(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with though leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back all ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios we're still getting through the COVID crisis. I think we're in week 12. I don't know, I can't even keep track anymore. But again, as part of this process, we're reaching out to our community, going out to the leaders of the community to really get some best practices, get some insight, and I hear from people that are out in the community and helping other companies as well as their own company, kind of get through these crazy times. So we're really excited to have in a brand new role, never been on the key before, Saleem Janmohamed. He is the senior managing director and market unit lead of the U.S West he just took over from John Del Santo, who we met when you guys opened the new salesforce location. So Saleem, great to meet you. >> Hi, Jeff, great to meet you. Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. >> Glad to be here. Excited for being in this new role. >> So, it's a new role for you, but you've been at a center for, I think for 30 some odd years so, give us a little bit of history. How did, where did you get started? And obviously you must like the culture. You must like the opportunity to stick with it this long. >> Yeah, I am, 30 years in one company is definitely an anomaly here in the Bay area. I started actually in Toronto in financial services, I have an undergraduate degree in business and computer science and then an MBA. I was attracted to Accenture or Anderson Consulting at the time because it was a combination of business and technology. And frankly, the ability to travel the world, just from a personal perspective, I was born in Kenya of Indian parents. I grew up in the UK, I went to school in Canada and now I'm a U.S citizen. So, when someone asks me, where are you from? My usual answer is, how much time do you have? (laughs) But I've got the opportunity through Accenture to work all around the world with some amazing clients, doing incredible things. So, I'm excited about this opportunity to work with some of the leading clients in the world. >> Right? And for people that are familiar with this Accenture, you guys are kind of a matrix organization. So, in terms of the vertical specialty, you've been in the called the CMT, the Communications Media and Technology. So what's been kind of your focus from that point of view? >> Absolutely, so I spent about, as I said, 30 years with Accenture, about 20 of those years were with a wireline wireless and satellite communications companies where I was helping to essentially build out the network infrastructure, the billing and customer care infrastructure. For both large existing telcos, as well as emerging telcos or next-gen telcos, for example, in the wireless space. In markets like India and the middle East, which were emerging markets for us, and for the wireless business. The last 10 years I've spent in the software and platforms part of our business. which is really serving our high-tech client base, as well as our internet and social plant based mostly here on the West Coast. And so it's been, CMT is one of our five industry verticals. The others are products, resources, health and public sector, and financial services. So, we have gone to market traditionally, as those industry led PNS just in the last few months, we actually, right before the Pandemic, I shifted to a new operating model, which is very geography focused. We still preserved our core industry argument. But we're now concentrating in specific markets with a real focus to get all of our services, deployed into those markets and focused on the unique needs of each market. So, it's nothing like moving to a new operating model and having to deal with a pandemic, two weeks into it. It certainly tests your leadership argument as well as your leadership team. >> Right, well, at least you're not in it by yourself. And, it's interesting from your mobile background, you got to see some significant transformation driven by the mobile, especially as you said in more rural markets that were underserved by traditional wire, telephones, but wireless completely changed the game. COVID is this new kind of digital transformation opportunity. We've talked about it a lot over the last several weeks, and it was kind of this light switch moment. You didn't really have a lot of time to plan or, any plans you had were probably laid out very organized, Gantt chart way over a long, long period of time. Then suddenly it was like, boom, you can't go to work. Everybody needs to work from home. So, I'm just curious to get your perspective as you look at, say, the telco transformation and some of these other transformations that didn't have the, either the benefit or the liability, I guess, depending on how you want to define it, of kind of this forcing function that's ready, set go now, you don't really get to think about it or have a choice anymore. >> No, absolutely, look, I'll tell you the COVID crisis, never been a time in  human history, when 2 billion people virtually overnight had to change their behavior And I think that's what we've seen here from an enterprise perspective. The transformation required or the capability required to actually work, have tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of employees working from home is an arduous task. If you think about Accenture, I mean, we've been a virtual organization throughout our history, We don't really have a headquarters. Our leadership team is distributed all over the world, and a lot of our workforce is actually mobile. So, early on we invested in remote infrastructure, Cloud technologies, really allowing our people to work on client sites at home, in our offices around the world, and to be able to collaborate and communicate, in that fashion. But for those organizations that haven't invested in that kind of infrastructure, COVID has really actually created a greater separation of between the leaders and the laggards. The top 10% of digital transformers have actually expanded that gap and they've created lasting value for their shareholders through that infrastructure investment that they've made. And I think about sort of today's clients that we have here, whether it's on the West Coast or around the world, at this point we've seen more digital transformation happened in the last three months, than we have seen in the last 10 years. It is on the agenda for our key clients and their boards with respect to how they create resiliency, both in their infrastructure and their business operations. So we're particularly focused on helping clients through that transformation, and closing that gap between the leaders and laggards. >> That's terrific, and I'm wondering what you could share, cause we always talk about kind of the three headed monster, right? It's it's technology, which is certainly part of it, but it's also people and process. And clearly to be able to efficiently manage a workforce of 500,000+ people I think are at essentially these days distributed all over the world, many languages, many times zones, many kind of expertises, what are some of those things along those three paths that you share in terms of best practices between the technology and the people and the process? >> Absolutely, so from it, I think, technology is the underlying foundation at this point, if you don't have the remote working infrastructure and the Cloud capability, your data and your systems accessible, to a remote workforce you're already behind. So, step one is getting the basic foundation of the fundamentals in place through that remote infrastructure as well as Cloud technologies. From a process standpoint, what we're seeing clients do today is actually rethink all their processes. If COVID has taught us one thing. I mean, three months ago, if you had asked most of the executives that we talked to, can you actually run your company remotely, most would have answered no. (Jeff laughs) Today, what we've proven over the last three months is in fact that's possible. But you really now need to create lasting change in the process, to be able to sort of sustain the value. We're finding that people are more efficient, quality's better, engagement is better, with remote working, but in order to be able to create enduring change, you're going to need to actually change and rationalize processes across the organization from selling to customer care, to marketing and to operations, and even some cases manufacturing. And that requires a cultural change as well. For organizations that haven't, aren't used to sort of virtual working, it requires an engagement model change, and really sort of bringing together a hybrid between, physical interaction and digital interaction. One of the things we're doing actually along those lines, our team is Zurich cause that pioneered this technology we're calling synapse, which allows you to go from sort of, this kind of interaction to actually augmented reality and virtual reality environments where you connect collaborate with each other in an entirely virtual world that actually replicates the real world. So, we've taken our San Francisco Hub and various other Hub locations around the world, replicated them instead of 3D space, and how people do interact with each other, in a more human way in a virtual space. So, I think what you're going to see is more of those kinds of technologies, creeping into the way people actually interact with each other as the new normal. >> Right, so, for the people that weren't prepared, right? That hadn't already kind of moved down the road in terms of SaaS applications and distributed workforce and security and all those things to bake in, did they just have to go now or are they still stuck, kind of holding their head in the sand, waiting for this thing to end. I mean, is there a way for someone to, how do they quickly make that transformation with no planning? It's one thing if you're already kind of on your way, and you just, you give it a little bit more gas, but for the