>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. I am Lisa Martin, sitting here in Bellevue, Washington with a couple of Smart Sheeters. Next to me is Ben Canning, the VP of Product Management. >> Hey Ben. >> Hey. >> And Ignacio Martinez, the VP of Security, Risk and Compliance. Guys, thank you so much for carving out time in a very packed event agenda to come and chat with us on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Happy to be here. >> So, this is a really interesting event, couple of things that really stood out to me, this morning in the key note, as I was telling you, we cover a lot of events here on theCUBE, of all sizes, and it was really interesting how your CEO Mark Mader, who was on the program earlier this morning, went out into the audience and talked about ENGAGED in action. I thought that was fantastic. And asked customers, randomly, three customers I think, how are you being empowered by Smartsheet? And how these customers were able to get up and articulately talk about the value that Smartsheet is delivering to their business. I thought that customer connection was really quite memorable. And then additionally, product management, when Jean Thoreau came out, and to a round of applause, a number of times, during announcements of the enhancements and features and what that really. >> Multi assign too. >> Yes, what that really, sort of, said to me, is you guys deliver software that is a facilitator of collaboration that is essential to drive businesses, digital transformation, et cetera, but you're collaborating with them because clearly they were very happy to hear about a number of these announcements today. >> Yeah we have very, very passionate customers and it's one of the great things about working here and working with these customers. We're super focused on what do those customers need and how do we enable them to get those things done. We don't typically get imposed from the top down by IT. You're using Smartsheet because you chose to use it. It's the thing that makes your life easier. And we never forget that and we never forget that we need to keep that close connection with our customers and I think you see it here, at the conference today. >> You do, you got 50 customers plus speaking in breakout sessions, which for an event that's got about 2000 people, it's huge percentage. >> Yeah. >> Some great announcements. Before we get into some of the risk and compliance stuff Ignacio, Ben walk us through maybe a high level of some of the key enhancements that were announced this morning. >> Well, so we talked about a lot of things today. I think we had over 23 total announcements. Things from the range of multiple, being able to sign multiple people in the grid, to Dynamic View, which we're incredibly excited about, that allows you to have custom views on a sheet and control who gets access to which view. Really opens up tremendous new possibilities for Smartsheet. Some of the things that I get super excited about, I work a lot in the platform and administrative space. We've announced a number of things this week that are all about helping IT administrators and system admins, manage Smartsheet much more effectively when it gets to large scale. And I'll highlight a couple of them. One is the directory integration capability that we've done. We hear a lot from our customers that managing individual Smartsheet users gets kind of hard once you get over a number and I want to be able to see all the people in my organization and be able to share with them and assign tasks with them, even if they're not yet Smartsheet users. So what we announced today was a way to integrate active directory with Smartsheet so that the company directory of all the users in the company is automatically synchronized into Smartsheet so that those users can be, you can assign things to them, you can @ mention them, they'll show up in the grid with their faces and all their departmental information. It makes it much easier to manage users inside your organization. So when 100 people join the team, they automatically show up in Smartsheet. When someone leaves the organization, they get de-provisioned. And it makes it much easier to collaborate with folks throughout your organization than it ever has been before. So we're really excited to announce that as a product for our enterprise customers, starting a little bit later this year. >> Excellent. You've got customers, I was reading, doing my prep for the show, over 75,000 customers in 190 countries, of all industries. >> Yes. And I imagine, some of the things that we've heard guys from your customers on the program today that they're really benefiting from are the visibility, the configurability of the technology, the ability to have accountability, to not only improve workforce productivity, but to be able to eliminate duplicate tasks, give project owners and initiative owners full visibility, whereas they did not have that full visibility before. Ignacio, another big announcement that came out today, was what you guys are doing in the federal space. So tell us a little bit about FedRAMP, what that is and how you are working with them. >> Sure so without boring you to death on FedRAMP, I'll give you a quick overview. FedRAMP is a requirement of the federal government. It's a program developed by the government to essentially certify or authorize cloud service providers like Smartsheet to be meeting a certain security level of compliance, to be deployed in the federal agency space. So the federal government, every agency, is required to abide by it. So they should be selecting providers that have gone through FedRAMP authorization. So it is essentially security compliance program that companies voluntarily put themselves through to enable themselves to do work in the federal space. And very happy to announce, this morning, that we were not only announcing our intent to develop a program and a product to enter the federal space, to have been selected by the FedRAMP program to go through what they call FedRAMP Connect. That's an accelerated process where the FedRAMP office selects cloud service providers that they feel, based on application, have a high level of demand in the federal agency space. So they select those providers and work very closely with us to go through that compliance exercise and get authorized to be FedRAMP authorized in the FedRAMP program. So the reason the government does that is they have a strong desire to get products like