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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector's Summit Online. We've done this show for many years, of course, 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, a very good partner of AWS's, from Salesforce, it's Casey Coleman. She is the Senior Vice President of Global Government Solutions, once again, with Salesforce. Casey, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, 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 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 break that down into actionable steps and really transform what they're doing to server their constituents and citizens better. >> Excellent, so of course, at the Public Sector Show a lot about leverage of GovCloud and the other services, all of the compliance that goes into that. Ahead of this event, you had a new update at Salesforce in partnership with AWS. Talk to us about it's the Government Cloud Plus. So what's entailed there? And tell us how AWS and Salesforce work together to launch this solution. >> Yeah, thanks Stu. We are so excited to announce the launch of GovCloud Plus which is Salesforce's Customer 360 CRM platform that runs on Amazon Web Services in the GovCloud in their GovCloud environment and we've just received a provisional APO provisional authority to operate from the FedRAMP Program office at the high security level. So we are announcing GovCloud Plus is FedRamp High, ready to go, generally available and ready for customers. >> Excellent, maybe bring us inside. What's different about how government agencies leverage Salesforce. For most companies out there, Salesforce is a critical piece of how they manage not only their sales force but 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. It's case management, it's benefits delivery, it's communications and outreach, it's all the same kind of functions that are necessary for commercial organizations to thrive. And so that's what we do, we translate that into government-ready terms so that they can serve child welfare, health information delivery, patient records, farmer information, all kinds of services for constituents of the public sector. And they might call them customers, they might call them citizens, residents, constituents, but it's those they serve. >> Yeah, well one of the things about Salesforce is, as you said, it's not just a sales tool, there's so much. You've got a very broad and deep ecosystem there as well as people that know how to use it. They get underneath the covers. When I think of not only is Salesforce the first company that I probably thought of and heard about that it was SaaS, but if you talk about the API economy, if you talk about how things integrate, Salesforce does a lot for developers. So I know one of the other pieces you had that everybody knows Dreamforce, maybe not as many people know the TrailheaDX Show that Salesforce just had for developers, so bring us a little bit inside what 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 announce a lot of exciting, new developments, including Salesforce Anywhere which his really bringing an immersive voice, video, and chat environment to collaborate in the developer environment and in 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 at a pace of change in the commercial world. All of us shop and bank, and live on our mobile devices, and governments are being faced with the same expectations from the public to do anytime, anywhere, personalized service delivery. It's the (audio distortion) rapid development environment that Salesforce offers gives the public sector IT teams the ability to quickly respond to changing conditions like the COVID-19 pandemic, and rollout applications that are not only fast to develop and deploy, but they also benefit from being in the GovCloud environment, and so the compliance is already built in. And that's another key challenge that often arises, the public sector (audio distortion) is not only fielding new applications but making sure they're secure, and so with Salesforce, it's all built in. >> Yeah, it sounds a lot of system similarity to what we hear in the private sector. Of course, the balance between what IT is doing and how we enable developers. Of course, security, you mentioned, is super important. Anything, specifically, from the government sector that you'd say might be different from what we see in the general enterprise world? >> You know, the 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 has the best in class commercial tools to make sure they are providing world class security for their constituents and their mission. And that's one reason we're so excited to be partnering with AWS on GovCloud Plus because Amazon AWS has already deployed the FedRAMP High version of their infrastructures and service, and so by riding on top of that, we inherit all of those existing controls, add our own FedRAMP High controls, and our customers benefit from the best in class security from two of the most trusted names in the Public Cloud. >> Great, you know, absolutely, GovCloud has been a real boon for the entire industry when it talks about how government agencies are leveraging Cloud. You talked about sitting on top of GovCloud, the Government Cloud Plus leverages some of the certifications and the like. Can you bring us inside a little bit? How long did this effort take to get? Anything specific in the integrations or functionality that you might be able to highlight about this joint effort? >> Yeah we've been working on it for some time now, because it's essential to really think from the ground, up. And this is really not just re-platforming 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 tech integration, it's a strategic partnership too, and you're going to see a lot more announcements coming from both of us about the integration, the capabilities we're bringing together. And a lot of the work we're going to be doing continue to bring innovation to our joint customers. >> Excellent. You made reference to the pandemic. What are you hearing from your customers? How does this new offering impact them and support them both, today, as they're reacting to what happens as well as going forward, as we progress? >> Yeah, Stu, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic really exposed a fault line in government programs that weren't scaled to meet this demand. We saw Websites crashing when people were going to them, and just overwhelming them with questions about the health situation. We saw benefits programs that only worked when people could come in and sign up and apply in person, and obviously, with government offices shut down, that wasn't an option. And a lot of government workers were sent home to tele-work without much notice, and their infrastructure just couldn't support it. And so just in general, there was a lot of breakdowns along the way. But the good news is that a lot of public sector organizations and programs are making that pivot quickly. For example, we worked with one state agency that experienced a 400% spike in demand for applications for unemployment benefits. It makes sense. People are out of work, they need unemployment benefits, but they just couldn't respond to that kind of surge in demand. So we worked with them along with AWS and in less than a week, stood up a virtual contact center with chatbot so they could meet the demand and provide those vital services for their residents at a time of real need. So there's a lot to be 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 and transformation and I think it's really going to make a fundamental shift in how we reimagine government in the future. >> Yeah, Casey, you're absolutely right. This pandemic has shown a real spotlight on what works and what doesn't. And I think about not only government, but a lot of how finances work. Oftentimes, you have your plans in place, you have your budgets in place, you have funding cycles, so what are Salesforce and Amazon doing to help those customers? You talk about they have to ramp things up. Oh wait, were 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 short-term and long-term? Are you seeing some change in how people think about their planning and how they can be ready for what change happens out there? >> Yeah, one of the big findings from this while experience, not just in the public sector, but across every industry, has been that digital transformation may, in the past, have been viewed as a nice-to-have. It is now really the only way to connect and serve both the customers and employees, and so digital first, digital transformation is rapidly becoming an urgent imperative because this situation is not going away overnight. And even when we get back to some state of normal, it's going to be different. And so digital first and being able to move quickly to rollout 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, well Casey, I'll let you have the final word what you want people to have as their takeaway of Salesforce's participation in the AWS Private Sector Online Event. >> We are just so excited to be here with AWS to jointly come to our customers with GovCloud Plus, the FedRAMP High authorized environment for the best in class CRM, 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 soon. It's not only a technology integration, it's also a strategic partnership, and we think our customers are, 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 in the future. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, be sure to stay tuned. Lots more coverage of theCUBE at AWS Public Sector Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios today on this kind of ongoing leadership conversation, reaching out to the community during these crazy times, we're two months into the COVID crisis, and we're excited to have two of our favorite guests, one is a frequent guest, Greg Sands, he's the founder and managing partner of Costanoa Ventures, Greg, great to see you. And he brought along Martina Lauchengo, also from Costanoa, Martina, great to see you, is this, I think your first time on theCUBE, right? >> This is my first time, nice to be on, Jeff. >> Great, and Greg, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here. >> So let's get into it, I mean, part of this conversation came from a lot of efforts that you guys are putting into really getting information out to the community, and I think if there's a silver lining and there's a couple here and there, that have come from this, is that everyone is really trying to help each other out. So you've come up with something you call virtual office hours. What is that all about, is that new, or is that just kind of a greater emphasis now that most people are working from home? >> Well, we've also always done a great deal of work with our portfolio on how to deal with changing times, how to graph, go to market, both sales and marketing onto what are often product-led and founder-led companies, and in a time of crisis, we felt like it was important to share that knowledge more broadly, and to set up a venue where we can interact with the broader startup community, and hopefully in the process of doing that, we're useful. >> I just saw a quote I think today or yesterday, from Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford, and it was "I didn't have the playbook for the global pandemic," in terms of preparation and being able to pull something off the shelf to help work through this, so as we've gone through mid-March, just this immediate, full stop, unanticipated light switch moment, now we're two months in, what are the specific actions you've been giving to your portfolio companies, and how has that changed over the course of the last 60 days? >> Well I'll take a first stab, and Martina, feel free to jump in if you've got additional thoughts, I think the first piece, going back, six, seven, eight weeks, was we all had that hair on fire moment, where you just have to understand where you are. And so I think that sense of situational awareness, and how does it affect your customers and your market, and figure out if the basics of the business, including revenue rate and what's guaranteed and what's not and expense base and planned growth trajectory are any of those foundational elements what you thought they were going to be, and readjust them, and re-plan, so almost every company went through two or three complete planning cycles, trying to understand where we are. And I think also trying to do that with a sense of authenticity and transparency and humanity, 'cause you're dealing with a company, and people's careers and people's jobs. So now I think we're more at the place where we understand the foundation, and you can more reasonably plan for the future. >> Yeah, I'd say I think what I've observed in our portfolio is people are through the shock, and that's also true for all of the customers that they're trying to reach out to, and the big adjustment is, what does our new normal look like? Jeff, before we started we were talking about how everyone has moved digital and virtual, so people did that initially because they had no choice, but now they're looking at the data they've been collecting saying "Gosh, should this mean that we should no longer do "physical events because we're having five or 10x "the amount of registration that we did before." Our digital channels are way more successful than they were in terms of outreach and awareness raising, and so everyone's looking at this moment, and saying "How should be adjust our new normal, "even post-COVID era, and do things differently "as a result of what we're learning from this time "where we have to be constrained in what we--" >> Right, so Greg, you had an interesting quote in an article recently talking about the harder challenge is going to be for people that are on this blitz scaling run, and you've talked about there's kind of two paths, there's growth at all costs, and then there's growth within a reasonable plan, clearly, if you were growth at all costs, and you were Uber or Lyft or one of these types of operations where your revenue just got turned practically off, really significant challenge, so as you look at it from an investor point of view, and what is a good rate of growth, what is the way to build a company versus this hellbent hair on fire, grab global market share at absolutely no, just spend spend spend spend spend? >> Yeah, and so of course this is independent of the pandemic, I think it's the case that there was this orientation towards blitz scaling, towards we're going to grow as fast as we can, and one of the things, if you just think about a biological metaphor, growth is expensive, growth takes a ton of capital, a ton of hiring, a ton of on-ramping, and the like, and you do all of that at very rapid speeds and you tend to cut corners, have people poorly trained, drop balls on the floor and the like, so I think the, generally speaking, our experience is that our portfolio companies, partly due to our guidance, partly 'cause we've selected each other, have been, look, we've got some very fast growers, we've got companies like Alation that have been here a lot, that have created brand new categories, but they've done it with bounce, and they've done it efficiently, and that's always what we preach, it's always what we've believed in, and I think our companies are in much better shape as a result. Martina and I both grew up as young athletes, and one of the things that you learn as an athlete is you got to be balanced, you don't know if your next step is going to have to be forward, back, left or right, and you've got to have all your sensors out and be paying attention, to figure out where you ought to go, and if you're all in one direction, you can only go forward. And when the environment changes, you're toast. >> Yeah, it's really wild to see, 'cause who ever plans for literally a binary turnoff of revenue stream, and we're seeing it in hotels and in obviously conferences and airlines and a whole bunch of industries, so it's pretty challenging. But for a lot of people, business still goes on, and Martina I want to jump into it with you, 'cause you've been a marketer in tech for a long time, but man oh man, the conference itself, the physical events, whether it be a big giant one like AWS re:Invent which had I don't know, 50,000 people, it's going to outgrow Vegas, to smaller events, those are no longer an option, yet people are still delivering products, they still have messaging to get out, they still want to touch their community. How are you kind of looking at the new normal around marketing, both for the portfolio companies but also a little bit of a broader view? >> So I'll start with the broader view, I'd say in general, Dreamforce is canceled, AWS, I mean all these things have shifted so massively and all the major companies have simultaneously made that shift, and I think one thing that they are all seeing is, they are getting a lot more registration, they're getting a lot more in engagement, this happened at Atlassian where, they rapidly made the shift to virtual, and what they saw was because they had that many more people participating in events, that they had a much bigger social bump, because that many more people were talking about what was happening simultaneously, and it also became this virtuous loop, where more and more people were talking, it was creating this intrigue, where people wanted to participate and see what was happening. So, I think people are looking at that and saying "Well how does that affect our business, "and how does that increased potential "for evangelism actually positively convert towards "a future customer, or more people talking about us "in a positive way?" So this is where they're looking at what they've put out in market and seeing what they should learn from that and I'd say that's the number one recommendation I have for all of our companies is, look at what the data is telling you, and trying to extract what your lessons are about this to what your ongoing normal should be from a marketing perspective. >> Yeah, it's such a good tip, there was so much focus at the beginning of this about what you cannot do in digital, you can't have the hall room chat or you can't have the water cooler chat, but on the other hand there's so many things you can do in digital that you can't do in the physical. And by separating content generation versus content publishing, if you will, and then content consumption, and those no longer have to happen at the same one hour window where there's an available conference room for a breakout session at the Sands on Tuesday at six, that I can't see 'cause I want to see somebody else's conference Tuesday, I mean there's so many things that you can do, and kind of just democratization of the access to the conference, if you don't have the means, the time, or just the ability to get on a plane and fly to Vegas or to New York or San Francisco, so there's a lot of stuff you can do in digital that's different, it's just not the same as the physical space, what are some of the other things that you're finding that are kind of unique and novel and actually really great? >> Well, one thing that you talked about is it relates to events, it's not just the attendees being there, it's also the talent. A lot of times you would want talent, but they're not available because they have a conflict or they can't accommodate that travel, a guy participating in a conference that's based out of London, and they are having people that it doesn't matter what time zone you're in, because they're like "Oh, you can prerecord it, "you can do it live if you choose," and so there's a flexibility that just wasn't there before, certainly as it relates to events. But in terms of novel stuff, people are reexamining things that they might have charged for in the past, so one company in our portfolio used to charge for their certifications, and now they've made it free and they've had over 1000 signups in the last couple of weeks, and so that was a small program that they ran and it's now the single largest generator of new leads for them, because they reexamined it and said "Well what assets do we have "and how can we use them differently?" And so I'd say it's not so much that people are doing monumentally new things that they haven't tried before, but they're examining the quiver of assets they have at their disposal and they're saying "Well how can we deploy them differently?" And they see the two things that are really bubbling up are you just have to do things in an excellent way, number one, and number two, you really have to do it in that much more empathetic way. >> Right, right. And Greg, I want to go back to you, go ahead. >> Jeff, if I can add two things, I think there are some things that it's worth noting that digital is uniquely good at. So one of which is inferring intent, which you don't necessarily get in the context of conferences, and the second is that as companies have dug deep and realized that they really need to take full advantage of their assets, one of the things that we find people really trying to do is to marry first party data, their own data about their own customers and their own interactions, with third party data which includes that intent data, and when you combine those together in a business to business marketing context, you can really