>choices. Mm. On that. That automation has long been a new track tive idea. I mean, I'm I'm old enough to remember expert systems and and having a go at doing this kind of heavily automated way of resolving particularly common issues. And I mean, we were familiar with Coulson, a chat scripts. Where there's here are the top three issues and or it will be in the I V. R. Where it's like we're currently experiencing this particular problems, so that resolves your question quite quickly. But there's been a big rise in things like chatbots and and the use of AI. How far advanced. Is that because I still remember some of the early forays into that were a little bit flaky, and that could actually exacerbate the poor customer experience. I'm already having a problem, and and now you're chatbots getting in the way. Have they gotten a lot better? Are they Are they up to the challenge? >>Yeah. I mean, I think what's really critical when you're thinking about automation? Um, in the conversations you're having with customers, it's it's two things. One Don't try to hide that. That you're a computer. No, no, my name is Chad. I am. I am a human. Um, you're not in the vault. Yeah, there's not anyone. Um, so I think being really clear. And then, um e think surfacing how thio very easily opt out of those flows. I think, um, you know, automation is great, but it's not away. You shouldn't think of it as a way to frustrate your users to keep them tied up until you can get to them. It really is. Give them some quick options. And if they don't? If those don't solve their problems, really make sure that your you've got an escape valve, right? We were putting out a new sort of flow build their product zendesk. And we have all of the different, uh, words that someone could say that air like smashing the zero button. That means please transfer me to a person, right? You're driving me crazy. Let me connect you to an agent. Eso We're really making sure that it's easy, um, for customers to provide the solution where their customers can get the help they need rather than I >>really like that. That's That's something I think that gets a little bit lost in the focus on computers and and on automation is that the reason we do this is to help the humans. So when we have these AI systems, it's not actually to replace. The human interaction is to make it better. It's to make mean that we can then get to that genuine connection. Computers a fabulous and when they work, it's when they don't when they frustrate things that that bothers us. And that's generally why we're calling is that something has already gone wrong and we're a bit frustrated. So adding more frustration, doesn't it? Sounds like a good approach. It sounds like zendesk really got that? That dolled in very, very well. Is that something that you've you've always had? Is it something that you've refined over time? And can you teach it to a bunch of other companies? >>Way would love to teach each other. People know, I think e think we have always thought about how the machines can help the humans. And I think one it's how can they help the customers, of course. But the other side that I don't think people talk about quite a much is how can we use computers to help agents? Right. So you're talking to a person, and how can we take sort of the best answers that they've given Thio other customers and surface those, um, when When a new agent is coming on board, how do we suggest, um, you know, the different kinds of work flows that they might want to use to solve this problem in a more dynamic way. So I really like to think of the computers never as a replacement but really as a sort of hidden superpower, Um, that organizations have to make every agent one of their best >>agents, right? Yes, it is a kind of external cyborg thing. I mean, I can't remember anything these days. I constantly right less and they all live in computers. But they are. That's the kind of society that we live with today. And I think we should remember to embrace that side of things. That ah, lot of life has actually gotten a lot better through the use of these computing systems. It's not all terrible. It's, um, and I think more companies could probably learn from zendesk. And the approach that you've taken to center the humans, both the customers and and your internal staff, the call center and and the people who are providing this service. No one enjoys it when things are breaking and and things have gone wrong being able to resolve that quickly. Thanks a better experience for everybody. >>Yeah. I mean, I think we find over and over again sometimes you know, if you can handle an issue that's gone wrong, Um well, you can actually induce more loyalty than you know. If someone never contacted. You'd also if you could really take advantage of the times you have, unfortunately, maybe messed up on bake those customers happy. You really do you know, put so much in the sort of loyalty piggy bank for later. It's really great. >>So for some of the companies that have maybe struggled with this a little bit and particularly under very trying conditions, is there's some advice that you could give to them. Is there some places that they should should start to investigate this when they want to improve the way that they handle customer service, perhaps with things like Zendesk. >>Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what what we're focused on right now is the this channel that's coming. Like I said, we think a lot about social messaging, but also in native messaging. Andi, how you can have a sort of ongoing long term conversation for a long time customer service, sort of Holy Grail was chat, and you could have a agent online and a human online, and you could solve their problem and then move on right And and sometimes those things take a little longer to solve. Or, you know, you might have a big issue and a whole bunch of people who have an issue and maybe not enough agents to solve them. And so, with messaging. We've really changed the dynamic. So chat was this completely synchronous, Almost like a phone call. Kind of experience and more messaging. You're able to live in this sort of duality where we can have a conversation if we're both here. But just like with your friends, right? Sometimes you throw a message out to offend you. Put it in your pocket, you pick it up, and you could pick up the conversation right where you left off. So bring that paradigm into your customer support experience really allows you to take some of that fear out of handling the volume that might come from chat. To be able to sort of have these ongoing sort of back and forth conversations over time. Andi also and give that that persistent so that we're always both in the same place when we show up again together >>embracing what the technology does well and avoiding what it doesn't do. Well, that that sounds like a plan. >>Shawna, >>this has been fabulous. It is. It is always very edifying for me. Thio here, when companies are doing well and centering the humans to make the technology improve all of our lives. Um It has been wonderful to have you here on the Cube. >>Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun, right? >>And thank you for joining in and and watching us here of the Cube virtual and our special coverage off AWS reinvent 2020. Do come back and look for more coverage off. Reinvent 2020 right here on the Cube. Next time I've been your host, Justin Warren, and we'll see you again soon.