people that really weren't thinking that way, do they even have a chance or it's like, sorry, you better, (laughs) you're late to the party. >> I think today, even with a standing start today, if you look at the technologies available from Microsoft, from Google, from Amazon, a lot of the big public Cloud providers, you can really get up to speed very quickly. For example, we took the National Health Service in the UK, using teams we put them online almost within a week to get them activated in a virtual environment, interacting and operating their service without having interest invested in that technology in the past so, even as an organization that hasn't done, that you can move quickly leveraging the investments in infrastructure that service providers have made over the years. >> Jeff: Right. >> I think that it requires though a leadership change. The c-suite and the board of our clients really need to see that strategic imperative of making that change in order to be able to facilitate the change through the organization. And I can tell you that, our clients are absolutely committed to that journey at this point, and are actively looking for opportunities to implement digital technology throughout every function in their organization, so that they can actually, handle these kinds of extraneous shocks to their business. >> Right. >> And if you think about sort of the three areas of focus these days, it's about, getting people to work or getting back to the office wherever possible, and doing that with a focus on keeping their people safe, and within sort of the regulatory environment that they operate. But secondly, it's about putting in place these kinds of digital technologies that allow sort of ongoing hybrid digital and physical workspaces, and also creating a different type of customer experience from selling to operations for their customer base. And then the last is actually thinking about a dramatic change in cost infrastructure through outsourcing that also creates the ability to variabilize your cost in the event of further extraneous shocks, because we don't know how long this is going to last. We don't know what the next wave might look like. So you really need to think about putting in place the infrastructure and the changes that allows you to endure both from a cost as well as a process and technology perspective, these changes in the future. >> Yeah, I want to dig into a little bit about kind of what comes next because we're into this for a while. I think it's going to keep going for a while. There's indications that we might be hitting into a second wave and in my mind, short of a vaccine we're going to be an in kind of an uncomfortable state for awhile. But I'm just curious as to how you're hearing people thinking about what going back means. Cause I, you know, I have a hard time thinking that if people have been working from home for months, right, and behaviors become habits and, people learn how to be productive and, they like to be able to eat dinner with the family. I just don't know, or what do you think in terms of kind of rushing back to jumping on the 101 every day at 7:00 to sit in traffic for two hours. I just, it seems like hopefully we're past that in a need to have knowledge workers be at an office all together at the same time every day, especially now that they've learned to be productive, kind of outside of that routine. What are some of the things that people are thinking about? How should they be thinking about it? And of course there's the whole liability issue where, you invite people back somebody gets sick. I mean, we've barely kind of begun to hear the whole lawyer piece of the story, which we don't necessarily >> No. >> need to get into. >> I mean, I think the first thing is absolutely making sure that people are safe. And I think most organizations are thinking through, how to put in place the controls and the processes to ensure that their people are safe and most are thinking about this in a very phased way. You're hearing a lot of our Bay area clients announcing that they're not returning back to work this year. And, several are saying, perhaps even never. And so I think that, there is a fundamental change happening here with respect to going back to the office. Our sense is that there's going to be a much more hybrid environment where, it's going to be perfectly fine for folks to be working from home two or three days a week, and then going to the office where it's necessary to collaborate in a physical way. And also a human way, I think that, we do need as humans that interaction, a physical interaction. And so I think, we may be physically apart, but we need to be socially interactive. And I think organizations are trying to figure out sort of the right blend there. But I don't think we go back to a normal, if you will the old normal, which was five days a week in the office, I do think that we're going to be in a much more virtual environment. And frankly, there are some benefits of that in that, if you look at our organization because we're so global, we're able to tap into talent all around the world that can help our clients here in the Bay area, because they're more comfortable now, with the use of virtual technology. So I do think that the new normal will be a hybrid environment, much more so than it has in the past. >> Yeah, we talked to, I don't know if you know, Darren Murph, GitLab, they're really interesting company. They've been 100% remote from forever. So they've got a lot of really defined practices and processes in place in terms of like, which communication channel is for what types of communication and Darren's point was because they are mobile and they are in different time zones, you have to be much more defined and thoughtful in the way that you organize your communications so that people can be more self serve. And that those things will also work great in a physical world you just didn't have to have in the physical world. And his point is, we can just throw people in a room and hope that they get together, that doesn't necessarily always happen. And so by using some of these remote management techniques and processes you're actually going to be much more effective whether you're together in a room and can go out to lunch together, or you're still distributed team. And really kind of, as we've seen this transition from kind of do we want to put it in Cloud, to why don't we want to put it in the Cloud, to kind of a Cloud first and then on kind of a mobile, where your history is, should it be a mobile app, or should it be mobile first? It almost feels like now it's going to be remote first. And then if there's a reason to come to the office, it's an important meeting we need to get together. People are coming from out of town, but it almost feels like it's going to shift that remote's going to be the primary form. And then the physical getting together really be secondary. I don't know if you are hearing anything along those lines. >> No, absloutely, we've seen that in our own environment. I think the level of engagement between our leadership teams here in the West and all around the world and in the market units is actually significantly greater. It's not that you run into someone in the hallway with especially in a very large organization like ours, you are now actually connecting face to face with people. The days of the conference call are gone, and you're actually interacting and you're peering into the lives and the homes of the colleagues that you've worked with for many years. I think that's actually a pretty fundamental social change, and actually creates a level of proximity that perhaps you didn't even see when you were together in an office somewhere, and you're appearing into the lives, if you will, of your counterparts. I think that's a pretty fundamental change. And, if I look at the forms of engagement, I mean, we have, most of our population is under 30 around the world. And so they're used to a digital channels of communication, both on the mobile handset, as well as on their laptops and desktops, through online channels. And so, we're actually leveraging that to be much more connected, even in this virtual world than we were in our physical world. >> Jeff: Right. >> And I think most organizations see that as an avenue to really get a pulse on what's happening with their workforce and in their business, especially in a global setting. >> Right, and I wonder if you could share some best practices on kind of from a leadership perspective, cause you're part of Julie's executive team. I'm sure you guys are distributed all over the world and I assume your direct reports, maybe a little bit less distributed now that you're running the U.S. West but, one thing we keep hearing is that the frequency and the variety of the communications has got to go up a lot both in terms of, what you're talking about and how often you're talking to. And as you said, kind of getting into this, kind of human side, because you are getting invited into people's homes. What can you share that you guys have been doing best practices at a center forever because you've been managing distributed teams, since the very beginning? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, if you look at just this week, I spent eight hours with Julie and the entire Global Management Committee, the top 40 people, or so within Accenture. Every morning through video conferences, we interacted with Julie, highly interactive sessions, where we went through our strategy or financial results, some of the key initiatives we're trying to drive, and instead of what we would have done historically is fly 40 people to some part of the world, and how's them in a hotel room for two or three days to have the same session, we were incredibly more productive. We had three blocked hours per day over the last three days, again using digital media to engage with each other converse share our rich media content much more productive use of technology and frankly, a lot less wear and tear on people flying around the world, and as substantially lower cost. So, I think that that's something that is here to stay. I can't see us going back to the model where we, fly people around for internal meetings, certainly. From a West perspective, I meet with my management team, we scheduled calls now three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically, we get together for an hour. We conduct sort of what's going on with the business, where are the issues, what do we need to solve? And we do that entirely virtually, if you think about it, I'm getting, an hour or three hours a week with my entire leadership team, connected and collaborating around the same issues, in a much more kind of organized and concentrated way than if I ran into them at the coffee machine or at the water cooler. I am actually getting more engagement, more organization and more focus through my leadership team, in this new world than perhaps I would have had, in new. >> Right. >> So, I think that there's a lot of benefit, to this model. I still think that there's an opportunity to get, when we have large meetings and we need to sort of convey a particular message. It is nice to be able to get together with people physically. But I think that that's going to be less often now than in the past. >> Right, I just think people it's just different, right? It's not better or worse, it's just different. We had an interview earlier today. I think we had somebody on from Singapore, somebody on, from India, somebody on from Germany, our host was in Boston and the production was here in Palo Alto. You couldn't do that to get all those people together in a physical space is a lot bigger investment and a lot more difficult. So, it's just, it's different. It's not the same as being together. We can't go out and get a beer after this is over, but at the same time, it's a lot easier to grab an hour and get together with people. So, I think there is, it's different, it's not a substitute is different. >> Yeah, I mean, to that point, if you think about our clients they are global, their executives are global. The ability to actually connect with clients have a conversation regardles of where they are on the globe You know, it's, we are actually much more able to do that now because it doesn't require flying. It doesn't require sort of scheduling months ahead to make sure everyone can be in a particular location. You can literally just schedule a meeting and have it the next day. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that makes us much more responsive to our client's needs and much more accessible as they have questions for us. So I think there's definite advantages to this mode of working. >> Right. So Saleem, before I let you go, it's a great conversation and we could go all day, but we'll let you (laughs) get back to work. But I've just, especially since you come from a communications background and a 30 year veteran in this space I mean for as bad as this pandemic has been and it's bad, right? A lot of people are dead, a lot of businesses like restaurants and airlines, speaking of airlines and hotels, couldn't go digital right away. Right, we're fortunate to be in the knowledge business that we could. But what I really want to get your perspective is the fact that we have so many of these tools in place today that actually enabled it to happen kind of easily, right? We've got fast internet and we've got a high power mobile devices. And we have a huge suite of mobile applications from Salesforce to Slack, to Acuity. That's the software we use for scheduling. I mean, there's so many tools that, you look at had this happened 10 years ago, of five years ago, 15 years ago, a really different level of pain. And I'm sure, as you look back to the old days, put again application of that service providers and laying all this fiber and a lot of that stuff in 2000 looked like it wasn't necessarily going to pay off. And in fact, a lot of that infrastructure that was put in in those early days has really, kind of shined in this moment where it had to. And it's, I just love to get kind of your perspective with a little bit of a history of how these systems have developed and are in place and really enabled, kind of this work from anywhere, communicate from anywhere, almost do anything as long as you've got access to some type of a device and an internet connection. >> Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you that the broadband infrastructure investments that our telco clients have made over the last, two decades or so have really come into their own through this crisis. I think if you look at the level of investment, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have made in Cloud infrastructure has enabled, our organization, as well as many others, to be able to turn on a dime with respect to this crisis. I actually think that emerging economies that are implementing for example, 5G technologies, and adopting those technologies sometimes faster than their Western counterparts are actually, will leap frog, with respect to using those technologies, and allow if you will, their economies, their businesses, to sustain these kinds of impacts in a much more ready way in the future than perhaps in the past. And I think that, digital and digital transformation is sort of a element to the  business in the future and frankly, to sustaining, economies. So, I think mobile technology, Cloud technology, and the ability to sort of digitize your business and your economy are critical success factors for the future. >> Yeah, if not, you're in trouble because everybody else is doing it. >> Exactly. (Jeff laughs) >> All right, Saleem. Well, thank you for spending a few minutes, sharing your insight, really appreciate it. And congratulations on the new position. I'll look forward to seeing you in that beautiful, innovation Hub, one of these days, as soon as we can get back outside. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Jeff, I look forward to having you at the San Francisco Hub and showing you the virtual implementation of that Hub on our CMS platform. >> Awesome, look forward to it, thanks a lot. >> All right, you take care. >> All right, he's Saleem, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, here at the Sands Convention Center at Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost here is David Vellante. Two sets, five hosts, three days, wall to wall coverage. All of the action for Dell Technologies, all the component pieces. Happy to welcome back to the program Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who's the president of the server and infrastructure services at Dell EMC. Ashley, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Good to see you. >> Alright, so we actually had Sam Grocott on and we were talking about all the product lines. And he said he's the father of power going across the line. He did admit that the power line goes back to PowerEdge, which, of course, is your baby. >> That's right. >> Give us the update, lots of discussion at the keynote. Always change in your world, so give us the latest and greatest. >> Sure, we're about 25 years old now. So PowerEdge has lived on for quite a while. We've got to be over 30 million servers out there by now. So we had a really good Dell Technology World so far. More to come, but some of the lists, real quick, of announcements that we've had and we can talk a little bit more about them. In servers, we actually went a little bit early from Dell Technology World and lined up with Intel to launch Cascade Lake, bringing Optane into server class memory. I think the industry's been waiting for it. We're ready to deliver now. And so that was earlier this month. We've put quite a bit of advancements and enhancements in our open manage enterprise and in securing the platforms. We also this week talked about a PowerEdge that's not called a PowerEdge. So we call it the DSS 8440, and really a capstone product to our AI ML portfolio. So today we already support one, two, three, four accelerators per server. Now we can go up to 10. We can support the latest Nvidia B100 tensor core GPUs, and it's really a unique system within the industry. That's going to help customers scale their training loads further and further, faster performance, more mips, very, very intense box, but one that's going to be, I think, well received within the marketplace. >> Did you say bits? >> I said Mips. >> I like that term,. >> So actually, we've got a lot of pieces that your solutions fit, but you mentioned one item, that I wonder if you could just explain to our audience the importance of SEM, is something that how does that impact solutions, the applications. It's something that a lot of times get lost in the whole general storage discussion. So maybe explain the importance of SEM in the marketplace today. >> Sure. So it's a game changer, it really will be, but it'll have to go, in our mind, through the technology adoption curve that a game changer deserves. So it's been a long time coming. We've been working on it, the industry's been working on it. Intel has been working on it for more than a decade. And if you think through it, we see customers using it in two different ways. In memory mode, expanding the capacity within nodes to levels that you can't reach with DRAM today at almost DRAM-like levels and performance, is something that a lot of customers already have models for. They can think through TCO, they can think through their performance characteristics, and it really becomes something they can consider to enhance their portfolio today, at mode, a little bit different. As we think through software from the OS level: kernel, hypervisor, application, cache, log, database, all these levels, we're going to have software that has to catch up and allow this to be the game changer it is. But already, I'll tell you the demand for systems that we're providing customers to begin their evaluations, they proof of concepts, their software development has actually doubled what we thought it would be, and we were pretty ambitious. So I think the demand is there, and we're going to see that adoption curve when the