do extraordinary things, and many companies have been under-optimized on that because they could rely on going to events and traditional face to face marketing activities. >> Well, and to me there's so many things, I mean conferences were designed in an age where there was no telephone, and you sent letters, and the speed of communication was weeks, and so that's how you had to get people together, but today, 2020, when information flows, it seems so waterfall to me to kind of squeeze everything in, especially for a big company, into three days in Las Vegas, in terms of all your product announcements, all your partner announcements, all these things, it seems completely against the trend of more of a DevOps world, which is if product group A is ready to roll, why do they have to wait to that date, and wait for product B and everyone else, not to mention that if you're some esoteric cool thing that gets lost in the sea of product announcements and press releases and events, does it really make sense? What we're seeing is there's certainly an opportunity for what's called a rally moment, whether that's a keynote or introducing a new CEO, or we want to have this moment where we have singular focus, but as soon as that's open, let the content be free, let people find what they want, when they want, and to your point Martina, if people want to self-organize, you can actually have almost infinite long tail sessions, if you give people a platform in which to organize, versus being this one way conduit of information which is the old way of working, but not really the new way in which we find, consume, and learn about things in 2020, it just seems so antiquated when we actually take a step back and think of how do we get our information today, and it's not wrapped up in one big giant splash moment. >> Well Jeff, I want to pull on a thread a little bit that you just brought up, which is that the old way of doing things, and I'd say old average, just there's no space for it right now, so I'm going to read through five things that were in my inbox this morning that went into the auto-delete pile, which is what everyone does every morning. "Tomorrow's webinar," "Only three days left, "have you registered yet?" "This week in review." So those were the bad ones that went to the automatic delete pile, that's the average run of the mill stuff that all of us get every day, and I hope everyone that's listening to this stops sending them. And here's the ones that stood out, "Why every startup CEO needs a chief of staff," so something that was specific, it told me more concretely why I should engage with what was being sent to me, it didn't tell me if it was an article or webinar, but it engaged me with content, and if you just look at Netflix as a platform, as an example of how they're very very content-forward, and they're trying to find what specifically is going to get you engaged, all the way down to the thumbnail level, that's what we are needing to do as marketers, where we're taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of our customers, where they are, and trying to create genuine connection with whatever it is we're trying to bring to them. >> With data, right, and you can AB type and all the stuff that Netflix does, it's so funny to me, the answers are all around us, we're just not looking in the right place, but I want to shift gears a little bit for marketing and talk about leadership, we've been doing a lot of these around leadership, 'cause leadership is so important. And really the uncertainty, more even the tough times, I think it's the uncertainty that really challenges people, and you mentioned something Greg, earlier, about really the transparency, and I think there's so much to be learned in terms of being human in your leadership, showing vulnerability, admitting, I'm a little scared too, I don't know what's happening, no one has been through this type of inexperience before, so from just a leadership perspective, again, what are you sharing with your portfolio companies, how are you advising people who are in this position, because they're probably nervous and uncomfortable as well, to lead these teams and to help them through this time of uncertainty. >> Well, it's an amazing and uncertain time, and frankly everybody is challenged by it, nobody's been through it before, even those of us that went through 2008 and 2000 and 2001, the ecommerce blowup in 9/11, this is different, it has a different cause and a different set of effects. I know in my case I spent the weekend rereading Jerry Collona's book, "Reboot," which talks about leading from the heart, and leading with transparency, and leading with authenticity, and what we've been trying to do in working with our founders is one, listen, and be there, and be a support, and recognize that we don't know all the answers either, and so we're in it together. Second is to try to give them the confidence and the room to do that in leading within their teams, and then the third is to focus on a couple of things that I think are particularly important, which is as I said before, situational awareness, you got to understand where you are, and the second is focus. So one of the things that everybody is finding, and we find it true with people's customers, too, hey, we were going to do five things, now we're going to do two. So companies have got to narrow the scope, they got to figure out how to be in the top two for their customers that have to get done. And so you got to do that from a strategic and execution perspective, you got to lead your team to do it, and in order to rally around it, people have to understand the facts, they have to trust you. And they have to know that your heart's in it. >> Yeah, it's almost interesting, the fact that everyone is separated, we have to communicate more, we have to communicate more frequently and we had Darren on from GitLab talking about the variety of types of communications beyond just your standard staff meeting and project updates to things, like social things and happy hours and these things, so it almost feels like because we're forced into scheduled communication, it's almost happening more frequently because you have to make sure it does, then maybe some of the ad hoc stuff that might happen in the hallways are on a more informal basis. You find that happening, are people really stepping up the scale in which they're making sure they're touching base with their team members? >> I'm definitely seeing that throughout our portfolio, so people are doing things like scheduled game nights that would've been more ad hoc in the past, or specifically scheduling water cooler time, or one of our companies has been doing specific meetings and get-togethers of parents, how do you maintain your full time job and actually coparent or figure it out while your kids are doing whatever it is that they need to and being a part of home, and working at home, and so they've definitely scheduled more, but it's really been about acknowledging the whole self that is part of this unique time, and that everybody's in the same boat, I think that is something that is really unique about this is that it is a global phenomenon, and so it's not sort of like oh, this country or this state or this industry is facing this, all of us are facing this, and so to your point, Jeff, about what does it mean to be human and to connect, it is a time in which we are uniquely capable of connecting with one another, and we all have the same way to do it, I meet a bunch of new people every week, and now we all start off actually seeing each other's homes. Saying "Oh, what is that, what book are you reading?" And so it's almost an invitation to have a more personal connection and I've definitely found despite the fact that we're doing all these meetings virtually, I actually feel more connected to a lot of people than I would have normally. >> Law of unintended consequences, you just never know. So last topic to shift gears before I let you go, we're still in the business of investing, and as I'm sure you're seeing or starting to see, now that the shock and awe's kind of over, and people are starting to define new opportunities, basically, to reassemble assets, to reassemble delivery methodologies, to reassemble business plans, and I wonder, as you look forward now to your next wave of investments, assuming everything's medium settled with the current portfolio, how is your investment thesis changing a little bit, what are you seeing in kind of a rejiggering of assets and business models that are going to take advantage of this new normal, 'cause sure enough, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people in garages right now that are building those companies based on this new normal that are going to be leaders down the road. What are you thinking of, how are you thinking about what's going to happen later this year, and in 2021 and beyond? >> So, we absolutely are continuing to invest, and so for quick context, we're seed and A up and down the stack of enterprise technology, so think of it as applied AI and the infrastructure that supports it, much of which is data and machine learning infrastructure, but also cybersecurity and DevOps, and I think for us, one of the things that showed up right away was this idea of, we're all going to work in more distributed fashion. And I think many versions of that were "Oh, we've got a new work from home app," or the like, and we haven't actually found that those are the difference makers, what we think is that these business processes that tie together application logic and data and analytics and a collaboration layer, like in Alation, so that you can collaborate on your data, you can collaborate while you're performing an absolutely critical business function, and what used to be tribal knowledge that was passed around in the halls is embedded in software, and cataloged. And so we're seeing lots of opportunities to do that, both in workflow context and in the context of data scientists and data engineers working on the data stack and developers in and around the DevOps ecosystem, that we think are really interesting and acknowledge the fact that you can't assume that all the people working on this application are sitting in the same building, and get to talk around the water cooler. So they talk about it in the application. >> I just want to add a little something to what Greg said in terms of the things that we're seeing, really the importance of data right now, people are trying to refactor all of our operating plans, they're trying to say "What is this actually doing to our demand," and so the accuracy of data and the quality of it is more important than it ever has