>>from around the globe, >>it's the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by >>IBM. Welcome back here on the cube, jOHn wall is your host with you as we continue our IBM think initiative. Been talking a lot about IBM s assistance in terms of what it's doing for its client base. We're gonna talk about partnerships today a little bit with Bill Patterson who is the VP and general manager of Crm applications at Salesforce, who has a really good partnership in great practice right now with IBM and Bill, thanks for the time to you looking forward to spending some time with you hear, >>thank you Jon. Thanks for having me today. >>You bet. Let's just jump right in first off, let's share with the viewers about your core responsibilities that sales for us. We're talking about Crm what your engagement is there, but if you would just kind of give us an idea of the kind of things that you're handling on a day to day basis, >>Well I am responsible for our crm applications here at Salesforce, which are our sales cloud technologies to help organizations get back to growth. Our service cloud technologies which are really helping organizations to take care of their customers through all moments of the digital lifecycle are small business solutions. So to help growing organizations thrive uh and our work dot common vaccine management solutions which are helping economies safely reopen through the crisis modes that we've all been living in. So broad range of responsibilities in my day to day is nothing like it was a year ago. >>I could only imagine, especially when you throw that last component in Covid, which hopefully will have some time to talk about just because they people are so are taken to the subject now and obviously it's impacting business on so many different levels. But let's talk first off about IBM and your partnership with them kind of the genesis of that, how that came about and maybe how you're working together, how are you integrated these days with IBM? >>Well you know one of the things that Salesforce that are key value as an organization is is to establish trust around the transformation of organizations across the world and when you think about brands that you can trust to drive transformation with IBM and Salesforce really stand apart. Uh so IBM is an incredible partner for us, on the technology side, on a service delivery side and an innovation side for us to create new solutions to help our clients really go in this from two state of how their businesses used to operate to how they need to operate in the future. Um I love working with the IBM team, we have a lot of great values that are shared across our two organizations, but most fundamentally those values are deeply rooted in customer success. And I think that that is one of the things that really draws me to working with such a great partner here. >>Yeah. Go into the process a little bit if you will. So if I'm a prospective client of yours and I come to you with some cloud needs, you know, again, whether it's uh, you know, storage or whether it's applications or whether it's edge, whatever it is, you know, I'm coming to you for um how do you then translate that to IBM and how does IBM come into play? Where does where do the boundaries kind of start and stop or do they? Is it a complete mesh? >>Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that's sort of unique about today's climate is people aren't just looking to solve technology problems. They're looking to solve business problems and what we really do, you know, at Salesforce's lead with the business transformation opportunity uh, and deeply partnered with IBM on a number of fronts to really go help those opportunities become realized. The first is in the services line. IBM has great partnerships with Salesforce around the transformation about core business processes, configuration integration services. That's one of the dimensions that we work together on. We also worked together on the areas of artificial intelligence and how we help businesses become smart in their operations every day to empower their workforce to really achieve more. And finally, you know that you mentioned about core technology oftentimes the business requirements translate into great technology transformation and that's what we do deeply with the IBM team is really outlined a blueprint and a road map for modernizing the technical infrastructure to help organizations move fast, increase their operational agility and run at such scale and safely today in the modern world that we all operate in on so through all those facets of the life cycle, IBM continues to be one of our leading partners globally to help clients, you know, not just here in the United States but around the world think about how they need to maximize their transformational abilities. >>And you touched on this at the outset of the interview, we were talking about IBM and the impact and and obviously the great association relationship that you have with them and the value in that I'd like you to amplify on that a little bit more in terms of specifically what are you getting out of it you think from a sales force perspective to have kind of the power and the weight and the bench basically that IBM provides. >>Yeah, well you think about transformation and you know, you read a lot about digital transformation online, that means so many different things to so many different businesses, businesses not just like I said here in one country, but globally the transformational needs, you really need to come with incredible bench and domain expertise by industry, by geography. Even by, you know, some micro regions in those geography has given what we've been experiencing here in the public sector in the United States with the scope of response activity we're doing with the IBM team. And so when you talk about the deep bench, what I love about working with IBM on is again commanding just great industry insights and knowledge of where industries are heading uh and also cross industry insights so that you can really bring great best practices from say one industry to another Um second is that real understanding of the global nature of business today. And I don't think the one thing that's really fasting about digital, it is not a sovereign identity today, a digital really means that you need to understand how to operate in every country, every region, every location uh you know, safely and so IBM has incredible depth and bench of experiences to help our clients truly transform those areas. Maybe another area that I really have appreciated working with IBM on is that deep technical understanding and deep technical domain of excellence, you know, maybe in the area of artificial intelligence and our partnership is quite unique between Salesforce and IBM, not only do we work together for external clients, but inside of IBM, IBM is using Salesforce today to run a lot of your core operations. And so the partnership we work with not only IBM as a kind of delivery excellence, but internally as a customer is really helping IBM transform its operations from service to sales to marketing all around the world. So I think this partnership is one that is deeply rooted in in working together and really like I mentioned before, finding the right path to drive the outcomes >>of tomorrow, you know, you mentioned Covid, um and so I would like to touch on that, but I assume that's you know, a big part of of your current relationship, if you will in service of the partnership goes, what specifically are you doing with IBM in that space of what have you done? And then what are you continuing to do as we go through now, the vaccination process and the variant identification processes and all these things. So maybe you can share with our viewers a little bit about the kinds of things that you have been working on together and the kind of progress that you've been making. >>Yeah, well back, you know, a year ago, uh you know when the world was really at a standstill, uh sales first created a solution called work dot com, which was to engineer new technologies to help businesses kind of deal with the reality of a hard shutdown to business in the say prime um private sector and in the public sector to really create new innovation around key solutions like contact tracing that you might have needed to track, you know, kind of outbreak and uh you know, the rate of progression of the virus. And what we did with the IBM team, working with uh clients around the world, first was work together to deploy those technologies rapidly into the hands of our customers through those moments of opportunity and realization. You know, working with our clients, we also started here, you know, kind of about, you know, where we find ourselves today. This mass vaccination wave of where our citizens and societies are kind of on the recovery journey. And the work that we did with IBM was to start to plan out the next wave of recovery options around vaccine management sales force, creating the core vaccine scheduling, distribution in administration management services in IBM focusing on more of that credentialing and vaccination state of how someone has gone from receiving a shot and arm to now having a trusted profile of which vaccines. When did you receive them? Are they still accurate, valid? Uh, around those solutions. So where we're working with the IBM tape most acutely on covid now is in the vaccine credential management side through Watson health. >>Mm Well, can you give us an idea now? Let's if we can dig in a little deeper on some other things you talk about? Talk about core technologies, we talked about, I mentioned Edge you know, that's when people are trying to figure out how to integrate, you know, these edge technologies into their, into their primary systems now. So, um can you give us some examples, some specific examples of some things that you're actually collaborating on today in those areas or maybe another that comes to mind? >>Yeah. Edge computing is probably one of the other more exciting things that we're doing with the IBM team. And I think you find that really working with our field service business and IBM cloud services, you know, globally speaking on the edge, you know, as devices become smarter and more digital. Um, they have a lot of signals that organizations can now tap into not only for real time intelligence, but also fault intelligence. When a device actually is starting to need repair or preventative maintenance around the solutions that kind of need to be administered and the work that we're doing to really broker this connected, not just enterprise, but connected set of experiences, but by IBM super powerful here because the IBM edge services are now helping us get into anomaly detection, those anomaly detection czar automatically routing to workers who use the sales force field service capabilities. And now we can help organizations stay running uh, you know, safely and and with continuity, which is really all our customers are asking us for. So the ability for us to be creative and understand our parts of the picture together are really the things that I think are most exciting um for what we're doing for clients around >>the world. Now, you mentioned continuity, kind of a cousin of that and a security right, in a way, because, you know, um so what are you hearing from your your customer base these days with regard to security? You know, a lot of very high profile instances, certainly from bad state actors, as we will know. But what are you hearing in terms of security that you're looking at and maybe cooperating and collaborating with IBM on to make sure that those concerns are being addressed? >>Yeah. You know, I think, well, first off security is on the top of mines, you know, for all decision makers, executives today, it's the number one threat that a lot of companies are really needing to respond to, given what we've seen, uh you know, in the geopolitical world that we're in. Um and security isn't just about securing your servers, it's also about securing every operational touch point that you might have with, you know, your um uh every end user or even every customer that's inter operating with your services that you project as an organization. And what I love about working with the IBM team as we mentioned, you know, just such great insights across all parts of technology infrastructure to really help understand both the threat level, uh how to contain that threat level, and more importantly how to engineer, you know, with great solutions all the way into the hands of customers so that becomes safe and easy for all actors in your environment to really operate with. Um And that's where, you know, again, you think about a solution like mobile sales professionals, you know, they're out traveling around the world on mobile devices, sometimes they're even brought their own personal devices into the enterprise. And so IBM is a great partner for ours just to help us understand the overall threat level of every device, every moment that an employee might have within their organizational data and really helped create great solutions to keep organizations running >>safely. Yeah, I think it's uh interesting you talk about people bringing their own devices on back when I remember that from B y O B was like a huge thing, right? And this major problem or a conundrum and now it's, it's almost like an afterthought right? You got it solved, we got it well, taken care of, >>oh, you think about again, devices in the enterprise and how much we've been able to achieve with the will be becoming commonplace in norm even today, the working place from home kind of environment that we're in, I mean, who would have thought a year ago that most of our operations conducted safely from her home office is not just our regional and corporate offices. And again, that's the kind of thing that working with IBM has been such a great value for our clients because you know, no one could have forecasted that the context center would have had to move to your kitchen last year. Uh and yet, you know, we had to really go achieve that in this time and working great partners like IBM, it became not just a conversation but real practice. >>Right by the way, I think I said, B Y O. B. I met B Y O. D. And so you know where my mind's at? Uh >>I wasn't gonna correct you. I appreciate that. It's >>Just kind of hit me. I think that just that was a 40 and slip. Certainly. >>Hey Bill, thanks for >>the time. I certainly do appreciate it. Thanks for shining light on this really good partnership between Salesforce and IBM. And we wish you continued success down the road with that as well. >>Yeah. Thanks again and again. Love being your partner and love the impact we're having together. >>Great! Thank you very much. Bill Patterson joining us, the VP working Crm at Salesforce, talking about IBM and that relationship that they're putting into practice for their client base. John Wall's reporting here on the cube. Thanks for joining us with more on IBM thing. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Hi, I'm stupid man. And this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sectors Summit Online. We've done this show for many years. Of course, this this time it's online rather than in person in the District of Washington D. C Happy to welcome to the program First time guest. Very good partner of Aws is from Salesforce is Casey Coleman. She is the senior vice president of Global Government Solutions, together with sales work. Casey, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Glad to be here. >>All right. So first of all, maybe if you could give us a little bit of level set your role at Salesforce and obviously, you know, a long partnership with Amazon. Tell us a little bit about that. >>Yes. My role at Salesforce is to work with our customers in the public sector globally and really help them map out their digital transformation. You know, it's an ongoing journey and we help them understand how to how to break that down into actionable steps and really transformed what they're doing to serve their constituents and citizens better. >>Excellent. So it of course said that the public sector show a lot about the leverage of govcloud and the other services. All the compliance that goes into that ahead of this event you had Ah, new update at Salesforce in partnership with AWS. Talk to us about it's the government cloud plus s o. You know what's entailed there? Uh, and, uh, tell us how AWS and Salesforce work together to launch this solution. >>Yeah, thanks Do. We are so excited to announce the launch of govcloud Plus, which is sales force is a customer 3 60 crm platform that runs on Amazon Web services in the govcloud in their govcloud environment. And we've just received a provisional 80 0 provisional authority to operate from the FEDRAMP program office at the high security level. So we are announcing govcloud Plus is fed ramp. I'm ready to go generally available and ready for customers. >>Excellent. Maybe bring us inside. You know what's different about how government agencies leverage sales force most companies out there, You know, Salesforce is a critical piece off how they manage, you know, number one, they're salesforce marketing and lots of other pieces, anything specific that we should understand about the public sector. >>Yeah, it's a great question because even our name Salesforce sounds like a commercial kind of thing to do. Governments don't think of themselves as selling, but if you break down to a level of detail about what governments actually do, it is the same kind of functions case management, its benefits delivery. It's communications and outreach. It's all the same kind of function that are necessary for commercial organizations to drive. And so that's what we do. We translate that into government ready terms so that they can serve child welfare, health information delivery record, former information, all kinds of services for the constituents of the public sector. And they might call them customers. They might call them citizens, residents constituent. But it's those they >>Yeah, well, what one of the things about Salesforce is, as you said, it's not just, you know, a sales tool. There's so much you've got a very broad and deep ecosystem. Their asses Well, as you know, people that know how to use it, they get underneath the covers. You know, when I think of not only a sales force. You know, the first company that I probably thought of and heard about that it was SAS. But if you talk about the AP economy, if you talk about how things integrate, Salesforce does a lot for developers. So I know one of the other pieces you had. There's everybody knows Dream Force. Maybe not as many people know, that trailhead DX show that that that Salesforce has had for developers. So bring us a little bit inside. What would Salesforce is doing for developers? And, of course, the government angle along those lines, too? >>Yeah, there's a lot going on in the developer world. We were glad to be able to host a virtual version of our trailhead developer conference and announced a lot of exciting new developments, including salesforce anywhere, which is really bringing an immersive voice, video and chat environment to collaborate in the developer environment and into the delivery environment. And you bring that into the public sector. And the benefits are amazing because one of the key challenges with government is keeping up with the pace of the public expectations. In a pace of change in the commercial world, all of the shop and bank and live on our mobile devices. And governments are being faced with the same expectations from the public to do any time anywhere personalized delivery as the code rapid development environments that force offers give public sector I t team the ability to quickly and respond to changing conditions like the code 19 pandemic and roll out applications that are not only fast to develop into boy but they also benefit from being in the govcloud environment. And so the compliance is party built in and that's another key challenges. Often it rises. The public sector is not almost building new applications and making sure they're secure with Salesforce all built in >>Yeah, sounds sounds a lot of sis similarity to what we hear in the private sector, of course, that the balance between what it is doing and how we enable developers, of course security, you mentioned super important anything specifically from the government sector that you'd say, Well, that might be different from what we see in the general enterprise world. >>You know, the but security is top of mind for the public sector, always because they're dealing with the most sensitive data they're dealing with the public trust and trust is really the currency of government. They're not dealing in profit and market share, but they are dealing in a public trust and protecting information like financial data, health data, personal data. And so it's essential that the government had the best in class commercial tools to make sure they are providing world class security for for their their constituents in their mission. And that's one reason we're so excited to be partnering with AWS on Golf Club was because Amazon AWS has already deployed the Fed Ramp I version of their infrastructures of service. And so, by riding on top of that, we inherit all of those existing controls at our own Fed ramp controls. And our customers benefit from the best in class security from two of the most trusted name in public Cloud >>Great. You know, absolutely. Govcloud has been a real boon for the entire industry. When it talks about how government agencies they're leveraging cloud, you talked about sitting on top of ah govcloud the government cloud plus, you know, leverages some of the certifications and like, can you bring us inside a little bit? How long did this effort take? to get anything specific in the integrations were, you know, functionality that that you might be able to highlight about this joint effort. >>Yeah, we've been working on for some time now because it's it's essential to really think from the ground up. And this is not just re platform ing our cloud solutions on AWS. It is rethinking the whole architecture so that we really are organically taking advantage of infrastructure services that AWS provides. So it is a really deep integration. And it's not only a technical tech, integration is the strategic partnership, and you're going to see a lot more now that's coming from both of us about the integration capabilities we're bringing together and a lot of the work we're going to be doing to continue to bring innovation to our joint customers. >>Excellent. You made reference to the pandemic. Uh, what are you hearing from your customers? How does this new offering impact them and support them both? Today is they're reacting to what happens as well as you know, going forward as we progress. >>Yes. Do you know the coveted 19 pandemic really exposed fault line in government programs that weren't scale to meet this demand. We saw website crashing when people were going to them and just overwhelming them with questions about the health situation. We saw benefits programs that only works where people could come in and sign up in a fly in person and obviously with government offices shut down, that wasn't an option. And a lot of government workers were sent home to tell a work without much notice, and their infrastructure just couldn't support it. And so just in general, there are a lot of breakdown along the way. But the good news is that a lot of public sector organizations and programs making that pivot quickly. For example, we worked with one state agency that experienced a 400% spikes in demand for applications for unemployment benefits. It makes sense people are out of work. They need unemployment benefit. But they just couldn't respond to that kind of surging demand. So we worked with them along with AWS and in less than a week stood up a virtual contact center with chatbots so that could meet the demand and provide those vital services to their residents at a time of real needs. So there's a lot to the optimistic about in the middle of this crisis, there is a lot of transformation happening. This kind of forcing function is producing a lot of innovation, transformation. And I think it's really going to make a fundamental shift in how we re imagined government in the future. >>Yeah. Okay, so you're absolutely right that this pandemic has shown a real spotlight on where you know what works and what doesn't, Um, and I think about not only government, but you know, a lot of how finances were often times you have your plans in place, you have your budgets in place. You have, you know, funding cycles. So you know what? What our sales force and Amazon doing to help those you talk about. They have to ramp things up a weight where they financially ready for this. Some companies Oh, wait. I have to temporarily dial things down. That's not in my 12 month or 36 month plan. So are there things that you're doing to help customers, you know, short term in and long term? Are you seeing some? Some change in how people think about their planning and how they could be ready for what change happens out there. >>Yeah, you know, one of the big findings from this whole experience, not just in the public sector but across every industry has been that digital transformation may in the past has been viewed as a nice to have. It is now really the only way to connect and serve both customers and employees, and so digital First, digital transformation is rapidly becoming an urgent imperative because this situation is is not going away overnight. And even when we get back to some state of normal, it's going to be different. It's a digital first and being able to move quickly to roll out services rapidly, to be able to start small and then scale rapidly. These are things that benefit any organization, whether it's government or commercial. >>Excellent. Okay, so I'll let you have the final word. What people want. What you want people to have is their take away of salesforce is participation in the AWS public sector online event. >>We are just so excited to be here with AWS to jointly come to our customers with govcloud plus the fed ramp. I authorized environment for the best in class theory, M and customer and employee services. Our partnership with AWS is one that we're excited about. You're going to see a lot more announcements coming to. It's not only a technology integration, it's also a strategic partnership. And we think our customers jointly. Just going to be really excited about the development. So thank you for the time and glad to be here. >>All right, well, thank you so much. Casey. Congratulations on the government cloud plus launch. And absolutely look forward to hearing more about it. >>Thank you. >>Alright. Be sure to stay tuned. Lots more coverage of the Cube at AWS Public Sector Summit online. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Hi welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host Donald Klein. As digital transformation continues to impact industries, the application workflows employees rely on on a day to day basis are becoming increasingly customized. This trend towards customization is presenting new challenges for the workforce of the future. To talk about that challenge, I'm here today with Gary Mahotra, VP of Product Marketing at WhatFix. >> Hi Don, thanks for having us. >> Glad you're here. So this conversation is kind of following up on an earlier conversation we did with Vara Kumar about some of the challenges for the workplace of the future. >> That's right. >> And of particular interest is you guys have done some new survey work, right, around some of the challenges or the new challenges that we have in the workplace around using applications. So I wanted to kind of have you talk a little bit more about that. But maybe before we do that, why don't you just refresh us and just explain Whatfix does and kind of where they fit in. >> Great, so Whatfix is a digital adoption platform. We provide on-screen guidance, self-help, and automation capabilities to enterprises and employees to really drive up adoption of the features and their applications across all cross application workflows. >> And so the important point there, this is what you call kind of in-application guidance, right? >> That's right, yes. >> All right, great. So you're providing screens that help people navigate these very complex apps that people are using on a kind of day to day basis, right? >> Yes, and the screens can be smart tips, pointers. They can be interactive walk throughs and easy flows. They could be better self-help across applications. They take a variety of forms. >> Okay, got it. Now this is a super hot area, right? You're with a company, you guys have seen fantastic adoption of your solution. I think you were mentioning to me that you guys have an NPS score that's in the 100th percentile, which is sort of unheard of for a software company. So this is a hot area, but we want to understand why it's a hot area. So you guys have been doing some survey work around the the future of the workplace. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about that survey and kind of what are the kind of, some of the things you found? >> Sure. So you know, we surveyed 500 enterprises in North America and we looked across areas, but also focused on the CRM area and what we found is 75% of sales reps in an average enterprise do not regularly use the CRM system and we also found that 90% of these enterprises believe that digital adoption and learning in the workflow technology would increase their employee productivity and increase the employee experience. >> Okay, so let me understand why that number is so high, that 75% of sales reps aren't using their CRM application and then, I mean obviously, CRMs have always been the bugaboo for a lot of reps, right? Filling in the data, as you said, but really in today's world, it's even more of a problem isn't it because these CRM apps are actually being sort of highly customized to the individual kind of workflows of different companies. Is that right? >> Absolutely. So you know, Gartner has the statistics that an average company has 14 different CRM applications or modules that a sales rep is using everyday and these are heavily customized to organizations and sometimes you know, within different business units and geographies, within an organization. Obviously, customers are different globally and products that they're selling are different so the CRM has to be customized and I think you'll add to that the complexity that up to another two, 300 cloud applications that integrate with the CRM in and around ad and then you know, the API, three API world, there's so much across application web flow that it's not easy for an average employee or sales rep to keep up with. >> Got it, okay. So there's kind of two challenges here, right? So the CRM application itself, right, is going to be sort of specific to lots of different workflows, even within business units, right? That's a huge challenge for somebody working in a company to kind of learn all that, right? And now what you're saying is that actually, it's even more complex, right, because you've got a lot of other applications that are integrating in and interfacing, right? >> Gary: Absolutely, absolutely. >> So it's kind of like a cross workflow challenge to be able to understand all this stuff. Is that right? >> Absolutely. And you know, with the movement to the cloud, all of this is rapidly evolving. There used to be a time when product software companies would release new releases once in 18 months. Now it's twice in two weeks, right? And so there's that infusion that, you know, even a sales operation manager or IT manager and learning and developing managers have to keep up with and it's certainly difficult for the average employee to keep up with all this new functionality. >> Great. So APIs in the clouds are kind of driving kind of just increasingly evolving applications that are becoming even just a challenge to kind of keep up with them as they're evolving, kind of let alone kind of learning them end-to-end. Right, yeah. >> Absolutely. >> So this is kind of, what you guys are tackling is really kind of almost a learning and adoption problem. Is that right, more generally? >> That's totally accurate and more specifically, you know, we're enabling learning in the flow of work because there is this whole megatrend of the merger of learning and work together because there's so much that an average employee has to learn. There's so many applications that it is not practical to expect an employee to attend a couple weeks of training. They're going to forget 90% of that within a week and then as their work-life progresses, the statistics from LinkedIn and Deloitte, you know, employees are only able to spare 1% of their average work week toward formal learning. So there's no choice other than you know, enabling them throughout their workday, throughout their applications with sort of micro moments of learning, in-the-app learning, like you said. >> That's a fantastic comment there, sort of what do you call it? Micro learning. >> Micro learning moments. >> Micro learning moments. >> In the flow of work. >> That's fantastic, okay. And so that's really what you're saying is the people don't, you know, the old school way was to attend a training class, get up to speed, right, and then sort of use that throughout the year. Well, that doesn't work anymore. >> Doesn't work at all. >> Okay, got it. Right, so then talk to us a little bit about kind of what WhatFix does to kind of do that. So you're providing an application that kind of provides kind of guidance screens, is that right? >> Yeah, so we basically provide three things. The first is what you said, we provide step-by-step guidance, content. So if there's a new user joining the application, they're guided as to where, a tour of the application or what are the key high value things they should be sort of interacting with. The other thing we do is we're providing many elements, or many learning task lists that a user's required to complete and when they do, they're actually clicking through the application. This is not a YouTube video they're watching offline and hopping where to get back into the screen at. This is actually them clicking through the screen. The second thing we provide is you know, better self-help across the enterprise. You know, when they're actually using our self-help widgets, they're able to get personalized, contextualized content based on who they are, where have they clicked before? Which department do they belong to? So they actually get relevant context right there. The third area we provide is what we call automation. So a lot of the processes that sales people and employees will have to do is to click, you know, empty clicks and navigational clicks and a lot of times spent on data entry. So we have a whole automation framework where we just eliminate the manual processes completely and we automate them and then we have bots that you can use for data entry so it's very easy for employees. >> Understood, understood. So then kind of walk us through what the typical kind of adoption cycle for a customer who says okay, you know, yes, we understand our whole kind of, we've gone through a period of digital transformation. We now have a lot of very essential applications that kind of manage our day-to-day workflow inside our company, but the challenge is getting everybody to use them in the right way and kind of populating them with data in the right way. We'd like to look at your solution for helping us kind of get better at that or at least help our employees get better at that. What is the journey that they go through from kind of beginning to end to kind of enable this using your system? >> So great question, Don. So I think the journey that we undertake together with them, is to first understand what the workflows look like across applications, where they're excessively long or manual or nonproductive so we can apply the right, you know, digital adoption platform, widgets or right functionality so we have the maximum impact. So that's sort of the first phase. Second, what we do is we look at, you know, the key workflow areas that their, you know, departments or their functional heads want them to use to have the maximum impact on productivity or the maximum impact on business outcomes and we basically authored our content on top of that. Now the reason it is so fantastic is once you've actually authored some step-by-step guidance, you know, onto say, Salesforce, using our content, that automatically is not only available in the application when you log into Salesforce, but it automatically gets converted into multiple formats. It gets converted into a video, in LMS, a course that you can take, a slideshare, a PDF, an article, and these are automatically sent throughout the enterprise. So even if the sales person is not in Salesforce doing work, they're on their mobile phone, perhaps, you know, interacting with a chat bot or maybe they're taking a LMS course, they have the same in-app content and guidance available throughout. We call it adoption everywhere and then, you know, maybe they're on the road, they see something, they read it. In one click, they can see live and they actually get back into the application to really execute that process. So you know, call it learning by doing. So that's what's so unique about you know, digital adoption platforms and this takes six to eight months. You know how hard it is to recall videos or how to use every aspect of the application. Now it takes you know three to four weeks. >> Interesting, interesting. So in a former life, I was once responsible for developing the user manual for our application which we sold within the enterprise, right? And everything was all written out in text. Well that's almost a bygone era now, isn't it? >> It is because I'm sure things change so fast and you know, not everybody likes to read text. A lot of people are visual learners. They want to see it in video. Some people are kinesthetic learners. They want to actually learn by doing and so that's what visual adoption enables. You don't lose the text, but you don't have to start there. You know, we give you the text based on how do you use the application? >> Interesting. So you're actually providing learning materials. >> Absolutely. >> For future consumption based on how people are using applications today. >> Absolutely, and then anytime you go back, you know, a month or two later, within the application, change the workflow, the process, automatically, all of the learning materials and all of the five or six formats I mentioned, regardless of where they are, is forever linked and automatically gets updated. So you don't have to, you know, worry about, okay, I made this paragraph change. Where are the 100 places I now need to go and change that? So that problem is solved forever. >> Interesting, okay. So let's just talk, you know, as we kind of wrap up here, let's talk a little bit about so the survey found that kind of 75% of you know, reps, particularly with just an application on CRM, right? I'm sure you got similar data for lots of other application categories, but something like CRM is a little problem point for a lot of companies, right? >> Yes. >> So people are, companies are adopting your solution in order to kind of keep the teams updated on how to use the applications, how to make sure that the data's properly populated right and even, you know, drive kind of materials and intelligence from all that usage history, right? >> Gary: Yes. >> So where do you see this going? What's the kind of workflow of future going to look like once solutions like yours have kind of been adopted here? >> Yeah, so I think that's a great question. I think what we see is that you know, the workflow of the future's going to have three things: one, there's going to be more and more applications in the cloud, connected in more and more ways with each other through API's and more and more customized. So you know, a future worker has to be digitally savvy, up to digital kosher and become comfortable navigating in this complex, highly digital world across multiple applications. So that's one. I think the second trend is they're going to have to focus, most employees and companies have the workers and employees focus on the most critical activities and be comfortable with bots and automation doing the routine tasks and the data entry and you got to be comfortable with giving up some work and I think the third thing is you know, these workers and employees have to learn to live with these bots and automation and be willing to accept hyperpersonalized you know, digital guidance and be comfortable acting on it. So when you log into your Salesforce, you may be shown a completely different sale content because you've been with the company for 10 years, you're a rockstar seller and you need a different level of sort of high-end learning versus you know, I may be shown a totally different set of content because I've been clicking and searching a lot on some topics. I'm a new sales rep or employee and I've not met my quota. And that's surely the future and I think companies and enterprises, you know, who are comfortable with that, you know, will succeed and we're certainly there to help with that journey. >> Wow, so it's interesting. So hyperpersonalization of application content. >> Absolutely. >> Is kind of the new trend that's going to be happening which presents a whole kind of learning and adoption problem in it of itself, is that right? >> Well, it does, but it also solves the problem because if you're presented content that's not contextual to who you are, how long you've been at the company, what you've been looking for, most likely, you're going to get distracted and not adopt the application or not do what you would do. But if you do get that, then your adoption really goes up the roof, you're really happy. You got the, it's like the application understood what you were trying to do and guided you in doing it and that's your best buddy, right? It's actually going to solve the problem. >> Okay, fantastic. So love that story. Like what you're talking, understanding what the challenges are for workplace of the future. So on that, I think we're going to close out here now and I'd like to thank everybody for joining us for this Cube Conversation. I'm Donald Klein and we'll see you next time here on the show. >> Gary: Thank you, Don. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE we continue our coverage AWS re:Invent. We are at the Sands Expo, 40,000 strong, maybe more attending this year's show and once again this show floor is packed and it is a quite impressive display. There are a lot of great exhibits, a lot of excitement in the air here. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. Again, welcome back here on theCUBE. We're joined now by Prakash Darji, who is the general manager of FlashArray Pure Storage. Prakash, good morning to you. >> Yeah, good morning, glad to be here. >> Thank you for being with us here. Alright, so you've got some, the exciting new direction that you guys are going, looking at cloud data services. Tell us a little bit about that. About entry into that world. >> Well, it's interesting. Most people Pure as an all-Flash company. That's how we started. But if you actually take a look at what Pure's really great at is its building software for platforms or technology that might not be mature. So Pure made an early investment in consumer-grade Flash when the market was going to enterprise and said, you know what, consumer-grade Flash doesn't have the resiliency or the enterprise-grade characteristics that people need. And in that early entrance, we built software to deal with the crappy hardware, basically, at the end of the day. And that's generally worked out well for Pure in the all-Flash market. And what we realized is the same value propositions we were able to build around higher-performance and reliability and enterprise-grade characteristics were some of the characteristics that were missing on another platform that we saw, which was cloud infrastructure as a service. And, you know, circling the show floor, it's interesting, I was talking to some of the customers and I'm hearing a lot of feedback around the "what are you really doing with our cloud data services?" And really what we're doing is we're trying to say, you know what, you shouldn't have to compromise between on-premises and cloud. You should get the same enterprise-grade characteristics you have on-premises in the cloud and frankly, if the API and the software is the same, then you can lift and shit and move back and forth. >> Right. >> So from a value proposition standpoint, cloud provides you the instant available capacity and agility, on-premises typically has been optimized for a high degree of performance, cost, and resiliency. And now you have the ability to add agility to that angle and start anywhere and move anywhere. That's really the goal of what we're trying to do with our cloud data services. >> Yeah, that is a thing we've been hearing so far in the show over the last couple of days, that there is this realization that workloads can live in multiple locations and that maybe the cloud isn't right for all of them or maybe it's not right right now or maybe we try something in the cloud and then we actually want to move it to somewhere else. So being able to do that is what a lot of enterprise customers certainly want to do. And we're hearing from a lot of vendors that that's what they're trying to enable and it sounds like that's what you're trying to do here with Pure is opening up this new avenue for "well you like Pure here on-site, we would love to use some Pure over there in the cloud," and now you can. >> Well, that's one part of it. Because people always have to, like, when you're making a decision, you have to decide where you're going to develop. Am I going to develop on premises or am I going to develop in the cloud? And typically, I like to liken it to center of gravity. Where's your center of gravity? And data has a lot of gravity. So if your data's primarily here, that might be like hey, I'll develop here. If it's something new and you don't have a lot of data gravity, you might decide to develop in cloud. But increasingly, we see applications being hybrid applications. For example, today, Salesfloor CRM is a SAS application. You can argue that that's completely cloud, right? But anything you sell needs to book in a finance system, most of which is on-premises today. >> Right. >> So the application workflow crosses both anyway, the data workflow crosses both anyway. But in IT management, IT management is just different across both of those worlds. So we increasingly see the need for hybrid applications where you can use the best of what's available where. If you want to use AI algorithms in one cloud and you want to use office services from another cloud, and you want to use infrastructure build services from a cloud and data from an on-premises system to go ahead and build and orchestrate your app why shouldn't you be able to? >> Yeah. >> The only way to do that is to bring the application architectures together and between VMware, cloud, KUBRA meetings, that's starting to happen. But in storage, no one's really bridging that divide in terms of making storage look the same on both sides. And that's what we're doing. >> So the big challenge with storage that everyone knows, like, state management is hard, as well, but being able to move that data, like you said, it has gravity. What if I make a choice today and then the pace of innovations is so fast, then, I'm likely to need to change my mind later on and I'm going to have to move data around. How do I do that? How do I, if I've chosen some here in the cloud and I want to bring it back on-site, how would I do that? >> Well so it's interesting, there's multiple ways to move the data. The challenge isn't actually in the data movement itself, it's because the data has gravity you always build things around it. Meaning, you have applications sitting on it, you have interfaces connecting to it, you have workflows such as, I'm doing development and I have have APIs that are spinning up new volumes. >> Yeah. >> All of those workflows and all of those integrations have to be re-done if you want to move it. Like, moving the data could be as simple as like, dump it to a file, ship it over there, and upload it, you know what I mean? And there's more sophisticated ways to move. So the data movement isn't the challenge. >> Kay. >> All the integrations and workflows you build around your data is. So really, what's most important is ensuring you build a consistent API across both environments. So the way we enable that today is we've taken the same Pure software that we've built and optimized for our FlashArray M or an X and we've now optimized it for a third platform called AWS Infrastructure. >> Right. >> And we'll probably do a fourth and a fifth if you read the tea leaves for the future as well in cloud environments. But that software's the same. Meaning, I met a customer that was interested in, they've built on AWS today but they have online curriculums for college education. And they have to take snapshots for curriculum development every semester that they send to multiple locations to build coursework. >> Okay. >> And what they're planning on doing now is setting up a directed connected in Equinox FlashArray, that they're basically synchronically replicating between our cloud block store in AWS and taking their snapshots from this environment because they're space saving snapshots and they get to save on the export taxes. So, when you treat the software the same, it's amazing how people will start using it. Because, you know, at the end of the day, your orchestrations, your APIs, all of your workflows are the same. So now you want to move, there isn't a tax to rewrite anything. >> Yeah. >> You just move the data. And once we add other platforms, then you have the ability to use the best capability that's available where. >> Is there any kind of a danger, or, I wouldn't say danger, that might not be the right word, the fact that you can make these transfers you know, relatively frictionless, or at least a lot simpler, a lot more convenient now. All of a sudden, I want to move everything. I don't know, and I'm not as selective as I might've been before and I'm just take it and dump it and move it and I don't have to identify what's really necessary, what's valuable, instead I'm just taking the simple way out as a customer, as a client. Would you coach them along in that way at all, to help them prioritize just because we can do it doesn't mean we have to do it? >> Yeah, we've started getting into that discussion around education. What's interesting is as we've been having these customer discussions, we find that the level of education in the cloud is pretty disparate. Some people who are very cloud-first, I'm going all-in, now know the challenges and we don't really have a lot of education to do. They've got a cost model, they've got performance comparisons, they've got reliability comparisons. >> Right. >> So, they know that from a performance cost reliability standpoint, you know, having control over your own infrastructure provides the most control over those elements. But they know that's not the most agile way to do things. So they're treating the public cloud as an instantly-available agility capacity and as they mature, they're moving certain things back into more hosted or private. On the flip side, we have other customers that have started on-premises, even a lot of our own customers who are using FlashArray in a hosted way, and they're saying, you know what, there are certain workloads that need to sit closer to different locations in the field. We don't have the networks for that. So we're going to actually leverage the public cloud for that and given that we can move it, we're going to do that. So what we're finding is people that are educated are making these as very conscious decisions. I find that the market that is uneducated is an interesting market where I've met a customer a few weeks ago in the oil and gas, big oil and gas company, that everything's going to the public cloud. But they have nothing there right now. >> Right. >> Right? And, you know, like any hype cycle, it's like, hey, we're going to do this, we're going all-in, and I'm like, have you thought about this, this, this, this, this? And they're like, no, we're going all-in, we want to get out of data centers. So, you know, we're like, okay, we'll support you in that journey, but we're going to guide you in terms of like, hey, it's a deep pool. You probably want a floatie or two so you don't sink. And we're giving you the floatie. (laughs) >> That's a good analogy. >> I love your analogy, that's right. Prakash, thanks for being with us. And I assume you brought some floaties with you in case you need to hand them out on the floor this week, just in case. >> Yeah, we've got Pure Storage here, we've got a nice presence, we're handing out some nice swag like everyone here. >> Excellent, good deal. Well, thank you for being with us, we appreciate it. >> Alright, thanks for having me. >> Thank you, Prakash, for joining us here from Pure Storage. Back with more at AWS re:Invent. We are live in Las Vegas and you're watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018 brought to you by ServiceNow >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. What we do is we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our sixth year at ServiceNow Knowledge. Jeff and I, Jeff Frick, my co-host, we started in 2013 I believe, Jeff. >> Yes. >> At the Aria, right? >> At the Aria, third floor. >> Small conference. 