software catches up. >> And any specific use cases you're seeing early on? >> Well like I said, memory mode, I think people can get their heads around already, is are they performance, or are they capacity bound by DRAM. Start to do the economics, does it make sense. At mode, caching for sure, putting log, changing kind of the structure of how you do logs, and database is really going to be the killer app when we get there. Across the different vendors already we've seen pretty significant increases in performance, and we're early still. But I think there's a few things that our customers want to get through, and we're trying to help them with. If you have persistence in the system, you have a new level of something you have to secure, and so we're spending a lot of time with our customers helping them develop technology methodologies to say wait a minute, information, I turned the machine off and there's still information besides the hard drive or the SSD. Also can I trust the data even though it's persistent? Or do I have to have storage services at that level that help me with things like replication or snapshot or archive. So we've got a long way to go, but we're really, we believe this is a game changer, and we're developing towards that. >> And cost-wise you're sayin' slightly more expensive than DRAM. >> Probably a little bit more than slightly. >> Yeah, okay, more expensive than DRAM, and relative to flash, obviously more expensive than flash, but much higher performance, right? >> Much higher performance, and so it's just a modeling exercise, but it'll reach levels we haven't had before. And then from a software developer point of view as you go forward, you can really think about scale out systems differently. If your application was bound by capacity of DRAM or memory, this changes it quite a bit. >> So you're talking about new programming model, essentially right, that's why it's going to take some time, but you would expect maybe uptake in financial services early on. Is that fair, Or not necessarily? Healthcare? >> All solid verticals. I think it's going to be where enhancement or performance can, you know, if you pay three, four, five x the cost, but you get three, four, or five x the capability, or even less, you have to think about it, but there's some applications where latency, where performance of the database are so sensitive, and such the bottleneck today, that it's well worth it. >> When you look at the innovation pie that's going on in servers, how much is architecture, hardware architecture, versus sort of software and management? Can you sort of, I know it's a sort of general question, but give us a sense. >> Sure, I think it's interesting, is we are investing as we go forward, I think into a brand new era. So I mentioned earlier we made it to 25 years old, what's going to happen over the next 25 years. So I think most of the architectures that we develop today are highly, highly optimized for bringing data into a processor, calculating, storing. And we have very balanced, efficient, high-performance systems for that today. What are we doing going forward? Well, we're not necessarily bringing the data, describing the rules, called software, and then getting the answers anymore, right? Now what we want to do in a lot of situations, we want to bring the data, which is the most valuable asset, we actually kind of know the answers already. We want it to calculate rules for us, and that's the output. That's a different architecture. That's a different way of computing, and that's why you're seeing these heterogeneous architectures starting to form, accelerators, a lot of technology going, and innovation, and venture capital, and talent going towards really building that new model going forward for the next two decades. >> Okay, actually we've had a lot about cloud this week. When I looked at many of the solutions underneath, I kept hearing the same answer. VxRail, VxRail, I've talked to some of the team, there is more than just VxRail and some of these solutions. Sammon looked at some of the other pieces, but VxRail has been a rocket ship for the last couple of years, and of course, you know, the servers underneath driving a lot of that. Can you talk about how that plays into your portfolio and some of the architectural discussion we were seeing. How does that bleed into the HCI and hyper cloud discussions? >> Sure, so if you think of the journey we're on, 10 years ago perhaps, maybe even more recently than that, customers really were making two different choices. As a matter of fact, you guys know as well. I was organized into two different organizations. One to deal with hyper-scale, and one to deal with enterprise capability, and customers can see that. They want to be able to operate in both domains, but even we were organized differently. And if you go maybe five years ago when people started talking about software defined and HCI we finally had a mechanism to say you can build scale out of architectures. We can automate this capability for you. You don't have to actually spend all your opexs, you administration, your talent, and your time, just keeping the infrastructure up and running. And so people broke out of IT by project by Gantt chart, and into flexible architectures, right. Next thing they said is but we still aren't really operating. We're operating in silos of very flexible architecture here in my data center, very flexible architecture in the colo, very flexible architecture in software defined or SAS or cloud. How do I bring it together? So we believe there's a consistency of platform and infrastructure that allows us to move to a consistency of operations. VxRail offers that today, because we uniquely can integrate with VMWare and V Cloud Foundation, to build where now we can take care of the automation, the lifecycle management of the hardware. VMWare together integrated now can take care of the lifecycle of the software stack, all the way up to the IAS layer or beyond, and now we have the ability to say you can look upwards, you can develop, you can build on that, and even more so, if you want to then stitch that together, and have that be the control plane, you can now build that out to other native public clouds, now you have the hybrid cloud. We can actually get there, we can actually organize around it, build it. I mean it's a breakthrough for our customers. And then add on that, some customers have come back to us and said, you have the expertise to do all this for us, can I just consume it? I don't actually need to control it. And in that case we can offer it as a service, and we previewed that as Project Dimension last year, and now the teams are really happy to bring it to fruition all the way to beta with customers today, and really give customers kind of that choice. >> So what's behind that? I mean you've got a team of people sort of monitoring everything, obviously a lot of automation. What's the customer conversation like? I mean it's the early days, but what do they want to know about, do they always just want to say hey you take care of it? Or do they want to peel the layers and say okay, I want to peek behind the curtain before I sign up for this. >> Yeah, so on the platform side, customers want to know how does the integration work. Really where do I have to spend time, energy? Can I really live at this IAS layer, can I live at the PAS layer with pivotal, can I live above that? How do my workflows get managed? And when you say, we're kind of in the environment and the methodologies you already use today with V Center and V Motion and PKS. Then I think you see a light bulb go off of okay, I can really lead the administration to the machines, and the automation. Then the customer who's interested in moving everything maybe to a consumption model, then they have the next question which is can I have consistency not only of infrastructure operation, but of consumption? And that's where as a service offering, really starts to highlight the fact that we can meet you on your journey wherever you are. Some customers aren't ready for that, some are just right there saying that's really the model I want to move to for digital transformation. >> Okay, you got roughly a 20 billion dollar business growing at almost 20 percent a year, so pretty good year last year. Give us the update on your business, why are you being so successful, and I got a follow up question on component, so the supply with. >> Okay sure. So we did have a pretty good year last year. We don't break out servers, but servers are networking as you said, but about 20 billion dollars growing at 28 percent. Why? Well I think we have one of the most capable portfolios of infrastructure. We're uniquely trying to make sure that we are operating within the Dell Technologies portfolio. And so most customers, Dave, have not come to us and said you know what I'd like to do, I'd like to have like 10 more of you guys come meet with me and talk to me about a portion of my business. They said why can't you come and provide all of my needs? But I don't want to compromise. I don't want to have one best of class, and then have to compromise across my other needs. So really building kind of number one all in one place, is that promise that you don't have to compromise. Really it's changed the dynamic with a lot of customers being able to say this is my essential IT infrastructure provider. They have what I need. So that's helped quite a bit. The nature of our business I think is that we are operating from the smallest customer, you need one, all the way up to customers who need a million servers, and we're able to operate in a consistent PowerEdge tenent across all of that space. Then the, I think, and you didn't mention it, but in hyper converged, we're seeing growth rates that kind of put the server business to shame, with we were 65 percent in Q4 in an industry that's growing 40 percent that's on fire. It's a new business model, it's still emerging, but customers, the demand for hyper converged continues to go forward, because that operating model, simplicity, elastic, scale out, automated, is