been, and being able to do that wherever it exists, if it's frontline, inside of a dashboard, if it's cleaning up stuff that's coming out of a data lake, people are investing in that infrastructure right now because they have the capacity to, so that's a place where we've seen I'd say probably the least amount of change, and then the other thing that this has revealed are gaps in the technology infrastructure that wasn't available, so for example supply chain, being able to identify all the elements of the mask, or the ventilator supply chain. Those systems were massively disconnected and extremely manual, and so people are looking at that saying there are some gaps that still need to be closed in a big way with infrastructure and technology, and those are some areas that we're seeing very interesting and illuminated as a result of this time. >> Yeah, I mean to certainly, what we've been talking about really is just a light switch moment, in terms of digital transformation and whether that is working from home, which is probably the top focus for a lot of people in the short term, or whether that's in education, suddenly everyone from kindergarten teachers to professors at Stanford had to suddenly learn to teach online with absolutely no preparation, no time to think about it, and then up into the data layer as well, because it's just this ongoing democratization and now with distributed teams, you are forced now to make that data available to them, really as a process as much as an objective to get it into hands to do more things, so certainly a digital transformation accelerant, like nobody expected, there's no more time to prepare and plan, it's ready set go, now. So we see it over and over again. Well thank you so much for coming on, thank you for sharing the information, just kind of last point, one of the things that I think is so interesting about today's time is it used to be the power was held by the people that had the information. And really what we've seen, and what you guys support is now the information is infinite and it's everywhere, and you should be able to find it. Now it's more about who shares the information, who's a trusted source to filter, to find the right information, and who can I go to who I know's going to give me stuff that's relevant for me, and I think you guys have really shown time and time again that in sharing information and helping others to do better, you get this multiplier effect that you wouldn't get if you're just worrying about yourself, and I think it's such a modern way to think about empowering people, and as you said, it even makes you more powerful and more successful, so really a very different way than it used to be in terms of everybody kind of holding the information, and who had the keys, had the information, that's completely turned up on the side of it's head. >> That is absolutely right, and we're thrilled to be here talking about it with you today, thanks for your continued support of the community and trying to help good people get the word out. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> Thanks for doing exactly what you're talking about, which is getting the right information out to people so they can be better. >> All right, well Greg, Martina, stay safe, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully next time we'll see you in person. You're watching theCUBE Conversation, Jeff Frick here in Palo Alto studio, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment. We have Brian Bohan, he is the Director of the Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group Global Lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, Managing Director Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group. Oh my word (all laugh) how big are your business cards? >> Exactly >> Well welcome for both of you Thanks for coming on the show. So the relationship between AWS and Accenture is now in its 13th year. I want to hear from both of you, what's new what's exciting about the relationship and I'm going to start with you Chris. >> Yeah, so it's been 13 great years. Four years since we used the AABG, we use the acronym to make it easier to say >> Rebecca: Okay, thank you, and now you tell me. >> The Accenture AWS Business Group. So the partnership continues to get stronger, continues to grow, we've doubled down on the partnership this last year, really increasing our investment and our focus. We've done in the last year really a lot of focus around industries. So we continue to build our teams we continue to grow on the number of certified resources we have. And our clients are just eatin' that stuff up. So it just gives us more opportunity to grow. >> Ryan? >> Yeah, I mean I think you can see, it's consistent with what you see here at the event and also with Andy's keynote. The emphasis on enterprise and as we see large enterprises really accelerating to AWS, I think that's what we're seeing as well. At any given time we have hundreds of projects going on around the world, but when we formed the business group in 2015 it was really around driving really large transformations with customers and what we're seeing now is customers at the place of maturity and willing to take, embark on those journeys and I think we're really well set up to make that happen together as a partnership. >> So as you kind of enter into this new phase now of kind of working with companies, are you seeing any kind of increasing specialization in the types of companies you're working with? >> Yeah, no absolutely. So I think that's why the answer's really exciting. So I think if you look across this is fairly typical. We started out in a lot of horizontal capability areas and they're still incredibly important to us around data and SAP, mass migrations and these are areas we continue to invest in and we tend to get even more specialized as we do so, but we're also seeing this last year is getting more industry focused. So as we move up the stack and we start talking about cloud native development, we start talking about machine learning and analytics, customer care has become a really interesting thing. So you see a lot of companies, whether it be tire companies, CPG companies, moving from products companies extending into services, it completely changes how they think about customer care and how they need to understand their data and understand their customers. So necessarily as you move up that stack, you have to have that deep domain expertise and so what's fantastic is we have great technology, we're building out some teams with domain expertise, but Accenture has got thousands of people with this expertise. So it's again this kind of combining of strengths that we're able to bring to the table for our customers. >> Yeah we saw when we started the group, we knew Accenture's strong position in industries, right. Our deep industry knowledge, knowing those industries really well we knew they would come together at some point, the technology and industry. And we've seen that over the last 12 months really start to take effect. Companies are now specifically thinking about how they leverage Amazon for their specifically industry solutions and capabilities, and we're just going after that. >> So Andy Jassy in his fireside chat this morning talked about innovation at AWS and he said, we're a big company but we need to think of ourselves as a big startup. So here are two big companies, how do you innovate together what is your relationship like? I mean you said it's 13 great years, but what's your creative process? >> So I'll take a stab. So first of all, I'll say that in recognition of that we actually on our team, and this year into some light of and Chris mentioned a doubling down the partnership, we're growing the team we have on the AWS side to support the partnership. And with some of the things we're doing in addition to adding industry folks, is I've added a full time team to focus on innovation. And it's innovation with customers but it's also all the mechanisms we use. So if you think about with AWS, a lot of customers come to us and want to understand how does Amazon innovate, what is our culture of innovation? So at Amazon we have a program that we've rolled out around that. Accenture also has many mechanisms around innovation. Small teams driving very agile projects, and it's our job, that team's job and my team to go around and pull the best of breed across the world and make sure that we're delivering that to clients every single day. And so more and more clients want to see not just the outputs, but they want us to imbed in their teams and also show them by doing. So yes, give us the deliverable but we want to build the muscle around what Accenture and AWS can do together around innovation. So that's more and more what we see. >> Yeah and we follow the Amazon principles, right. The principles that Andy talks about that are core to innovation there, we follow them. From the beginning when we started this partnership we started working backwards, what we wanted it to be in five, ten years and we follow those. So our teams act that way, they work that way, they follow those day to day out and it makes us, it allows us to integrate well into AWS into the AWS people around the world. For Accenture it gives us, our people a insight into how AWS does it, and then we can share that with our customers as well. >> Interesting, so Chris you've been doing this a long time. Right, okay and so, and you guys have been collaborating for a long time, when Amazon first started there was a whole new breed of companies they were coming out, we'd call kind of born in the cloud. Companies that were agile and fast moving, taking advantage of a lot of the technology stack to do things that a lot of legacy companies couldn't do. Now we're starting to see what has been termed kind of companies being reborn in the cloud, right. Older, leg--, you know older companies now that are transforming moving their workloads to the cloud and then getting new types of capabilities. I'm wondering in your work, are you seeing some examples of companies that are kind of undergoing that kind of transformation? >> Yeah absolutely. I think we see what we would call an epic disruption of these companies right. It's happening, it's been happening for awhile. I think they've gotten, they've looked at Amazon now more as not just a cloud, and not just infrastructure, going up the stack and doing that. So they're going through these transformations and we see them balancing between moving their workloads to AWS versus innovating. And also changing, they've realized they have to change the organization to go along with that. It's just not moving and acting in the same old