3,800 people, we were kind of tucked in the corner Now we're in the center, the ecosystem is burgeoning. As is ServiceNow, the company started with core IT service management and has been extending its applications on its platform into new areas and Abhijit Mitra is here, he's the general manager of the customer service management unit at ServiceNow. It's great to see you again my friend, welcome back to-- >> Great to see you Dave and Jeff. >> Great to see you, welcome back. >> So we met several times at headquarters, at shows like this, you've been educating me and us on your business, but let's start with customer service management, what is it to you guys? >> Interesting you ask the question because two years ago I remember explaining to you that it's not customer-service management. It's customer service-management. So, I want to go back to that once more and start off explaining what that was about. You know, I have been building CRM applications for a long time, in my career and especially in the customer service domain, I always felt there's something missing and I didn't quite really know what it was until I came to ServiceNow. And I discovered service management and what I realized, and after talking to so many customers what I realized is that traditional CRM solutions are meant for, they're very well architected for customer engagement which is about allowing customers to contact you by different channels, by phone or email and logging their issues as cases. And that's important, we need that in customer service. But what is also very important is, how do you streamline your underlying operational processes? So that it can close the loop and fix those issues or deliver to your customers request and that's what service management is fundamentally designed to do. So what we have done here is we've combined customer engagement with service management into customer service management to give you a solution that can cater to the end to end process, that's what it is. >> Okay, so we had your boss on earlier and he said, "I have three things on my whiteboard "when people walk in with a new idea. "First one is, what's the problem? "Second one is, why now? "And the third one is, why us?" So when you guys had that conversation, (laughs) what was the answer? >> So, the problem, it really has been that customer service has been fundamentally broken and we all experience customer service every day of our lives and as consumers, I can tell you, I expect that experience to be much better today. I don't know about you, but I expect that experience to be much better. >> I was going to say expectations are pretty low unfortunately. I'm going to have to tell you for the 18th time, my name, account number, and social security number, my mom's maiden name, but I just told the other four people that I got to before I got to you. (laughs) >> So, feel the pain. >> We feel the pain. >> Let's rest that argument, OK? Now let's go about, sort of a why now, right? So, what we are seeing in the industry is massive digital transformation. Now digital transformation is a heavily overused buzzword. When I talk about digital transformation, I am talking about products becoming services, services becoming connected services where you're offering solutions to consumers and customers digitally meaning they are powered by technology. In that kind of a world, when we are customers we expect our requests and our issues to be resolved and delivered instantaneously and we expect those digital services to be always on. Now this kind of a challenge was not there like you know five, 10 years ago, this is something new. And this is where, when you combine service management which is all about how do you deliver that end to end service in a technologically technically connected world to the customer through the different channels of their choice becomes truly differentiating. So that's why now, now is the right time for doing something like this. >> Well, why ServiceNow? >> Well, ServiceNow is a market leader in service management. We are the market leaders in IT service management. And so what we are doing is we are essentially taking the core capability of the service management and just to explain a little bit for people who are not so familiar with service management, service management is about automating repetitive requests through workflows, we apply that to what we say an effortless customer experience. So customers now through self-service for example, they don't need to call anybody, they can go to your website and they can sort of request services which get automatically delivered to them, right? So that's essentially something ServiceNow does very well because of our automation capabilities. Service management is about driving down root cause of customer issues through a structured process. Problem management, change management and we do that. Service management is about monitoring connected services and being proactive and taking actions to prevent business disruptions and we do that. So that's why service management is extremely applicable to the problem of offering services in our digitally connected world. >> So you said you've been doing it for a long time in your career, before was it just really thinking about the ticket as an individual transaction in customer service management versus trying to build really more robust processes that are integrated in service management that now you're applying to the customer problems? Is that kind of why this is a fundamentally different approach? What makes it so different? >> Yes, so service management is essentially the underlying operational process, you're right. And one part of that is the ticket. Customer engagement on the other hand is being aware of who your customer is. Who that person is, what's the customers 360, what is his purchase history, what's the service history of this customer? What service contracts do they have? What entitlement do they have? All the information. So, combining it together on one common platform is what's unique. >> OK, talk a little bit about how you're innovating in that platform. You guys announced virtual agent technology, you're infusing artificial intelligence into the platform. Discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about virtual agent. I said one of the things that we focused on is making that experience for customers as effortless, as simple and easy as possible, right? So, we know that, you know companies around the world like 75% of all organizations, they want the self-service to be the primary channel of help and mass consumers, we also want self-service, right? But self-service today is primarily very static because you get, what do you get? You go, look at a knowledge base article, some self-help article, right? >> Right, right. >> And OK, maybe you lock some cases, that's all you can do. With virtual agents, what's happening is self-service is becoming actionable. Because when you are in the self-service experience, a virtual agent can anticipate your needs and start helping you, you interact with the virtual agent and it's not just a human-like interaction with you, but it can also perform actions. Automated actions using workflow capabilities of ServiceNow. And this is very unique. Now it's an extension of the service process, it becomes a living, breathing entity. The website becomes a living, breathing entity. Not only does it reduce a lot of, on the organization side for example, the customer service organization side. Not only does it reduce a lot of repetitive work for customer agents, but it makes the experience for customers very simple and effortless. >> The thing I think is so interesting on the AI side of it is that, the system learns from every transaction and can apply that learning to the next transaction versus an individual interaction between myself and say a customer service agent where they might learn a little bit on how to solve that particular problem. But it's not shared system-wide. It's not necessarily learned by the machine to help the next person get that answer a little bit faster. So it seems like the application of AI, and machine learning to these workflows really opens up an efficiency gate that's like nothing that you've been able to do before. >> Absolutely, you know one of the features that we offer is something called agent intelligence I have not seen if you talked about that, but what agent intelligence is about is that when you do need an agent, right? And you need to find the right agent, you can essentially convert or route these cases essentially which is just descriptions of words or descriptions, right? You can categorize them, you can prioritize them, and you can route them to the right cues. So that the right people can actually now help you out to solve these issues. This is something that we are using machine learning for. To be able to learn from like past history and then be able to do that without writing any rules or thing like that. The machine simply learns and figures out the best way to categorize, prioritize, and route the cases to the right people. >> Based on real behavior, as opposed to trying to figure out the rules in advance. >> The thing is that you, every time you figure out a rule, it becomes outdated very quickly. So, it's very difficult to keep rules up to date. I know and I've been building rules engine for a very long time. I know exactly how it works, It's very difficult. If AI can actually solve this problem, there is a tremendous productivity gain. >> Talk about why I wouldn't use a CRM system to do this, I have all my customer information in there, everybody's using it, I got my sales guys involved and why not just use CRM? >> Yet again, goes back to the core value proposition of CRM. CRM was essentially invented as a methodology to enforce the sales process. So you track your leads, the opportunities, codes, convert MTRs, and that's what most companies use CRM for. Now, since we had your prospect data in there used, you know some customers would start thinking that okay, you know what? My customer database is in CRM, but actually if you think about it for most companies, the customer data is not in CRM. It's in their ERP system. >> It's in Oracle SAP. >> SAP that's where the data is so, in a service process, you're actually interacting with your customers. The customers are interacting with your system through self-service. In CRM, and in traditional lead opportunity management, there's no customer interaction. It's your company's internal process. So here, you are talking with a customer interacting with the system and you servicing that customer in an end-to-end process. So, I don't think for customer service, CRM was ever well suited actually. So specifically in the customer service domain, I think a service management approach is a much better approach. >> Abhijit, what are some of the KPIs? What are people using as yardsticks of success when they're doing these types of implementations? >> Yeah, so one of the key KPIs for our customers is, you know from a business stand point, it's Net Promoter Score and we have had, customers like Epicor, for example, who've implemented customer service management, actually retiring 15 CRM systems including everything you can imagine. And within 10 months of going live, they're seeing 10 percentage point improvement in Net Promoter Score, just by switching to CSM. These are unbelievable numbers, then we have had nice systems, by the way both these companies have won awards for innovating customer service. And they've seen more than a 70% reduction in cases because of self-service. 'Cause they are going to the self-service channel. So these are sort of the obvious, let's say customer satisfaction improvement or cost savings that some of our customers have seen from using our solution. >> That's great. >> Okay, takeaways from K18, what should we, what's the bumper sticker say in the back of the car as they're pulling away as it relates to customer service management. (laughs) >> You know, to summarize for customer service management, we essentially combine customer engagement with service management to offer and to help you offer an effortless connected and proactive customer service so this is really our key value propositions that we offer to companies. Effortless is all about simplifying the customer experience. Connected is about breaking down the silos in your organization. Getting everybody on a common platform to drive down root cause of customer issues and the customer service team support, and proactive is about monitoring the data and reacting to issues before customers are affected. And this is what makes customer service experience, a superior customer service experience. >> Jeff: Three word bumper sticker, it works perfectly. (laughs) >> Abhijit, it was great to meet, however briefly your team last night, we saw you guys, you took your team out to dinner, they seem motivated, really charged up, a lot of smiling faces, so congratulations on the progress that you've made. You're super excited, I can tell and it's really great having you back on theCUBE, thank you. >> Yeah, yeah, and if you wanted even the shortest bumper sticker, I would say customer service is a team sport. >> Beautiful that's a good one. >> The other won't fit. (laughter) >> That'll work, all right. >> Okay keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. We're live, you're watching theCUBE from ServiceNow Knowledge18, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back and we're live here in Austin, Texas. theCUBE's exclusive coverage of CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, which stands for Kubernetes Conference, the not Cube, C-U-B-E, that's us. I'm John Furrier here with Matt Broberg, co-host in here for Stu Miniman, podcaster himself And we also have a special podcaster here on theCUBE, Edaena Salinas, who's the host of The Women in Tech Show @techwomenshow on Twitter, also a software engineer at Microsoft. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> This is kind of like a podcast, we're like live though, we're streaming. >> Oh, okay. >> Love your sweater, that's a binary tree holiday tree. >> Binary Christmas tree. >> Binary Christmas tree. >> So perfect. >> I'm going to do a quick sort quickly, no I'm only kidding. So question for you, you've got a great program, you've got a desk over there, you're doing some interviews here, great to see you here doing The Women in Tech. We've done a lot of women in tech interviews on theCUBE, love to showcase women programming, women developers, women in stem, great that you do it so congratulations. So tell us what's the vibe like, are you people excited to do podcasting, is it all women, do you interview men, so tell us a little bit about the show. >> That's a good question. The motivation of the show is to have technical women talk about what they're working on, the products they're building or business strategy, instead of what does it feel like to be a woman in tech, or the only woman in the meeting room. Those conversations are valid, but I think we've heard a lot of those, and the community can benefit if they're just listening to what they're working on. >> It's great to get the education out there. So I have a question for you, I'd love to ask this. But I never really had a, talk about software engineering on theCUBE, what's the style difference in coding, do that's talked about, are women, do they code differently? Is it, probably neater, cleaner, is there biases in coding in that come into, because. >> I'm not aware of (laughs) difference like that, but, you could find that out if you run a script on the GitHub projects but, I don't think it affects. >> People don't, they don't talk about that, do they? >> They don't talk about that, and I certainly haven't experienced anything like that, and I learn from my coworkers and they learn from me. >> Now what are you working on at Microsoft? >> I am at Microsoft Research earlier this year, so what I work on is adding AI features to our existing products, like Outlook and Dynamics, so yeah. >> And I want to switch gears and talk about the podcast a little bit. So, I'm curious what was your inspiration to start it, and had you done podcasts before or did it just feel right, like this is the time to do something? >> I hadn't done a podcast before, but I had listened to a lot of shows. And the initial motivation of this is, at Microsoft where I work, they have this Meet Our Leader series, where they bring men and women in a leadership position. The audience is mostly women, and I was tuning in there by Skype, and there's 200 people listening to them plus people in the room, and they're asking questions about what's our business strategy or technical questions, so I'm like, women want to know about these things, and then in addition to that I noticed some women, technical women, they list on their website, I love giving talks, just not the diversity talk or the lady panel, I've given it several times, I just want to talk about cloud computing or the things that I work on. And then I looked if someone was doing this already, a show like this. I didn't find it, so I started it, and it helped that I listened to other shows. >> I mean I find when I talk to a lot of my women friends that are technical, sometimes CTOs and higher, and even down in programming, they don't want to, they just want to talk about what they're working on. They don't want to be the, that woman in tech on the panel, I've had a friend said to me privately over the weekend at a party, I don't, am sick and tired of being called and them saying, I need a woman on a panel. >> Yeah. >> I mean, it's kind of like a backlash, but they also feel obligated to do it. >> Yeah. There's kind of a new culture developing. Talk about that, and what that kind of conversation's like in your world. >> Well what I've heard, for example Sheryl Sandberg I think has said, there, we will reach a point someday where we won't be called a female CEO or a woman engineer, it would just be engineer. So, that's our goal, to just lose that label at someday, right now, the show has the label because I'm raising awareness of having them talk about technical topics. As more people hear about them, it's just going to be natural and normal like, sure I learned from Nicole about Kubernetes, and then men are also listening to the show, which I think benefits a lot the community. >> I have two daughters, one's in high school, one's in college, one's at Cal, and they're techies, they're science, they like science, not coding yet. Their mom doesn't want them to be like me and code, but, so they're, but they're-- >> Just give them the choice >> I said hey, do you do Cube interviews, it's also an option. But in their culture, when I ask them about this, they're like, we don't think about it. So there's a, at their level, they're all in school together and it's interesting, I think a time is coming now where the awareness is putting the old guard pressures away, there's still some bad behavior, no doubt about it, I see it everyday and it's being called out, thank god, but now it's just like, you're a person in tech. >> Exactly. >> So I think respect is the number one, respect for the individual is something that we always preach, independent of who the person is, male, female, whatever. >> Yeah, exactly, and we will reach that point soon, I hope so, where we lose the label. >> So you're 77 episodes in, I'm also a listener, I learned a ton from it, you have brilliant people on every week. I really admire you for that because I know how hard it is to produce a podcast. What are some of the things you didn't know before starting a podcast that like, oh wow, that takes more energy than it looked like at the time. >> That's a good point, yes. The very first few interviews that I did, I didn't take into account how the guest would respond. So I prepared the questions in advance, and then I would think, this is going to be a two-minute answer, but the person just ended up saying yes, no, or sure, that's a big problem, and I was counting on it to be more, so I needed to prepare in that aspect and what helps is just, if they've already given talks, just look them up on YouTube or find all their interviews they've done, just to get a sense of how they talk. There's also people that tend to give super long answers, and you need to prepare for that, how you're going to handle it. >> I noticed you had someone from Bitnami came by recently, was that Erica? >> Erica Brescia came on the show a few months ago, the COO of Bitnami, and in that episode we focused a lot on entrepreneurship, she came out of YC, so sort of building Bitnami to where it is, and today I interviewed the engineering manager of Bitnami, and she talked about Kube apps and all this security aspects. >> What are some of the innovations you're seeing in your interviews? Can you highlight some examples recently that jump out at you, that are, lot of innovation coming from these ladies, what are some of things that they've done? Shine the light on some of the awesome highlights from your guests. >> One of my favorite ones is Rachel Thomas, she works at Fast.ai, what she works on is bias in machine learning. Machine learning is about learning from your data, but I've heard, this woman at a conference bring it up, like, if I'm a minority, I'm a minority in the data. So you need to take that into account. So there's a lot of people working in the space. That was a really cool project I think. >> Data driven analysis. >> Yeah, but sort of, considering that bias that can be in that data, and make sure your data is better. So for example, it's a known fact that there's a lot of men in the technology field, so if you're going to get job recommendations, if a person like me, Mexican, I studied computer science but if I'm a minority in the dataset, maybe I'm not going to get the recommendation. I'm not saying that how it works, but that could potentially be an issue. >> It's a statistical fact. >> Yeah, but if you don't take that into account in your system, maybe women are not getting job recommendations, of openings. >> That's a good point. >> So, it brings up-- >> That's a really powerful observation, right, and I was curious, as a software engineer, software engineering is your craft and podcasting is your hobby, how has podcasting influenced your software engineering skills? Because ultimately that's the path you're going down career-wise. >> Well a big part of software engineering is about talking to your team and going to meetings, talking about solutions. Podcasting has help me a lot, improve my soft skills. For a period of time I was editing my own shows. One thing that I noticed is when I was talking to my guests, I'm listening to my recording, when I would say an idea, I would tend to lower my voice. So I noticed that, and then I said to myself, I'm probably doing this in the meetings at work, and then, I work-- >> What an amazing insight, right, like now you're seeing how you're presenting yourself in front of other people in technical ways and then you get to bring that into your work. >> Yeah, whenever I would say an idea I would just be like, what happens if we do this instead? That was like I have to-- >> That's a great example of self-awareness, right, I mean, everyone should do that, listen to their, look at their actions. >> Yes, so it helps with the soft skills. And it also helps if you're working in a certain area of software engineering, and you want to find out more about it, you can decide to do more shows on that and just share that with the community that women are working on this. >> It's great to see you have some Cube alumni like Erica on, we interviewed her on theCUBE at Google Next a few years ago. Share some coordinates, when does the show go out, when do you record it, does it ship on a regular cadence, share a little information. >> The show is released weekly. I publish Monday evenings, but I share it on social media on Tuesday mornings, so if you're subscribed, you would get it Monday evenings. >> Good for the week, running, on the bike, in the car. >> It's 30 minutes. >> Any video podcasting coming? >> I don't have any video, no. >> Lot more editing required, trust me on that one. Cool. What's the most exciting thing that you're working on right now? You have the podcast, which is a super cool hobby, great to get those voices out there, so congratulations. But at work, what are you working on? >> Yes, well like I mentioned earlier, I work on a team it's a team under Microsoft Research, a lot of it, we don't know what people working on there, but, my team works closely with product teams. So we're adding AI features to Outlook and Dynamics CRM. Just to increase the productivity aspect, in this sense. >> So you're bringing applied R and D to the product groups, mostly AI? >> Yes, yeah. >> What's the coolest thing in AI that you like? >> Oh wow, well I really like recommendation systems and things like that. >> All right, well thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, The Tech Women podcast here, they got a booth over there. Doing great interviews, here's at theCUBE we're doing our share. Two days, the second day of live wall to wall coverage. Be right back with more live coverage, in Austin Texas. You here the music, this is the big D, Texas here in Austin Texas. More live coverage, that's Dallas, we're in Austin. Be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid Spain. It's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid Spain everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering HPE Discover Madrid. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. Vaibhav Parmar is here. He's a partner with PwC. Good to see you again. >> Good afternoon thank you for having me here. >> Yeah you're welcome. So PwC obviously people know it as top consultancy, global capabilities, deep industry expertise but give us the update on sort of your role and where you're focused. >> Sure so I represent our technology consulting organization at PwC. And basically we work with our clients and our business partners in bridging the gap between the business solution and the business outcome that are intended and all of the enabling technologies that get to the outcome. And so our role is to design solutions, help implement and get them deployed, and make sure they work properly all with the objective of this technology has to be aligned to the outcome, the business results that are being intended. So we provide that traceability from the beginning to the end and we are the part of the consulting organization that focuses on the use of these new and emerging technologies for bringing that business realization. >> So anybody who's followed the tech business obviously has been following cloud and the impact that cloud has had on customers, on industry competition, on how companies partner, go to market, et cetera. And get and achieve outcomes. So hybrid cloud is all the rage. Hybrid IT, what does that mean to you? You hear it from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. What does it mean to PwC? >> Sure so I think the word hybrid has become very pervasive now as we think about technology, as we think about IT and there's several definitions to the word hybrid or the terminology hybrid IT. First it's the use of multiple types of technology environments to deliver the outcome. It could be a public cloud provided by one of the major cloud providers. It could be all of the on premise traditional data center technologies and infrastructure. It could be a combination of both using some third party intermediary in a co-location or in a hosted manner. But that's one part of the hybrid definition. The second part of it is actually being able to access services and capabilities that are built and innovated by the providers. So if you look at where Microsoft is going with Azure and all of the platform as a service capabilities that they've introduced into the marketplace, how do we take advantage of that so that we're not building individual lego blocks we're actually taking lego blocks that have been built and assembling them for some type of a business outcome. So hybrid is also taking advantage of the services that have been prebuilt and predefined so that we can fuse them together to get the result that we're looking for. And the third part of hybrid is what we're now starting to take advantage of with the public cloud providers which is we use what we need and only pay for what we need. In the traditional model, we buy this much and we may be used to using this much at some point in time, this much at some point in time. I think in the new and emerging model it's... We only want to pay for what we need and what we use whether it's in a public cloud manner or it's in our own data center manner. So hybrid is also that flexible consumption and economic model associated with all of this technology and the infrastructure. >> So what's the predominant conversation going on with customers today? Are they saying Vaibhav help me get to the public cloud. I don't want to have all this infrastructure in house or are they saying look I can't move everything to the cloud, but I want that cloud experience in my own operations. >> Yeah. >> Hybrid, hybrid IT obviously is the latter, but what's the dominant