extremely powerful. >> And component supply right now, component pricing, is a tail wind for you. For years it's been a head wind. Is that right, it's flipped? Or not so much >> Certainly, yeah certainly the last two years has been sort of an unprecedented rise in some of our commodities in terms of cost. We're seeing that be deflationary or stable at this point, so it's really changed a little bit of the dynamic of how customers were operating within their own budgets. So now I think we're more in what we're used to in the beginning 23 years as we go forward. >> So actually, last thing, you talked about you used to have kind of a hyper-scale business. Just give us the update. I saw a quote out there that Dell puts more gear out there in hyper-scale environments, than anyone. Can you just give us a little context as to what that means? >> Sure, you know as we go forward, I think we've seen others say that they don't operate in certain businesses, they don't want to be in tier one, and you won't hear that from us. I think where we can add value, and we have incredible assets in terms of engineering, modular data center capability, capability at the edge, real assets like software supply chain delivery, across the board. We want to be able to help customers build their infrastructures. And in the service provider community, I think we've already built up relationships, credibility, and technology, to help them compete. Our standard is if you do business with us, we want you to win in your segment. We want you to transform faster than your competition, and we think we can do that for people, and I think we continue to see quite a bit of success in the service provider's space. >> Well really appreciate the updates, and congratulations on all of the progress you've made Ashley. >> Thank you, great job thanks for having me guys. >> Alright, for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, gettin' towards the end of day two, three days wall to wall coverage. Thank you as always for watching The Cube.

>> 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 with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington or, as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the Senior Director of Product Management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. >> Hi, how's it goin? >> Great. This is, been a very buzzy morning, for Jeff and I here on this side. Lot's of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so... >> Big growth in just a year. There's a, I think, Mark Mader, your CEO, shared some sats this morning. There are 1100 companies represented here customers. >> Correct. >> From twenty countries, there are more than fifty customer speakers, which is, I think there's no more validating voice, than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, was looking at, you guys are partners with, some of your competitors. One of things I wanted to understand is, where do you have integrations with technology, versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two, and how does is work >> Yeah. >> In a Smartsheet world. >> You know, I think, the integrations really are, where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So, maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or, I want to be able to connect to Google Drive, or 03 Secure, One Drive document, in those native stores. So, that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves, is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization, and I need data to flow between those tools. >> Like a Sales Force. >> Like a Sales Force, or a JEAR, or something like that. Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there, when something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet, or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems. Cause, those are the systems of record, that my company cares about. >> So, a connection is a much bigger step in integration? >> They're just different. >> Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interactions. So, things like Drive and Box and Dropbox, and Slack and Teams and, stuff like that. Or, the web content, which we just announced. We want to be able to embed a Youtube video in a dashboard. That's not integrations, it's not, there's no data flowing back and forth, it's just a link, right? >> Got it, thank you. >> Yeah. >> So, lot of customer's we have, I think fifty customer's presenting, which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's, (laughs), >> Yeah. >> Awfully large. So, just some of the all chatter here. You've been here for a couple of day now, you guys had some early training yesterday. What is some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customer's. Kind of, what's the buzz on some of the new offerings, and what are you hearing, amongst the constituent here? >> I mean, it's always, you know, this is only our second year. But the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away. By just the big list of things that we shipped, this week. And, as I was reflecting, like, I don't remember doing all that much. But then, when you see it all on one big slide, with everything listed out, it's incredible. So, it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product... >> Yes. >> Session, and we're really excited to have shipped, the multi-assign to feature, which has been our number one customer request for a while. But, it's not a, game-changing feature. Whereas, I think some of the Automation Rules ,and Updates there, and Workflow Builder, are really. People are going to go back and it's going to to change the way that they work. And, so people are really excited about that. But, really excited about Dynamic View. And being able to really, taylor the information that is shared across their organization. >> The word collaboration, like symbionic or bi-directional collaboration, popped into my mind. When Gene Pharaoh, your SVP of Product, who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience. In that, number of times, you mentioned, the audience broke into applause. And, it probably feels pretty good. Like, yes, we're listening to you, we're doing this. Enabling, them to have technology that allows them to collaborate with and amongst teams and functions within an organization. But, you're also taking their feedback, directly and collaborating with customer's, to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had, Margo Visitacion on from Forrester. And she was talking about the collaborative work management CW as an emerging market. With respect to collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I can be a licensed user, and share it with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for Smartsheet? >> Well, you know, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative where you can comment on them. Google Doc, and that's great. But, I think where Smaresheet really excels, is really in this free collaborator model. That's not bounded by your particular organization or your team. And it really allows you to create, to spread, and create connections across customer's and vendors and other orgs within your team. And, this is where you're starting to see this these sort of step function changes in these organizations. Where, you know, you see this Office Depot example. And, he talks about, you know, taking a workflow in their organization they, going from, you know, four to six weeks, down to twenty-four hours. And, enabling people who are putting in budget request, to take action on that request, the next day. And, those are the kinds of things, that are going to fundamentally change those businesses. And so, that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful. You can't get that kind of compression in time. Unless, you can really span those traditional business hours. >> So Robin, one of the great things that happens always is, with tech companies is the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important. You get an ecosystem, lot of stuff going on, but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? >> It's always, >> Correct >> Application centric, right. I got a problem, I've got to fix it. At the same time, you guys, you do have a platform. Meaning, you can go across a lot of different applications. So, when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform. Priority, in terms of more of, kind of a general purpose underly, versus and app priority, like you said, multi, how do you call... >> Multi-assignment. Yeah. >> Multi-assignment, you assign two people to the (laughs). To the no correct product management protocol, but everybody wants it, cause it's the real world. How do you kind of prioritize that? How do yo kind of look at the world when you're deciding, what are you going to roll out next, what are you going to roll out next, ware are you going to roll out next? >> It starts and ends with having conversations with real people. We've taken lots of data and we have enhancement request and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning, actually, was less than 3% of all answered request in the last couple of years. But, it's our number one request. And so, it sort of. >> Oh, Wait, wait wait. So it was less than 3%. >> Of all enhancement request. >> But it was number one? >> But it's our number one. >> So you've got a giant laundry list. >> Giant laundry list of things, right. So, we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually, have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers, and dedicated user experience. People that are going out, we're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them and we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases. Because, there're so many different ways people use the product. There not enough people asking for one thing. >> Right. >> They're all asking for slightly different things. So, we really have to dig in and have a real, qualitative conversation with them. To understand, and bring that back and say okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves, all of these problems in a compelling