way so we're seeing agile and cloud come together to drive that transformation. So I would say almost every customer we're seeing today is going through that transformation in some form or fashion >> Yeah, I would say that's also a really interesting change Again, years ago we were, if you were focused on a mass migration today, the conversation is if you're a pharmaceutical company how do you get your pipeline of therapeutics out to market faster, right? How do you start thinking about patients differently or patient services, the data you have on those patients how do you integrate further into the value chain and to providers and payers and get that information. So, and what happens, what you find is to be able to deliver say precision medicine and pharmaceutical you need to rethink about your data, then you have to look at your application portfolio and say, okay what does that need to look like to support this completely new paradigm serving our patients? And that's what ends up pulling the workloads through to support these new business initiatives. So I think that's a bit of a difference that we've been seeing as well in the last couple years. >> One of the messages we're hearing is that journeys of the cloud really represents the fourth industrial revolution. I'm wondering, in terms of the pace of innovation are there any new technologies that maybe even just from a couple of years ago that are just table stakes today? >> Yeah no, I think the table stakes, AI and ML are quickly becoming table stakes, right. And that's what I love about AWS, they make the stuff easy to consume. Right, SageMaker and that stuff. Last year I was able to go in through DeepRacer and going through that I was able to do a model in 30 minutes. I don't do a lot of coding anymore these days, but on a plane I was able to create my first model. And so that stuff is becoming table stakes. They're making it very easy, so there is no excuse to not do ML or AI in your application. I don't need a separate set of data scientists sitting off to the side. So that to me, and data in the cloud, right. So the data being there so I can consume it in AI and ML that's table stakes, there is no more hey, I'm just only going to put what I don't care about, or what I want to low cost data store, it's table stakes to have that data there, accessible to your people 24-7. >> And what does that mean for your workforce? Because as you said, these are now basics. You need to know how to use these tools and be willing to experiment with these technologies. How do you make sure your workforce has the right skills and the right mentality and approach? >> So one of the things I talked a little bit about DeepRacer last year when DeepRacer came out, I was sitting there kind of scratching my head and saying, what is this, right? It's a glorified RC car. And one of my team members was texting me and saying, we've got to do this. And what that, we've run a private league, and what that's done is it's taken well over 1400 people who never knew what machine learning, R-reinforcement learning was and got them engaged in doing it. So now they've got that experience, they're now hungry for more knowledge through a fun activity, a competition. You know we're all very competitive people at Accenture, so that was just, it caught on amazing, it was amazing just around the world at how these people took onto it and why our employees took onto it. >> Yeah, the person who won that league, so it was across 30 different innovation centers at Accenture, plus hundreds of people virtually building cars, and the guy who won it out of Kronsberg, Germany had never touched AWS the day before. And I dunno if this is true, the story's great, he supposedly wrote his model on the train to the innovation center that day, he ran the model and came up like four one hundredths of a second off the world record. So great example, yeah, of somebody who wasn't in the AWS kind ecosystem at Accenture, got turned on my this new technology, this new capability, dove in and now he's enabled, right. And we talk about innovation, so innovation is also like I said, not just what you're delivering for the client but how you're doing it. So that same team actually who started the DeepRacer league down in Australia, they've been creating what they call a hackathon as a service. So working with customers, not just doing slideware and going through courseware, but getting folks in a room like this and you've seen it here at the event, have a business problem that you want to solve, get a bunch of people in a room, business people, technology people, and hack away. In a low risk environment that's collaborative where you can share and you're learning by doing. So we're seeing a lot of that, and so you've got to really, like think of new ways that you're going to enable the workforce especially if you hope to scale this. >> So one of the things obviously that Accenture brings to the table, AWS got a global platform but you're a consulting firm with global reach. And everybody wants to use data in new ways but how you use data in different regions and different localities can vary. So how are you working with customers to be able to kind of enable that? >> Yeah, so obviously a lot of different regulations, country by country, and they're changing very rapidly so we have to stay on top of it. One of the things we've done is through our we formed a state of business group last year. We've completely focused on data. Includes AABG folks, Amazon folks, but they're very regionally based. So we stood up a lighthouse here in North America, in New Jersey, and the experts sitting in that are very well versed in what North America or the US is doing around data privacy and security and things like that. So they're taking what they learned, the same thing, we opened it in London last, a few weeks ago in Canada, other places. So we're definitely taking a regional focus but we're making sure through the partnership that the techniques, the tooling, the capabilities are being pushed down into those groups. So they're taking all that experience and that knowledge but putting a local slant to it and making sure it's locally compatible. >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting too is you talk about, I mean data we're seeing this take off in every industry and it's so critical, but two of the areas that the data business group is seeing the most traction actually are financial services and life sciences pharmaceutical health care. So you would think, those are two of the most regulated industries in the world, extremely sensitive data, you wouldn't think those would be the ones out in front but they are, and because there's so much value to be had. So even in Europe, working with pharmaceutical companies there together, and their R and D process around patient services and being able to use native data lakes on AWS, use machine learning to gain new insights in terms of how therapeutics are working on patient populations, right. And so this is again, very sensitive information but hugely valuable, and Accenture through this business group has all the capabilities so that we can have the best of both worlds, right. And have it accessible, analyze it in AWS but have it secure as well. >> And a lot of research show, actually the constraints can power innovation. The fact that it, because it is so sensitive and there are these regulatory concerns around it that that in fact enables people to be more, they're forced to be more creative. >> Yeah, and it's the old, you know cars didn't go fast until they put brakes on them, kind of a thing, right. And we see that, absolutely. And I think that sort to thing is, big enterprise customers, they want to move fast but they're public companies, they have to ensure that they're mitigating risk. So again we're investing a lot in moving fast but doing it in a way that controls risk and is able to kind of give them the assurances that they need. >> And definitely the platformed has helped, right. Amazon investing in that platform, bringing the tools like you saw on Andy's keynote, some things around the S3 bucket, you know those type of things. Those are enabling, and those regulations, us to deal with those regulations much faster and less work on our side to build the things that are need to meet those regulations. So definitely the platform growing and expanding is definitely helping us go faster. >> That's a great point, right. I mean because also if you have, you know whether your data, your applications in your on-premises environment chances are you don't have the granular visibility that you would like into that environment, whereas you move it into AWS, you have all these tools to really get as granular as you want and really understand your environment and make sure that you have control over it. So it really creates a new paradigm for that. >> One of the things that really struck me during Andy's keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy's keynote, was the fact when we was announcing all these, this dizzying number of new products and services >> Brian: I'm not sure how he does that (all laugh) >> I know, just how many of them rely on the technology ecosystem to be successful. So can you just riff on that a little bit about how really the landscape for technology has changed so dramatically in the sense that all these companies need to cooperate and collaborate, and here we are. You two, you're a living and breathing example. >> Absolutely, you know I think you'll hear Andy say it, is the right tool for the right job. AWS, we're very much about giving customers choice. So there's a lot of options and you know we went through all the different database options that we have. So they're very specific to specific use cases. Now that also implies that you have to know which tools to use for the right job and you have to have very skilled craftsmen. So that's where we rely on partners like Accenture who have those skilled craftsmen, in addition to our own to really extend that. And then you look at the ISV ecosystem, right and some of those ISVs and our technology partners who've done an amazing job of taking our capabilities but then extending them further into whatever domain that they're very expert in, and there's a very specific IP delivers extra value to their customers. And so that's what, we want to give all this choice, whether it's a customer, or a technology partner, a consultancy like Accenture can really thrive. >> And I think if you walk through the show floor you see what these companies are doing. And they're not afraid to innovate and they're not afraid to take on some of the bigger challenges out there because