discussion with customers? >> So I think it starts often as the first because customers hear that hey everybody's talking about the public cloud. Maybe I need to be there. But then very quickly we come to the conclusion that a public cloud by itself may not be enough or adequate and we actually need to think about the hybrid model for a number of reasons. It could be for data governance and compliance reasons. There are jurisdictions and municipalities that have data residency requirements which make public cloud more difficult to use. It could be for performance reasons where a lot of the applications and the use cases are of a nature that an on premise environment will continue to make more sense. So very quickly we move to the point of view that a hybrid model is the more probable and practical model. But the conversation also is not so much that I want to be in the public cloud or I need a hybrid cloud, it's more so around here's the outcome and the business result that I'm looking to achieve. It could be that I want to get more features out to the market faster. It could be that I want to take advantage of innovation that's available to me so that I don't have to invest in that myself. It could be that my developers are antsy for all of this new technology that's available and they don't want to you know be encumbered by more traditional life cycle activities. All of that then leads to the decision or the discussion on okay well this sounds like a cloud oriented mindset. Let's talk about what is available to us to get more flexibility, to get more agility, to get the developers all the tools that they're looking for. And that's where we quickly start saying okay the public cloud has all of these offerings but again it may not be adequate enough and we need to complement that with an on premise environment and the hybrid model becomes a natural landing point. >> So the technologies and means to that outcome end. Okay so in thinking about the realities of hybrid cloud, hybrid IT whatever you want to call it, how do you actually... You named some attributes and some parameters. How do you actually bring those to the clients? How do you make it real? >> Sure. So I think we have to think about what is it that we need to make it real? Again if we think about it from a developer point of view they want quick access to environments so they can do testing. They can do code reviews, right. And the environment has to be stood up in a very timely manner. Today it takes time to request the environment, to do all of the configurations, make sure all the security processes are in place. But the developers want quick access because they want to turn that code over very quickly. So that's one part of what is needed to make this real. Let's think about the developers. The second part of it is around operations. We want this to be safe, we want this to be secure. We want this to be aligned to our corporate policies on regulation, on use, whatever it might be. And so we have to think about okay well what are all of those elements that make this compliant? That make this highly aligned to our security policies? The third part is the economic part of the equation. Again it's we want to only pay for what we want to use. How do we make that a reality in an on premise world where we're used to traditionally spending a lot of money at one time and then we're just amortizing that over time. Well in this new world we need that economic model as well. The ability to only pay for what we need yet still have the capacity that we're looking for. So when we think about what is needed to make this a reality, I think it's the infrastructure in an on premise environment has to look and feel very much like the infrastructure that's in the public cloud. Highly accessible, you can turn it on and turn it off when you need it. You can spin up these environments when you need it. And then you turn 'em off when you don't need them. It's the consumption model and the economic model. Again I'm only going to pay for what I need and not for excess capacity. So that capability has to be there as well. And then the third is the fact that developers are highly motivated by these innovative capabilities that are available in the public cloud model. So you know firewall as a service, storage as a service, how do we make that equally available in an on premise environment? The on premise world and the cloud world have to look very much alike from an infrastructure point of view, from an application and services point of view, and from an economic and sourcing point of view. That's what's needed to make it a reality. >> Is the delta so... That all sounds great and it's kind of consistent with what we see in our research. But when you start to peel the onion on what exactly goes in on prem, it isn't exactly like the cloud, but maybe it doesn't have to be. Does it just have to be substantially better than what was there before? And substantially mimic the cloud? With some other attributes that the cloud can't deliver. For instance data residency. >> Correct. >> And other locality stuff. Maybe governance, maybe not. I mean that's one you've got to really think through. >> Vaibhav: Sure. >> Some of the cloud guys would say hey we've got great security and great governance. >> Vaibhav: Sure. >> But does it map to my edicts as an organization? So there's some nuance there. But I guess my question is how close do you actually have to get to satisfy this sort of customer demand? How close to that cloud model? >> So again I think I would say we can try to match it from a... A CPU to CPU point of view or from a storage terabytes petabytes point of view. But again our observation and our experience in working with our clients is it's not so much at that level, it's more so at the, the behavior level. Again if I'm a developer, I don't want to wait two, three weeks for somebody to stand up an environment. I want to be able to stand it up in 30 minutes or an hour because my code is a microcode. It's not a big monolithic, waterfall oriented code anymore. So if I have a microcode that I want to quickly test, I want to be able to have the environment that's quickly accessible and when I'm done with it, it can go away. So it's those functional attributes that we have to match. How we technically match them, you know we can go in many different directions. I think one of the things that we're excited about in where HPE is going as an example, is with Azure Stack, right. The availability of Azure Stack in collaboration with Microsoft in an on premise environment looks and feels very much like the public cloud environment. With the ability to get the microservices that we're looking for. With the ability to spin up and spin down the environments in the timely manners that we're looking for. Those are the attributes that I think are what we see as our clients looking for. And behind the scenes, how we technologically enable them, it doesn't have to be a like for like match. >> Dave: Right. >> So the exciting thing is we're seeing the evolution take place. We're seeing the availability now. And it's time to start taking advantage of it. >> So we talked about hybrid cloud, but in many respects we're really talking about multi-cloud. That's really going to be the challenge. So I want to take you back a few years. And build a scenario and you tell me if you think this is where things are going to be. So a number of years ago, we had a lot of mini computer companies with a lot of specialized networks. And if you were running a plant, you would have all these little mini computers. And you'd say I want a single network for everything. And they'd say yeah, bridge my network, gateway my network, all this other stuff. And along came TCP/IP and flattened everything. >> Vaibhav: Sure. >> And that drove a lot of the mini computer companies into... I mean HP survived because they were one of the first ones to address and adopt TCP/IP in a big way. >> Vaibhav: Right. >> So here's the question. We're going to have hybrid cloud. But it's inevitable we're going to have multi-cloud. >> Correct. >> Because we're going to have Saas, we're going to have Iaas, we're going to have on premise, we're going to have Edge. And all these have to share attributes as you're saying of the cloud experience. >> Vaibhav: Right. >> How are companies going to start thinking about flattening all those different cloud options so they are not recreating the legacy of having to manage all this stuff but adding the transaction cost of having to do that through a contractual arrangement? >> Vaibhav: Sure. >> Where's this going to end up? >> Sure. So I think there's a couple of ways to think about that. If we think about the cloud model, you mentioned those terms infrastructure as a service, you have platform as a service, and you have software as a service. I think we're making a lot of progress on the infrastructure as a service layer becoming more and more flatter. And more and more consistent across the different providers. Consistent across your private cloud providers. Consistent across your public cloud providers. And what I mean by that. >> Give us an example. >> So an example would be as we look at where technologies like Open Stack and Open Shift are going. >> Peter: Okay. >> You know you're essentially turning all of this infrastructure into virtual elements, right. I want a computing resource whether it's this company's CPU or this company's CPU, it shouldn't matter. I'm looking for storage. Whether it's this company's storage or that company's storage, it shouldn't matter. I just need high speed storage, which might be flash, or I need more traditional storage because it's all static data which may be more disc based storage. We're becoming more and more flatter from that point of view. And behind the scenes, again, it could be a white box. It could be a branded box. It doesn't really matter to us anymore. So we're making good progress at the infrastructure layer and on top of it we've got good control mechanisms to be able to access that infrastructure function. Again through Open Stack type technologies that provide this control mechanism so you can provision, you can source, and you can manage and operate. As you get to the next level which is platform as a service, this becomes a little tricky because this is where you're getting into the application layer that's taking advantage of that infrastructure. And here you do have differences between the cloud providers. You know one cloud provider may choose to offer a set of platform services that are built one way whereas somebody else may do it a little bit differently. And so that does require some contemplation, right. Are we going to go down this path or go down this path? Because getting a firewall function from this provider... It still gives us a firewall function that this provider provides, but it's done a little bit differently. And that may not be always... You may not be able to make it flat. Because that's the nature of how the application layer is being built up. As you move to the software as a service layer, this is purely at the application layer now right? And there you will always have differences. Software as a service coming from one CRM provider or HR services provider will be different than another one. But what they've done is completely abstracted all of the underlying requirements. You don't need to worry about infrastructure. You don't need to worry about platform. You're purely sourcing the software function. So I think as, going back to your question of where will we get to when it comes to flattening all of these things, I think at the infrastructure layer we will get there because it's happening. At the platform layer, we may not get there because it's the nature of the business and the functions that these providers are developing and making available. And at the software layer, we won't get there because it doesn't make sense, right? We're going to focus on the business outcome and not necessarily the software itself. >> Well how about at the governance layer? My last question, at the governance layer across all these multi-clouds, the Saas, the platform as a service, the infrastructure, can we get to a common governance model? And why is your approach, you know talk to me as a customer, how can you help me get to that common governance model? Why is that approach better than sort of doing it on my own or doing it with a cloud provider? >> Sure so you bring up a great point. That despite the fact that we will have variances in the cloud providers and the cloud capabilities, yeah we do need some way to properly manage, run, orchestrate, operate, and govern all of these different multi-cloud scenarios that we will be in as a large enterprise. And so governance becomes a key tenant of how do we make this successful? And governance has a number of different definitions behind it. It's the operating model and the policies by why you provide access to the cloud services. So how do we make sure that a developer isn't just clicking a button, and then spinning up environments without the right controls behind it? Whether it's in this cloud provider or in this cloud provider. So putting in the policies and controls in place is one element of governance. The second part is having a consistent mechanism for connecting into those cloud providers through the right APIs and interfaces so that when somebody says I need additional storage, you're not having to create bespoke processes and technical interfaces between one provider and a different provider. You almost need an abstraction layer that provides all of the transparency in the back end so you can plug to provider A, provider B, but on the front end to the developers, to the architects it looks like I want more storage, right. And the machine will do all of the translation behind the scenes. So that's the second part of governance. The third part is on the operating model, on the operations itself. How do we make sure that the cloud provider is holding up to their commitments in terms of reliability, availability, throughput, all of these commitments that they've made so that we can get the performance results that we're looking for. Well provider A is going to have a different set of mechanisms to run and operate their environment compared to provider B. So governance also includes this element of looking at all of those different mechanisms by which the environments are being monitored and operated and giving us that consistent view so we know that yep, we're getting the services and the performance and the throughput that we're looking for and we've got a common set of processes and tools that allow us to interface into each of those providers on the back end. So we're not having to do all of this bespoke tools development, we can do it in a common way. And the fourth part to governance is ongoing controls. So how do we make sure that what we're expecting to use, what we're expecting to consume is aligned to the forecast. And that we're not deviating. If we are deviating, there's a good rationale behind it. Right, if the developers say over the next six to 12 months I'm expecting to use this much storage and this much compute because it's aligned to these business objectives, how do we make sure that's what ends up happening and that the developers aren't spinning up extra environments without the right discipline behind it? So that's a part of governance as well. >> Excellent. Well great framework Vaibhav. Thanks very much we've got to leave it there. We appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts. >> Absolutely. It was my pleasure thank you David. Thank you Peter. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. We're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, this is theCUBE. We're live from Orlando ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Our fifth knowledge, Jeff. Abhijit Mitra is here, the general manager of customer service management business unit. ServiceNow. Great to see you. >> Good, you too. >> Loved your keynote this morning. A lot of energy. CJ introduced you as enthusiastic as today as you were 20 years ago when he met you. >> And he said even more enthusiastic, it seems. >> Jumped off the stage, he got a good reason. >> Must be a solution. >> Business is good, you guys are rockin'. You got a hot, new business unit that you're managing. You started off your conversation with essentially saying customer service is broken. I mean, you had us all raise our hands at who's ever had a bad customer service experience. Every hand went up in the audience. Explain that a little bit. What's broken? >> So the thing is that you know, when you think about customer service today companies spend a lot of time and effort on customer service but not necessarily the end customers are seeing the result of that. And you know, when you talk to customers, I talk to a lot of customers asking them like, why is this happening for you. What they're telling us is that all the solutions that are available in the market today. Our solutions are really based on CRM systems and these are very well suited for allowing customers to contact through a multitude of channels we call home channel engagement. And then for support, agents to log their issues as cases. But they don't do anything more and as consumers, as customers, we are looking for solutions. And as customer service departments, customer service agents want to fix customer issues. So that is really where the problem is so the issues don't get fixed and customers keep on calling again and again and again. That's how case volume keeps on growing. >> But they always ask you at the end, are you satisfied with your service and will you hang on for the survey and give me a five please? That's the part that amazes me. That you solved none of the problems that I asked resolving. >> Gave me the NPS. Okay so how are you attacking this problem? >> So the way we're attacking this problem is, this is something that I didn't invent. It's something in which I learned, actually. Again after talking to a lot of customers after joining ServiceNow, what they told us is that they were looking for a service management approach and really the benefit of the service management approach is that it makes customer service a team sport. Because now not just customer service but every other department whether it's engineering or operations or financials, or legal or sales can come together on a common platform and the root cause of the customer issues are then assigned as tasks across enterprise. And once these root causes are fixed, then the issues are permanently resolved. And that reduces case volume. And that also includes customer satisfaction. >> You mentioned CRM based tools, people trying to use CRM based tools for customer service management, which essentially logs something. Logs customer service issues but doesn't give you the whole work flow. What's the difference? Can you give us the, you know CRM, why not CRM, why ServiceNow? >> Yeah like I said, it closes the end to end loop so just give me an example, just giving an example, is that in ServiceNow when customer has issues, these are logged as cases. And now, the customer support agent may be able to give a quick relief to the customer and close the case. And that's what you do with every other CRM system as well. And you do the same thing in ServiceNow. However closing the case is not necessarily the be-all and end-all because the root cause of this customer's issue may still be there. And that's how you assign these as problems to other departments. So that's really the fundamental difference. There is a follow up process that's happening. And follow up process may not just be problem, it may be also require a change of knowledge. It may require technician to go on-site through on-the-ground field service. So basically we close the loop. We allow companies to close the loop so that it's end to end customer service. >> Now I'm just curious, when you're out on the field talking to customers that are doing this, how receptive is kind of that next level of people and departments in terms of now being pulled more directly into a customer's role through you know, taking this service approach. Is it, are they happy? Is this new? Is it just a different way to execute what was inefficiently being done before? Because they don't, you know, I'm not in customer service. I'm in whatever department I'm in. Now you're asking me to help you resolve it because I'm part of the root cause. >> So underlying this is the philosophy that everybody in the company is responsible for customer service. And companies who do well as business actually enforce that philosophy in their different departments. And it is such companies who either have aspirations to transform themselves or who are already along this way that actually have an affinity towards the service management approach. Now in terms of the people who are actually working in the different departments, it's not that they're not working on their own systems anymore. Yeah those systems are there and for example, engineering would work with Gida, and there's nothing stopping them from doing that. But what is interesting here is that the work is getting assigned to them from customer service in the service management system of customer service management. That's really what it is. And that increases visibility. It's all about visibility. And reporting and other things. So that really shows, that okay, here are where the issues are and once you see the benefit of your impact on customer satisfaction, on Netomoto scores, on revenues, then it becomes very, very compelling. >> Abhijit, you guys don't break out the revenues of your customer service management business unit. I understand that. But it's a real business unit. It's growing. You got real customers. You showed some logos today. What can you tell us about the business, the business momentum. Any proof points that you're seeing with customers? >> Well we're been in the market for a little more than a year now. I would say a year because we just launched at this even last year. And in the last year, one year we've seen customers from all over the world at our best solutions. All over the world. We have customers now in 28 countries. Over ten big industrial categories. And many of our customers, early adopters will be live with system for a while. They were here. They are here at this conference. There are eighteen of our customers who are here. They're speaking their own sessions and they're sharing their own experiences with other customers. So it's been a tremendous adoption of the solution so far. >> Okay. And how about the impact that you've seen on their business? Can you share any results? >> Yeah absolutely, some of our customers, without naming names, have had up to 70% production in case volume just because of self service, and case deflection. Another customer had a 40% improvement in their Promoter scores. And these are unbelievable statistics. And a third replaced a 50 different customer service portals. And 15 CRM systems with ServiceNow's customer service management. So these are just unbelievable results that our customers have achieved in the last one year. >> You call them light speed pioneers. >> Abhijit: That's right. >> That's the term you guys are using, light speed. But so you know, your customers don't say hey call you, Abhijit, I need to move at light speed. What are they saying that you guys, of course, translated into that rubric of light speed? >> It's really about business transformations. So most of the, many of our customers, I would say, are looking for a better way to run customer service. They have challenges in either improving customer satisfaction. The customers are telling them that your service is very disconnected. Your SMAs aren't being met. So either it's mostly that or reducing costs because they have too many different systems. Different business units who do, work in different ways. So it's about standardization. It's about increasing efficiency. Do more with less. Automate more. And it's also about the effectivity. So, if you complete the work, you complete it well. It's done. >> Yes, being able to reduce volumes like that is impressive. Especially given the amount of data that we have. The amount of complexity that there is out in the world today. You hear a lot of talk at these conferences about IOT. You know, that's going to create more data, more devices, more problems for customers. What are your thoughts about IOT and the impacts it has on customer service? >> I think IOT is going to force customer service to be proactive. And to some extent, IOT is an opportunity to be proactive because now you have access to data that you've never had before. Now you can analyze the data in real-time. You can find out any anomalies and for which you need to take an action. And if you can predict an outage, then you can essentially take action to avoid that, right? So IOT opens up totally new opportunities for customer service to be proactive now. >> Okay, so we're live. >> They're shutting us down here. >> As always, we shut down the expo hall. It's kind of a CUBE tradition. >> We're going to go way after. The lights will be out but we'll still be going. >> The forklifts will be driving in. >> So hearing a lot today about Jakarta. CJ was explaining sort of, the process that you guys use starts with the customer. You guys try to understand what the needs are and it comes back through the business units into the platform and then you guys take it back and reapply it. What are some of the things in Jakarta that you are going to be applying in your future releases for your customers? >> So one of things that I'm very excited about Jakarta is our communities product. And this is something that were are announced today, we're releasing in Jakarta. Now with communities, it increases the level of engagement that customers have with companies because it allows the companies to provide a totally personalized experience. And think about it. In your own personal lives, when you look for help, you turn to people who you trust the most, right? Your friends and your family. Similarly as customers, they would like to turn to people who they trust which is like, other customers like them, right? So that's why communities is a big step for us. Essentially. And giving that features to our customers to have a better experience for their customers. >> So how would that work? It's a feature within the platform. Your customers will then create communities and cultivate communities? >> Yeah, essentially it's a new product and we just, you just turn it on and then you administer that community. You monitor that community. You rule it out. So our customers would use it to create their own communities for their customers. That's how it would work. >> What are some of the objectives you have for the business unit? What are some of the things we should watching as observers, in terms of indications of success, momentum? >> Really there is only one goal. Which is for our customers to be our most outspoken references. That's really the only goal that I have for this business unit. And 18 of them are here today. They are speaking on our behalf and I hope to see many many more of them in this conference next year. Customer satisfaction as they say is one thing. Customer loyalty is everything. >> Jeff: In public. >> Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and congratulations on the success you've had. >> Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Alright keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest before the lights go out. ServiceNow Knowledge. It's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)