way. >> Well, it's definitely more than 3% of the people cheer. When, when that. (laughs) >> Yes. >> When the feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other, kind of (mumbles), that you've got to wrestle with is, kind of a low code, no code, we want to be for everybody, yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So, again, that's kind of a delicate, balancing act as well. Cause, you want to let everyone have access to be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it, pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those. >> Well we... >> Priorities. >> We just try to hide as much of that as possible. You know, Smartsheets always been this tool, where it's like, it sort of looks like a spreadsheet, and it sort of looks like project management. But it's got this underlying flexibility built into it. We don't force you to, you know, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there. If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD. Whereas, a lot of purpose built applications, their like, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format, or it doesn't work. We've always had this, sort of, flexibility and complexity trade off. The trade off is, if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt Chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more (mumbles) than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so, we've always sort of danced this line, with making the tool super flexible and assume the users know what they're doing. When they're interacting withhe tool we assume they an intention and they're trinna do something. And, we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that, sort of, plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do, is like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers. And we put stuff out there, well in advance in releasing it. In a situation like this, we announced a bunch a capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And, I think that's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board, than any feature I've seen at this company. But, it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever build, as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right, by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sit in a room and go, oh, we know that perfect solution to workflow management. >> Right. >> Most of our customer's don't even necessarily, use the term workflow. >> And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say. It says words and actions. You know? And little things with words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement. It's when this happens, do this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this. To try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. >> Right. >> You can't avoid it, but you know. >> So, in hiding it, the last thing which your going to do, going forward is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in the field, is for you to leverage that under the covers. To hide. >> Absolutely. >> The nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer. To help suggest the right path. So, that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap. Integrating those types of capabilities, underneath the covers. >> Yeah and, there's been a lot of, we've have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot Company back in January. And, that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. We feel that we have a lot of really good information. But, at the same time, there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI. And, the reality is, that relies on huge data sets. And it relies on a lot of analysis. And that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customer's data, security data privacy very seriously. And we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens, then say a consumer product. That's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data. And you don't really have a lot of recourse, other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it. But we want to enable you, to turn these types of features on. So, we need to look at more of like an off-end model, where a customer can say oh, if I'm a big enterprise user at Smartsheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users, knowing that that information is going to stay in our, is going to comply with our data governance, and our data privacy rules. That our IT team puts forward. >> So the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, Hiding it, (mumbles). I'm curious, when you walk into a customer. Cause here we are in Bellevue, we're not in Vegas, But, we're neighors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced Teams, about eighteen months, or so, ago. You partner with both, you compete, but you, also, you're competing with Teams. When you walk into a customer and an enterprise, likely has a mixture of, tons of different software appications, right. But they probably have, 360, Office 365, Para Bi, Excel... Why would a customer, who has such a familiarity with, say a Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus, well we'll just extend our Microsoft expertese and bring in something like Teams? >> Yeah. >> I'm just curious, what...You've seen in that? >> Well, you know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of, orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And, there's a lot of tools out there where, you're having conversations and tools out there where you're creating content, and there's not a lot of tools out there, that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together. In an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of, Gene will, you'll sometimes here hims say, use this term, shared fabric. The Smartsheet, really provides this shared fabric, that ties a bunch of these tool together. And we really, we want to partner with all these people, because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You talk to some customer, they're like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of ten apps. And, you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later, then they'll be like, I love Smartsheet, it allows me to work with all the tools that I've already got. Very different, and they just have to different coperate goals and objectives there. And so, I think that the reason people like Smartsheet, is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about things. It's going to say look, oh, if you want to use, if you want to us Teams for your communications vehicle, and One Drive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed a PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet, great. We want that to be the case. We do that internally, right, we use all those. If you look at us internally, we're just like every other mordern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using. And it's different from team to team and department to department. So, it's all about just embracing the reality, that as modern business and modern application, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. >> So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1100 companies represented here, at this event. 2,000 people or so, fifty plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind, whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> Yeah, no. I'm trinna think of a good. I don't know that I have a good standout example. I think that we hear little tidbits of that from everyone. And it's not, it's a very common theme. So, I don't know that. It's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, I hear things, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this. Or, I'm going to now pull, integrate with this tool because, you've added this. So, you sort of take some and give some, on the same sentence almost. >> Yeah. You can do both. >> Yeah. >> Well Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time. We're excited to be here. This is our first Smartsheet event. And we have some customers coming up, so looking forward to hearing some more these cases in action. >> Great, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smartsheet Engage, in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back, with our next guest. (tech music) (tech music) (tech music)

(electronic music) >> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, and we've been here all day at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. We have had lots of great conversations, Jeff, with some of the executive team at Smartsheet, some analysts, and now we're excited to welcome a customer of Smartsheet to the show. We've got Latonia Lewis, the senior director of program management at Sodexo. Latonia, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you all for having me. >> So, Sodexo, I'm familiar with it as, you know, being in the tech world, and I go to a client's cafe, and I will usually see branding on boxes or maybe on the chef's gear. But this is a much bigger company than I thought, 437,000 employees globally. But, for those who might not know what Sodexo is, give us a little bit of an overview. >> Sure, Sodexo is a global company. Pretty much we focus on providing quality of life services. And you might ask yourself, "What does that mean?" So, Sodexo really recognizes people as being important and feel that, in a company as well as in the environment, that people should be the main focus. And, in doing that, we focus on providing services that enhance the quality of life for people. For us, the people could be our clients, they could be our consumers, or they could be our employees. So, we pretty much center that around the services that we offer. We have our on-site services that focus on facilities management. So that's basically providing a healthy environment for people to work in, or live in, or operate in. It could be across our food services platform where we're providing healthy meals or a healthy way of living. In addition to that, we provide support for rewards and recognition programs. And, in addition to that, we also