they don't have to invest in the platform underneath. They're able to start with something that's solid, known, recognized by the market, right. No one is going to get in trouble for building something on AWS. So they're taking that and taking the next level and you're right, the partnerships between 'em we see if you just walk down there, you see them talking, you see them collaborating and saying, oh well I'm doing this, if we integrate this, can we do this differently? So you know I think we're only going to see more of that. And we're going to see it more industry focused, coming back to what we were talking about earlier. We're going to see more things stand up in the industries. We've seen this with FinServ, we've seen this you know but I think across all the industries we're going to see more of this collaboration. >> Yeah, I agree, in fact I have someone on my team now that's new this year to focus exclusively on we'll call the power of three. So it's AWS, Accenture, and plus a technology partner. And so if you go in the Executive Summit, Salesforce being a really obviously example, right. Accenture's got very large successful Salesforce practice very important partner of AWS's, how can we come together and drive more value for our customers by figuring out solutions. You know we announced at Dreamforce, the connect integration with Salesforce that's a perfect example, right. So the end-to-end customer care I talked about earlier, even more powerful, we can bring that power of three together. >> So going into the 13th year, lucky 13 (laughs) what are some of the things we're going to be talking about at next year's Executive Summit? What are some of the things you're most looking forward to in the coming year? >> I have to say machine learning and AI. And I have to say Outposts is probably the third of my, I think I live the quantum computing stuff, and Accenture has been doing a lot of research and a lot of work in quantum computing. We were super excited to see what was announced, I guess Monday, and so we're super excited about that but I think that's a little farther out. I think the ML, the AI, the new things in SageMaker are super exciting and I think are only going to make that stuff go faster. So I think that's all we're going to be talking about next year I think we're going to be talking about all the new models that have been created, all the new problems that have been solved, and just a new paradigm in computing off of that stuff 'cause it's getting simpler to use, faster to use, and cheaper to use so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's just, these announcements yesterday just continue to remove barriers, and so you think about the announcement with Verizon around 5G, so now the possibilities that opens up in terms of the applications and the analysis and the machine learning that can get pushed down to the edge is really amazing. And I think what's going to be fun is, we work with customers to figure out what these services should look like, but even at launch we're not sure how they're going to be used. So now it's going to be really exciting turning all these developers, all the Accenture developers, loose on this and just let's see what we create together. >> In 2020 all the developers are loose, I love it. (all laugh) Brian, Chris thank you so much for coming on theCUBE again. That was a really great conversation. >> Well, thanks for having us >> Thanks for having us >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

(funky music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Donald Klein. Today, we're here to talk about digital transformation, and the challenges many enterprises face in helping employees adopt the new applications that drive their business. To have that conversation, we're joined by Vara Kumar, CTO and co-founder of Whatfix . Vara, welcome to the show. >> Thanks, thanks Don for inviting me to the show. >> Great, so looking forward to this. Tell us a little bit about Whatfix, what you guys do and a little bit of the history here. >> Sure. Whatfix is a digital adoption platform. So essentially it overlays on top of applications and makes employees to use applications faster and better. So, we are five years old company, so we have offices in four different countries, and we have 500 customers, and 60 Fortune 500 users, including companies like Amazon, UPS, Facebook, Microsoft, Western Union, Western Digital. The users are a variety of applications like CRMs, VRPs, SCMs. >> Great, fantastic customer base, that's really good. So when you say you're a digital adoption platform that kind of provides an overlay, what specifically you're talking about? You're talking about notifications inside of an application? Tell us a little more about that. >> Sure, sure. So Whatfix helps employees through all their journey in their applications. As they onboard to the applications for the first time, Whatfix welcomes them and holds them to the application. So we provide these, what we call as flows, so these are step-by-step guidance to the users for using the applications and processes and not only within the application, Whatfix guides the users across applications that the employee is faced with, so for example-- >> So cross-application workflows, that kind of thing. >> That's correct, that's correct. For example Anaconda executive, so they have to manage opportunities in the CRM, and then to create a code they have to go to the CPQ and then to submit a purchase order, probably they will have to go to a digital workplace to maintain the code and proceed to the contract. So Whatfix can guide the users through all this and that process. >> Great, so it's not just about the challenges of learning about one particular application, it's actually learning an entire workflow that might stretch across multiple applications. >> That's accurate. >> Some sort of end to end process that gets very complex because you're moving from one interface to the next. >> That's accurate, that's accurate. >> And I guess another challenge would be that, many, in a large enterprise, right, many of the applications that come from the well-known vendors get highly customized for that particular business environment is that correct? >> That's completely true Don, so, Salesforce instance of UPS looks very different from Salesforce instance of Western Union because it's completely customized to the organization business workflows and the nature of their business. So this customization also brings in lot more adoption challenges because even though I'm an account executive who has seen Salesforce in my past experience it looks very different from my current job. So that's more challenging for the enterprises to train their employees and make them use. >> Great, understood, okay, very good. So the problem that you guys are really trying to solve is around this challenge of getting employees to adopt the new applications as part of their overall digital transformation journey, is that right? >> That's true, it's not only new applications now with the so much of cloud movement. So the applications are actually getting updated more faster as you must have heard so much about as well being used in the enterprises for the IT rollouts and IT deployments. That means changes are constant so because you are reinventing your business process as you're learning. So now employees, actually, it impacts more the employee experience because every update employees have to be on top of those. So Whatfix can help them with these updates and making sure that employees are self-served. >> Understood, okay, very good. So now, this has become really such a widespread problem across many of these large enterprises that it's now become quite a mature category of software solutions, is that right? >> That's accurate, Gartner called this category as digital adoption solutions, DAS. >> Digital adoption solutions, okay DAS. >> That's correct, and then they coined this term only a quarter back, and they published reports, in terms of seller productivity and how it will influence the digital workplace, and such kind of things. >> Great, okay, great. So this category now is becoming more widespread, and people really see these types of solutions as being key to enabling digital transformation in the enterprise, right? >> That's accurate. >> Okay great, so then what are the trends that are driving this problem, what is it that's making this such a problem area that companies really need to focus on dedicated solutions to solving? >> Yeah, so one primary is the cloud migration. Yes, more and more the companies, wants to move to the cloud, for example you no longer hear CRM being on-prem, so people are using all the cloud CRMs. So the migration to the cloud, and then the digital, overall the digital transformation of these business practices to suit this cloud migration, that'll also, it's all putting pressure on employee experience. So impacting and making sure that employees are getting used to these new applications and the constant rollouts. >> Got it, got it, okay. So with all this happening, right, more and more applications moving to the cloud, the applications themselves are evolving much faster, the interfaces are changing, and then moreover they're getting more complex, because they're getting more interconnected, right? And so you have this step by step kind of work flow that helps people navigate all of these integrated applications to actually perform a single workflow. >> That's accurate, that's accurate and at the same time given that Whatfix is on top of these applications we are learning a lot about the user, this particular user and what they are doing, what they are good at, what they're not good at, this is helping us to make our content more personalized to the users, just like Google, you search for the same keyword, I search for the same thing, we both see different results. Because it's personalizing to our taste and our knowledge and expertise. So that's exactly it's getting into. And it's not only guidance, we are also helping users to be more productive by automating certain steps. Let's say you do a certain activity every day, then Whatfix can do that automatically for you so that you're becoming more and more faster in your job. >> Interesting, that's interesting. So it's not only helping provide guidance for people moving through these applications but it's actually collecting data about how users are interfacing with it, right, and then delivering a more kind of personalized experience in terms of the guidance that it offers. >> Accurate, accurate, that's accurate. >> Great, so that's really kind of, I guess that would really be the main kind of area of