Smartsheet deployed quickly among the federal agencies, because those people, think of them as an enterprise, they want all those great features that Ben talked about that we bring to enterprises in the public sector, they want them in the government agency sector as well. So we are very pleased that we were selected to go through this program and get a product to the market place in the federal space to help them improve how they work as well. >> So this isn't an entry into federal, 'cause Smartsheet has great presence and traction in federal, NASA, the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Administration. I also saw from your website, you've got customers using Smartsheet in city governments and state governments but this FedRAMP Connect Program, you mentioned it as an accelerator, but I think I heard you say that this was from demand from users, so this is that validation coming from the best place it can, right? >> Yeah it's essentially demand in the federal market place. So we're going to go through on an accelerated basis and what that does, you're right, we are currently deployed in a large number of federal agencies, state and local government, but in those cases, we'll get deployed on a limited basis, because we don't have FedRAMP authorization and they will be careful about where we're deployed. Achieving FedRAMP authorizations gives those federal government agency CIOs and CISOs the ability to say, Smartsheet can be deployed agency wide because it's now authorized under the FedRAMP Program. >> So let's talk about that from a product, maybe innovation standpoint. One of the things that's very clear from today, is how collaborative Smartsheet is with its customers and how influential they are in product innovation. From a federal perspective, you mentioned, Ignacio, that a lot of times they have the same requirements as enterprises and other organizations in the private sector, but how are you guys working together? Are there tweaks and enhancements that you need to make to the technology as part of the FedRAMP Connect Program? >> Yeah for sure. So one of the, FedRAMP institutes a very strict regime of compliance, audit, security controls, onto the product. And it ensures that we're really operating at the highest level of rigor and delivering a service that is highly reliable, highly scalable, fully audited and secure. So that requires us to invest in all of those areas. And the nice thing about FedRAMP, for even the non-federal customers, is that we make those investments consistently across the service. So while FedRAMP is an isolated instance of Smartsheet, all of Smartsheet can take advantage of the practices and procedures. We don't want to have to do things two different ways for two different parts of the service, so we impose a lot of those same practices and procedures and hardening of the service, across the board. And so that helps us to meet our promise to our customers that are not federal customers, that we're delivering a true enterprise grade fully scaled and reliable solution that they can depend on. >> And the flip side is true. Everything that Ben's team is working on, as you said, the customers cheer when we announce something, it was on our roadmap because they wanted it. So our federal customers, they would want and desire the same things that Ben's team has been developing, automation, any of those tools, because they want to work efficiently and effectively and collaborate the same way all of the private sectors do. >> Exactly. >> Yeah that's right. I mean you saw that this morning, in the keynote, right, where we heard from the North Carolina Department of Transportation. This is a federal agency that's using the power of Smartsheet to build a solution in mere days, rather than having to outsource it or wait for a large scale IT spend and RFP and all of those things. We're empowering these agencies to build solutions. The people on the ground are able to put together a solution that is really saving people's lives. >> That, exactly, Hurricane Florence that just hit, that's a life and death situation. >> Yeah and it was breathtaking and sort of moment of pride to see how quickly they were able to put that together and that's the power of Smartsheet. So we're really excited to bring that to the rest of the federal government. We see a tremendous amount of desire from them for that. >> So Ignacio, in terms of the FedRAMP Connect Program, you mentioned it's going to allow an acceleration of this process. What would it normally take if you weren't part of this Connect Program? I'm just curious how much advantage you'll get but you'll be able to pass through to your federal and non-federal customers. >> Yeah so very good point, good question. The statistics you often see thrown around about companies, cloud service providers, that want to get a product into the FedRAMP authorization space, is they'll spend on average a couple years, two years, and a million plus dollars. So it's not a small task to get FedRAMP authorized. Being part of that FedRAMP Connect accelerated program, we're working with what's called the JAB, the Joint Advisory Board, so the top three CIOs of the FedRAMP Program, they work along side us if we're wiling to invest the time and the dollars to take our product through to do it on this accelerated basis. So it is literally a joint effort, hand in hand, working with the FedRAMP office, the auditors we use for it, and our people to demonstrate that we've got the enterprise great security and that we can meet the ongoing monitoring submissions that have to be done. >> So the cost avoidance of a million dollars from two years, what are you expecting? And if you can't share that, that's okay, I'm just curious, is it going to be six months, a year? >> Well if you look at the FedRAMP Connect Program, on average, it runs approximately six months. So it's back and forth. It's a three way collaboration between the cloud service provider, the FedRAMP office and the auditors, but that program, their goal is to get it into approximately a six month timeline. So we were announced last week, so I think we said, our goal is to work with them on that timeline and early in calendar year 2019, is the timeline end that we all have on our radar. >> That's like Back to the Future acceleration, no wonder you're excited about that. >> We are and we're going to try to go faster than that, if we can manage it on the product side, but we'll see how quickly it goes. >> Well