provide personal and home healthcare services. >> That's far more diverse than I ever thought. >> Yes. >> Yeah, it is diverse, and we operate across a lot of different industries. We support corporate. We support energy, education that includes both schools as well as universities, seniors, and then sports and leisure. >> Wow. >> So what's your area of focus? That's a broad scope of services. Hopefully you're not delivering all of those to every customer in the United States. >> No, no, no, no. >> Okay, good. (laughter) >> I do work in the North America, and I work for the North American service operations organization, and, pretty much, we are the internal organization that provides support across all of our different segments. We're charged with providing synergies and centers of excellence in the servicing that we do, pretty much to try to bring out the best that Sodexo has to offer its customers and its clients, as well as its employees. >> So your customers are the Sodexo folks that are delivering the services to the end customer. Is that accurate? >> That is accurate. We are internally-faced organization, pretty much focused on making sure that we're providing a safe environment for people to work in. We're enhancing our services and our service offerings in facilities management, as well as across our food service platform, and then also focusing on our growth and support. >> So you are, obviously, a Smartsheet user. That's why you're here. I imagine, though, with as cross-functional as the services you deliver are, you have a lot of stakeholders, a lot of projects, a lot of programs to manage. Tell us a little bit about, prior to your Smartsheet implementation, how were you managing projects, programs, collaborating with stakeholders. Tell us about the before scenario. >> Okay, well, pretty much, I joined Sodexo to, basically, stand up a project management office for the North American service operations organization. When I came into the role, did a little bit of analysis, did a little bit of investigation, and pretty much found that people were doing things a myriad of different ways, right? From a project management maturity perspective, there was not a lot of, what I'll call standardized process and procedures, so I was faced with really figuring out how to, basically, get our arms around the work and the projects that we were doing across our service operations organization. So, Smartsheet was being used in-house already. They had used it in the prior year, basically to try to get their arms around the work that was being done, but that ended up being an exhaustive list. So I looked at how we could leverage Smartsheet and how we could use it more effectively to track the initiative or project work we were doing across service operations. So, in doing that, I found a way to be able to harness standardization in the way that we collect data to be able to do the reporting across the portfolio. And started using dashboards, which was something new. And, of course, you know, using digital transformation from a reporting standpoint is something new. It invokes change. So it was driving a lot of transformational type of, you know, activities that were going on, but it did enable us to be able to get a strategic view of the work that was taking place in service operations, which was something that was needed in order to be able to figure out how to best utilize the resources. >> You sound so calm. It must've been a rat's nest when you walked in, between so many offerings across so many types of facilities as a global company with 400,000 people. You're still calm. I can't believe it. You can laugh. It must've been bananas. I mean, where did you start? Where do you start? Is it the data collection? Is it the reporting? I mean, where did you start? >> I think the first thing that we really had to do was, I hate to say it, go back to basics. And we had to figure out what was our roadmap and how we were going to grow from a project management maturity perspective, and then align that growth with how we were going to, basically, identify a tool to use, and how we were going to, basically, scale that tool. So we started out very, very simple. It was like, "Guys, we need to get our arms around "the key initiatives that are helping us move forward and, "basically, that are aligned with our regional priorities "at the time." So we took that approach and, in FY 18, we pretty much focused on, "Let's get the key initiatives into a format "where we can do reporting on "and we can actually create a reporting cadence "that takes place every month "to be able to bring visibility to leadership "about the projects and the work "that was going on to help them "more effectively make decisions." As we looked at the planning for FY 19, I said, "Well, okay. "I spent a lot of time standing this up, "doing a lot of manual work, you know. "It's becoming unbearable, unmanageable." So we looked at Smartsheet control center, and I kind of, like, jumped, shouted, you know, did my little happy dance, but privately. But, then, made a business case to say why I felt that, you know, we strongly needed this to be able to, not only become more effective and stop doing so many things repetitively, but also to help us foster better project management practices through the use of the standardized, what I call project assets or project templates. >> So what were some of the KPIs that you could immediately grab onto, measure, report, to show, you know, the success and why this is such an important project strategically? >> Strategically, I think the first thing was, one, just being able to get our arms around what were the key projects in the portfolio, and then being able to report out to our internal customers, which were the market segments, what was the work that we were jointly doing to help them meet their strategic objectives. So that was, basically, transparency that they did not have before, and we really weren't reporting at that level. So, if I'm a market segment, I can pretty much say, "You're going to have seven projects "that are impacting you, "and here's the status of those projects. "Here's the health of the projects. "Here's where we need your support." So that was what I call phase one. This year, fast forward, we have control center. We have more visibility. We now have dashboards pretty much at the project level, and we can roll up data a lot more dimensionally. I can do it at the project level. I can do it at our S-O professional family level. I, in turn, can now give segments more detailed at their level, and then I can roll it up at a regional level. >> So you've got, you mentioned, sorry, Jeff, you mentioned, you know, reporting. Sounds like starting small with a focus on what are all the initiatives. I imagine leveraging a tool like Smartsheet to then stack, rank, and prioritize those. You talked about visibility, and that's key. We've heard that all day. Everybody needs visibility within organizations. Were you able to give these program, these initiative teams visibility where before they had none? Was this like a dramatic opening of the curtain whereas they've got 100% visibility into all of the core components of these initiatives that they're involved in? >> That's what's happening this year in FY 19. And, to your point, yes, we are opening up the curtains. And the projects teams, which, primarily, a lot of them are actually driven by service operations, but we have to do them in conjunction with our segments who are really responsible for the actual deployment within their different lines. It's opening up the curtains. It's allowing them to have visibility at a very detailed level than they, they haven't had that before, right? We're using standardized project schedules. We're using resource allocation sheets. We're using, what we call CCT, which is change management, communication, and training plans. So bringing that visibility at a much granular level, but at the same time being able to roll it up to the appropriate stakeholder. So I'm excited about FY 19 for what control center is going to provide for us. >> And so what happened when that happens in terms of, I mean, I'm sure the individual project people around a particular project have, probably, pretty good knowledge about what they're working on. But when you open it up to the senior teams, and now they've got this portfolio of projects and now, suddenly, they have this visibility. How did it change the way they look at things? How did it change the way that, suddenly, they make decisions and they allocate additional resources once you, basically, like you said, kind of opened the curtain and showed them what's going on? >> I think, last year when we started out, when I had just started, it was more retroactive type of reporting whereas, as we started in this new year and planning for FY 19, we had more visibility into the projects, what the projects were about, what was their financial benefit, if applicable, as well as their impact in terms of the scope and the number of units that were going to be involved. So, we do a lot of our planning on an annual basis, what we call during our budgeting or planning cycle, and, this year, there was a lot more visibility into the work that's being planned for FY 19 at a much granular level, down to what we call the unit level. So, being able to share that information and have the teams realize that we're able to track that this year, was very surprising. People like the transparency. I think it's driving a lot of collaboration between the service operations and the market segments, so I think people are going to be very happy. If I come back next year, I can really tell you how the fiscal year went and what we really saw with the turnaround in leadership, but I think they're looking forward to it. >> You're giving a talk tomorrow. What's your talk on? Give us a little preview. >> Preview. I'm going to be talking about control center and, actually, the experience with implementing control center, what was the thought process for, basically, implementing control center, how I went about it, doing