innovation I would imagine for a system like this, right, the ability to capture data about how users are interfacing with the application and then provide recommendations on how to do it better. >> Yes, that's definitely one of the area there's several reasons why customers choose us. We believe in the concept called adoption everywhere, so that adoption everywhere, that means employee need not be on the application all the time, they may want to interact with the application when they're outside of the application. So be, maybe you're on the wiki, you're looking for something then you wanted interface with application, so Whatfix is present across all touchpoints wherever the employee may decide and guide them to the application and help them use the application. And second, we are very easy to deploy and maintain, so we invested heavily on this, because we realize that we don't have to, we shouldn't be providing a platform which is technically more complex for the business guys to create these kind of process flows, we kept them very low tech, and our authoring environment is very easy for them to use and maintain. And then we are, we are very open in terms of how our API is just like Salesforce, which is very open in terms of integrations because we do understand that enterprises are, wants more of interconnected applications so, our allowed APIs are open and we work well with the enterprise ecosystem. And our customer success is highly regarded, so we are best among in the software vendors in terms of the highest customer satisfaction. And we care a lot about real user privacy and security so we don't really collect PII information for the recommendations and personalizations as I spoke about. >> Okay, very good. And so then the, tell us a little bit more about which kind of applications are you guys finding, which categories of applications really kind of benefit most from this kind of guided, walkthrough capability? >> Sure, so the applications are widespread so but more commonly people use us on CRMs, ERPs, and SCMs, and digital workplaces. These are the kind of applications where customers commonly use us on. >> Okay, so ERP and CRM would be the kind of core, would you say? >> Yeah, CRM, ERP and SCM. So these will be the core I would say. And, it's not only the applications that the customers are purchasing from outside, but Whatfix can work on any application that is internally built, any applications that are their IT team is customizing, Whatfix can work on those. >> Great so, bespoke applications developed internally inside companies are equally suitable for this, as are the the packaged applications they might be customizing for their business processes. >> That's correct. >> Okay, that's great. So I just, on the kind of conclude here, let's talk a little bit about maybe some of the customer success stories, that you guys have had. And I'm not asking you to necessarily name names, but maybe talk about some of the areas where you've seen some real value creation from implementing a system like this. >> Sure, sure, our customers have seen that our onboarding time of employees into the applications have reduced one third, because of using Whatfix, because now employees are learning in the flow of work, you no longer have to train them to use the applications, and we've also seen that organizations telling that their content creation times and their amount of planning preparation time has reduced 85%, because of our easy to use authoring environment, and easy to maintain authoring environment. And we've also seen organizations have reduced internal support tickets by 60%. Yeah, so we have also seen that the overall productivity of the employees increased by 35% because they're able to find things and be able to self serve, and do more faster in the applications. >> Got it, so the old days of sitting down and sort of expecting the employees to read the user manual page by page, right, before they dive in, is kind of gone now right? >> It's gone. >> What people want to see is they want to get into the application and then they want to be able to be guided through what they need to do to solve their particular problem. And they want it done in real time. >> That's true, that's right Don. >> And even better they have that whole guide through maybe customized to their particular problem. >> That's accurate Don, that's the digital option solutions for you. >> Great, well that sounds like a fantastic solution, understand the role it plays fantastic, I think you guys are doing great work. So, want to maybe just kind of touch on this last point, where do you see this kind of industry going in the future? This is fantastic innovation but how do you see this trending as digital transformation becomes more widespread? >> Yeah, sure. So adoption as the problem statement more and more organizations understand, and more and more software vendors understand today, we are at Dreamforce now, so if you see the number of sessions around adoption is phenomenal. So, when the Gartner called out that only six to 7% of our enterprises have adopted to the solutions like Whatfix, so there has to be more awareness, some people, enterprises understand that adoption is a problem, but they are not aware that there are solutions that exist to tackle that problem. So we see that's going to be the future for us as we go forward, having more and more enterprises adopt these kind of solutions. >> Great, okay, well if you happen to be at Dreamforce, folks, stop by and talk to Whatfix. So, Vara Kumar thank you for coming on TheCUBE. So thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation, I'm Donald Klein and we'll see you next time. (funky music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Docker, Docker, Docker. No, you're in the right place. This is KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman kicking off three days of live, wall to wall coverage. My co-host for most of the week this week is John Troyer. Justin Warren's also in the house. He'll be hosting for me. And a big shout out to John Furrier who's back at the corporate ranch in Palo Alto keeping an eye on all the CloudNative stuff with us. The reason that I actually mentioned Docker is because it is the first thing that is on our lips this week. Just this week, Docker, which is the company that, if it wasn't for Docker, we wouldn't have 12,500 people here at this event. Really democratized containers. But the company itself built out a platform, millions and millions of companies using containers. But when the orchestration layer came in there was some contention, there's lots of politics. I'm waiting for Docker the Broadway musical to come out to talk about all the ins and outs there because Kubernetes really sucked the air out of the CloudNative world. Spawned tons of projects here. As you can see behind us, this ecosystem is massive and swelling. Last year it was 8,000 people, year before it was 4,000 people, so many people here, so. And John, so, let's start. This is your first time at this show, you've done many shows with us, definitely covered some of the cloud-native, you've worked with many of the companies that are in this ecosystem here. Give me your first impressions here of KubeCon CloudNativeCon. >> Sure, sure. Well, I mean Stu, 12,000 people, it's pretty crowded here. We're right by the t-shirt line, on day one of the conference. Look, a conference this big, especially an open source conference, there's several jobs to be done, right. This is an active set of open source projects and open source communities. So a lot of the keynote this morning was updating people on details about the latest releases, the latest features, what's in, what's out, what's going on. CNCF is a very broad umbrella for a very broad number of projects, not a coherent opinionated stack, it's a lot of different things that all contribute to a set of CloudNative technologies. So, that's job one. Job two, it's a trade show, and it's an industry show, and people are coming here to figure out how to build and learn and operate. So, that wasn't particularly well served by the keynote this morning. There was certainly a lot of hands-on this week. There's a huge number of breakouts, there's a huge number of tracks. Even day zero, which is a set of specialty breakout workshops and sessions, everything was packed. There were over a dozen of those. So, what strikes me is the breadth here is that it's a mile wide. I won't say it's an inch deep, because there's some, but it is a mile wide. >> Yeah, yeah, John you are right, there's so much going on. The day zero tracks are amazing. I think there were over two dozen, maybe even more of the sessions where, you know, half-day or full day deep dives. Even talk, there was some other small events even that went on for two or three days leading up to this. So, sprawling ecosystem. Last year at this show in Seattle, I actually said that this show is the independent cloud show that we've been looking for. John, I was at Microsoft Ignite just a couple of weeks ago, and absolutely, Satya Nadella, they're not talking about the bits and the bytes. It's a, you know, Microsoft is your trusted partner for everything you're going to do, including building 50 billion new applications. Amazon Reinvent will just be right after Thanksgiving, and we will hear a very different message from Amazon and where they play. But this is not a company, it is a lot of different projects. The CNCF is the steward of this, and so Kubernetes is the one that gets all the attention. I think for this group to even grow more, it needs to be focused more on the CloudNativeCon, because how do we do cloud-native? You know, what does that mean? We heard, you know, Sugu was up on stage talking about Vitess, and he said, look, if you bake your database directly in fully Kubernetes cloud-native, that means that when you want to move between clouds you bring your data with you. So, data, security, networking, messaging, there's so many pieces here. It's a lot of work to be done to mature this stack, but it definitely is getting more mature. You start hearing many of these projects with a million or more downloads a month. So many pieces. John, what are you looking to dig into this week, what are you most excited for, what questions do you want answered? >> Well, here on theCUBE I'm always excited when we get to talk to people in production, customers, really see what's going on. There's a lot of stuff in production right now, which is not to say a lot of stuff isn't bleeding edge, right. I hear a lot of stuff, just out of the woodwork, about things that are fragile, things that aren't ready, things that are not quite updated, and I think Kubernetes