that's one of the things, that not only is that validation from the users within the federal government that they want this. But Ben, as you were saying we're not developing things in isolation or certain features for this market and this market can't use it, this is all going to be accelerating, I imagine, what Smartsheet is innovating to deliver to all segments globally. >> Yeah I think that's right. We see an increasing need for manageability and security capabilities within the platform. And our customers are asking for this across the board. Great example, another feature we announced today, is what we call the event monitoring service. So enterprise IT wants to understand who is doing what on the system. They want to be able to impose business rules, make sure that highly confidential information isn't being shared inappropriately. So we've invested in a system that we announced today that basically keeps track of all events that happen within the system, anything that's shared, new documents that are created and so forth, and gives the IT administrator a way to track that feed and make business decisions on the basis of it. Integrating with other CASB Solutions to drive business rules. So for example, we have customers that are using this system today to keep track of all of the attachments that are being added into their environment. When they see an attachment being added, they're able to go and look at that attachment and make sure that if it's a highly confidential thing, and that it's shared with an inappropriate set of folks, then they can take business action automatically to manage that environment. And that's the kind of security and audit control that enterprises need in order to feel comfortable deploying Smartsheet at wide scale. So we're very excited to be able to offer that to those enterprise administrators and help them foster Smartsheet adoption in the company. >> So some of the things that we've talked about today are this is technology that was designed for the business user, I've used it. I think I read a quote from Mark Mader that may have been from the press release for the IPO a few months ago, that said, in the beginning in the early days, 12 years ago, there were critics that said, why are you guys building this on a spreadsheet construct, and his answer and Smartsheet's answer, at a very small company, at that time, was 500 million people are familiar with this, so building something for business users, lines of business, finance, IT, sales, for example, tools that I as a marketing person don't need to be an IT expert. I don't need to even know what an API is or what it stands for, right. But you're also now, as you were saying, some of the new enhancements to facilitate IT, so what's that, kind of, yin and yang with designing a tool that is for the average user and ensuring that the IT folks who weren't probably involved in the first place, are able to manage this successfully? >> Yeah well it's definitely a balance that we have to maintain. We can never lose sight of the fact that the end user is at the center of what we do. And that we have to design for solutions that end users can implement themselves and that's at the heart of what Smartsheet does. At the same time, we look at IT administrators as partners. We know that the users love what the product does. They're desperate for it. And in general, I find that IT administrators are not trying to get in the way of what their users want. They want to be the hero and they want to be able to say, yes. So part of my job is to make sure that I give them the tools to enable them to get to a yes. That I can show them that we are secure enough, reliable enough and scalable enough, that we meet their strategic enterprise needs, that we integrate with the other systems that they have so that they're not building an island that they're going to have to deal with and doesn't connect with the rest of their estate and that they've got the tools to manage at scale, so that I'm not asking them to go one by one adding a thousand users, that's just not nice and fair. So I think we keep the end user, the business user, at the center and we look at IT as a partner and we try to find ways to help them get to yes with the product. And I don't think those two things are really in conflict. >> It's interesting, dealing with CIOs of our customers, they'll tell you, it's very strange, and it goes back to what you said earlier, value. So CIOs are tasked with delivering the most value for their organization, doing more for less, efficiently. And that often means selection of tools that then they have to go and force into an organization and deal with users that might be less than happy. I've had CIOs tell me on the phone, I have people putting together petitions to make Smartsheet the tool that we use across the organization. And so he said, that makes my life easy. I just need to work with you guys to make sure you've got the security, you've got all the tools I need as a CIO to protect the enterprise, but I don't have to worry about user acceptance. That's unique spot and we love it when the CIOs say, this makes my life easier with everything we're doing with Smartsheet. >> Oh that's music to your ears. >> Yeah it totally is. I mean, I met with a tech CIO recently as part of our enlist, talking to him about, oh well are you going to come to ENGAGE? And oh well you know, we're busy and we don't have a thing, and I said, oh you know actually there's eight people from your company, business users that are attending. >> Nice. That are attending the conference on their own dime and you can see the light bulb go off in his eyes and he's like, okay if eight people from our business groups are paying their own money to go to a tech conference, that's something I need to be paying attention to. How can you help me get my arms wrapped around this and help our users so it's a nice position to be in. >> It absolutely is. Well congratulations on being in the FedRAMP Connect Program and we're excited to hear next year all the great things coming out of that. And Ben, Ignacio, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thanks for having us. >> It's busier than ensuring with us what's going on from your perspectives. >> Thanks a lot, thanks for having us. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live from Smartsheet ENGAGED, 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around. I'll be right back with Jeff Frick and our next guest.