is an architectural as well as a spiritual home for everything. But there's a lot of pieces that plug in, and there are opinionated ways of doing it, there are best of breed way, there are vertically integrated stacks. What's the best approach, it's not clear to me. I mean if you have to look at it from a company perspective, who are the winners and losers, I don't think that's a very productive way of looking at it. I'm interested in some projects like, we're going to be talking with Rancher, and they've got some announcements, but I'm also interested in K3s, which is their project there. I'm been hearing some really interesting things on the storage front. You know, all these things are really necessary. It's not all just magic containers moving around. You got to actually get the bits and bytes into the right place at the right time and backed up. >> Yeah, I love that you brought up K3s. Edge is definitely something that I hear talking a lot, because if you talk about cloud-native, it's not just about public cloud. Many of these things can run in my on-premises data centers and everything like that. >> And Edge fits in all of these environments, so. Right, winners and losers, I remember two years ago, first time I got a chance to interview Kelsey Hightower, who we do have on the program. He had actually taken a couple shows off, but he's back here at the show. I said Kelsey, why are we spending so much talking about Kubernetes? Doesn't this just get baked into every platform? And he's like, yeah totally, that's not the importance of it. It's not about distributions, and not about who's who, any of the software companies, it's how do they pull all of the pieces together. How do they add value on top of it. One of the terms I've heard mentioned a lot is, we need to think a lot about day two. Heck, there was even one of the companies that was heavy in this space, Mesosphere, they renamed the company Day Two IQ, spelled D2IQ. No relation to R2D2. But you know, that's what they are focused on to help these things really go together. So yeah, we talk about multicloud, and how do I get my arms around all of these pieces, how do I manage a sprawling environment. You add Edge into it. I've got a huge surface of attack for security issues. So, John, remember cloud was supposed to be simple and cheap, and it really isn't either of those things anymore, so yeah, a lot for us to dig into. >> Yeah, it'll be an interesting mix. Developers, experts, people brand new, probably half the people here they're the first time, and people coming over from the IT space as well as people coming from the open source space and I even saw this morning this is the biggest conference I've ever been to. So it's a many, it's different parts of the elephant, I'd say. >> Yeah, absolutely. It is a good sized conference, especially for open source it probably is the largest. But Salesforce Dreamforce is going on this week, which is more than an order of magnitude bigger, so my condolences to anybody in San Francisco right now, because we know the BART and everything else completely swamped with too many people. One other thing, you know, CNCF, what's really interesting for me always is when you look at a lot of these projects, the people that we saw up on stage were companies, it was the person that oh, I started this project and I'm the technical lead on it, and that's where I'm going. We've interviewed many of the people that start these projects, and they come many times out of industry. It's not a vendor that said, hey, I built something and I'm selling it. It is companies like Uber and Lyft that said, we did things at massive scale, we had a problem, we built something, we thought it was useful for us. Open source seemed a good way to help us get broader visibility and maybe everybody could help, and other people not only pitch in, but say this is hugely valuable, and that's where we go with it. So, it's something we, a narrative I've heard for years about everybody's going to be a software company, well, almost everybody at this conference is building software. We've heard about 30 to 40% of the people attending this show are developers, and therefore many of them are going to build products. A question I have and I'll give you is, with Docker, we just kicked off talking about Docker. You know, Docker created this huge wave of what happens there, but to put it bluntly, Docker the business failed. So, they are not dead, there's the piece that's in Mirantis, there's the piece doing the developer piece. We wish all of them the best of luck, but they had the opportunity to be the next VMware, and instead they are the company that gave us this wave, but did not capitalize on it. So, I look around and I see so many companies, and you say, "Hey, what are you?" "Oh, we're the creators of X technology in this project," and my question is, are you actually going to be able to make money and do a business, or is this just something that gets fit into the overall ecosystem. John, any thoughts and advice for those kind of companies. >> Well, I mean we are here, even though there's 12,000 people here, this is still very leading edge, right. There's a lot of pieces, parts here. We're not sure how they're all going to fit together. A lot of the projects have come out of real use cases, like you say, but they're, it's commercial viability is a different beast than utility. Docker was very good at developer experience, but the DNA of actually selling an enterprise management stack is a whole different beast, and there are a lot of those too. So I mean I think a lot of the companies here may not be around, but their technologies will live on. I think if you're here, and the interviews here at the show I think will be a, you'll want to have your antenna out to see like, okay, does this give you a feeling like this is solving a real problem and is incorporated in a real ecosystem. You know, the big company, it cuts both ways, right. Some of the times those technologies get absorbed and become the standard, sometimes they disappear. So the advice is you just put one foot in front of the other and try to find people in production. That's the only way at the end of the day that you could move ahead as a small company. >> All right, John, I gave you one piece of advice when we came here and I said, you know one thing we don't talk about at this show, we don't talk about OpenStack. So, I'm going to break that rule for a second here, just 'cause I feel we have as an industry learned some of the lessons. There is some of the irrational exuberance around some of these. There's lots of money being thrown at these environments, but I do feel that we are reaching maturity and adoption so much faster, because we are not trying to replacing something. The early days of OpenStack was, you know, we're your alternative for AWS, and we're going to get you off of VMware licensing. And both of those things were, they didn't happen for the most part. And OpenStack did fit in certain environments, especially outside of North America there's lots of OpenStack deployments. The telecommunications environment OpenStack is used a bunch. Telecom, another area, talk about Edge, that plays in here and we have a number of conversations. But there are both the big and the small companies when I look at our list of people we're going to be talking on the program. You know, I love first the customers. We've got Fidelity, Bloomberg, Red Cross, and Ford Motor Company all on the program, and we've got big companies, mega giants like Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as couple of companies that came out of stealth like in the last week, including Render and Chronosphere. So, you know, broad spectrum of what's going on. You've done some of the OpenStack shows with me. You've got a long community and ecosystem viewpoint, John. What do you think and what do you hear, yeah. >> You know, this is, I guess yeah, this is a next generation, you could look at it that way. Anytime you bring together one of these open source foundations, you know, it is kind of a new style of development. You do have differing agendas. People do again have to have their antenna up to see, is this person promoting this open source project and what is their commercial interest in it. Because there are different agendas here. But it looks pretty healthy. Look, there's probably a million engineers worldwide that are going to have to know the guts of Kubernetes, but it's a different job to be done than OpenStack. OpenStack community is actually, that exists, is still thriving. It is good for the job to be done there. This job to be done's a little different. I think it's going to be an engine, you know, the engine that's embedded in everything else. So there's going to be a hundred million engineers that don't need to know anything about Kubernetes, but people here are the people that pop the hood open and start to you know, mess with the carburetor and this is a carburetor show. And so for the coverage here we're going to try to up level it to talk about the business a little bit, but this feels important. It feels cross-cloud, it feels outside of any one silo, and I'm really interested to see what we're going to learn this week. >> Okay, and thank you John. I really appreciate it to get it right final. It's like what is our job here? We are an independent media organization. Yes, we did bring our own stickers here to be able to, you know, we know everybody here loves stickers, so we've got theCUBE and we've got the fun gopher one, our friends at Women Who Go that support this, because, you know, inclusion, diversity, something that this community definitely embraces, we are huge supporters of their, but right, we want to be able to give that broad viewpoint of everything. We're not going to be able to get into every project. We're not going to go as deep as the day zero content web, but give a good flavor for everything going on in the show. I've found of all the shows I've gone to in recent years, this is some of the biggest brains in the industry. There's a lot of really important stuff, so I appreciate bringing my PHD holding co-host with me, John. Looking forward to three days with you to dig into all the environment. All right, so we will be wall to wall coverage, three days. If you're at the event, we are here in the expo hall. You can't miss us, we've got the big lights right next to the CloudNativeCon store. If you're online of course reach out to us. I'm @stu, S-T-U on Twitter. He's @jtroyer, and hit us up, see us in person, come grab some stickers, let us know who you want to talk to and what question you have, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)