a little bit visualization with seeing some of the dashboards that have been created, and then just giving some lessons learned on the implementation itself. >> That's always helpful, you know. Especially with a technology like Smartsheet where, often, like, you kind of found it osmotically through your organization. I know people love to hear how did you do this, what worked. I am curious, though. You mentioned FY 19 a couple of times. Has this technology enabled you to get to planning FY 19 faster, more effectively? What's been the impact there? >> I think it's being, it's having more data up front than we had last year, understanding what it's really going to take to implement these initiatives, being able to have an understanding of the resources from a human resources that's required, as well as understanding, "Okay, if we're going to implement "these initiatives, this is what the impact is going to be." Because every project that we work on doesn't necessarily have a financial benefit. Some of the projects are required. We have to do it, and this is why we must participate in on it. I think it's opened up the door for a lot more collaboration between leaderships and understanding, "You know what, guys? "We definitely have to put more prioritization." Because what may be a priority to one segment may not be a priority to the other, and we're working with the segments in being able to do that prioritization, if possible. >> And the configurability of Smartsheet tool enables you to move projects around in terms of priority much faster, much more easily. >> Oh, you can, it's, how shall I say it? It's a very nimble tool. It's a very agile tool. You can move things around. You know, if a project, we may think that it's going to be what we deem to be a traditional project, but after discussions we're like, "No, it's not really a traditional project "in the sense that it has a defined start and end cycle. "It's more of what we've done, "and we're tracking that as a business as usual." We have the flexibility to change that on a dime. We have the flexibility to change what our key KPIs are, and still be able to incorporate that into the reporting. So it's been great having that flexibility. It's been great not having to do and create dashboards manually. Everything is based off of standardized templates and it is wonderful. I mean, literally, I've been able to create the portfolio, delete the portfolio, and re-implement it just because of some changes that we did, and that took less than a couple of days to do. >> And before it used to take how long? >> Oh, I gave way too many personal hours to stand it up, but I had a passion about it because I loved the tool I could see the ease of use with the tool, so I just gave a lot of hours to initially doing it. But now that I'm working with a lot of the project teams, making a lot of progress. And Smartsheet, it's infectious. I mean, I think one of, I was just speaking with one of your counterparts and I was explaining to him about the fact that I just worked with one of our VPs who's been there for over 20 years, and actually taking the way that he was reporting in one system and transferring it into Smartsheet, working with him. And he's able to realize now that he can do a lot more reporting. He can get more KPIs. He's excited. I've, you know, thrown up sample dashboards of how he can track in FY 19. He's got his team on board. They're looking at it, and, every time I turn around, the Smartsheet is now growing. But it's such a success story, because there is that resistance to, sort of, like, changing the way that you do things. >> Especially for an organization as large as Sodexo is. >> Absolutely >> And, I imagine, as historical it is as well, right? >> Absolutely, and to see him embrace the tool and he's like, "I get it. "I love it." His team is off running with it. Those are the types of things that, you know, really, really make me happy. >> It's funny, because you just, you basically answered the question I just wanted to ask you, which is, you know, in the keynote there's a lot of talk about empowering everyone to do their job better. >> Yes. >> And you're a trained professional project manager. It's what you came in for. You know the tools. You're a sophisticated power person in this space. But I'm curious, have you seen, you know, kind of, project management, kind of, capabilities that flows out to the no-code, low-code, everybody with the Smartsheet, kind of, implementation and, kind of, proliferation within the organization? And how has that, you know, kind of, taken what used to be, kind of, a side load, super professional specialty into a broader, you know, kind of, use-case to take advantage of this thing? >> I think the more people see Smartsheet and start to understand its capabilities and that it's not just a project management tool, right. It's a facilitator of project management. So, in the case that I was just talking about, they're tracking a whole process that's really around facilities management. So it's not necessarily tracking your traditional type of project, but he's able to leverage that to save time. The administrative burden that, you know, he used to have to deal with, with reporting in a different system, bringing information into another system, then creating reporting. Now it's all in one system. He's like, "Latonia, I'm going to use dashboards. "That's how we're going to do our reporting." So he's getting back time. Not only him, but his team is getting back time so they can really focus and go out and do the work where they had the expertise. And that's the beauty of it. It's about people, as you said, being empowered to do what they were hired to do, understanding that you still have a responsibility and are accountable for doing the reporting. But it's giving them that level of empowerment and them seeing that, "You know what, "I can actually design what I need to see "in this application. "It's not Latonia, project management, "or it's not IT, or it's not somebody else. "It's me defining what I need to see in this tool "to get what I need to get out of it to service my clients." >> So I can imagine, as Jeff was saying, you have a lot of experience in program management. Sounds like this is, I don't want to say this is making your job easier, because I think that would be unfair, but it sounds like it's really helping make it much more efficient. >> I would definitely say it's definitely doing that. I think it's helping people, also, understand what project management is all about. You say project management, most people cringe because they think of paper. They think of, "I've go to do this." >> Gantt charts. >> Gantt charts, all of this other stuff. But when you think about it, it's really just a holistic approach to the way that you execute something. And that something could be a standard project, whether it's an IT project. It could be a process that you're rolling out. It could be you planning your wedding or your next family vacation. It's just all about managing work and the execution of work. And I think, once people realize that, they're starting to step back and say, "Oh, it's not as bad as we thought." Which, I'm happy as a project management professional that Smartsheet enables that type of empowerment and it's helping to facilitate that type of knowledge. >> Did you see that quote in the keynote this morning? It was an anonymous user. I'm getting this vibe where, one of the users told Smartsheet that Smartsheet made her the queen of the world. >> Yes. >> I'm getting a vibe here, Latonia. (laughter) >> You could be the anonymous-- >> Potentially. >> No, no. >> I won't put that on you, but that empowerment-- >> Top secret. >> Is impressive what you guys have been able to achieve. We want to thank you so much-- >> Thank you. >> Latonia, for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Great luck in your presentation tomorrow. I'm sure a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of the lessons learned and the best practices that you can offer. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, bye bye. >> For Jeff Frick, I am Lisa Martin. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around. Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Seattle, Washington, it's the Cube on the ground, covering KubeCon 2016. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John furrier. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Cube special on the ground coverage of KubeCon or CloudNativeCon, this is an event. Seattle booming with attendance, great growth from last year, and we are here in Seattle covering it all. And my next guest is Dan Kohn, who's the executive director of the CNCF, which stands for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's a mouthful, but it's super important part of the Linux foundation. Welcome. >> Thanks so much, really glad to be here. >> Yeah, so big fan of what's happening here. One, the event's awesome. Great uptake from last attendance from last year. >> Yeah, unfortunately, maybe a little too much. We're a little crowded in the foyer and a little bumping on the way into getting in the restroom and everything, but it's one of the challenges of fast growing technology space is trying to figure out a year ahead of time, what size space to get? >> And how many people to squeeze in without getting the fire marshal on your back. >> Exactly. >> Certainly this is going to be a great one because the hallway conversation has been spectacular, and normally the excitement's pretty strong at tech events like this because they're developers, so there's a lot of collaboration going on. But you have a kind of an air of really forward-thinking entrepreneurial kind of thinking going on here. And I haven't seen that in a while and I think that's one of the main things that we're seeing that came out of the containers, Kubernetes. I would say the unveiling and the clarity of at least a path. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And the importance of that. So that's been super important to (indistinct) community. Now making that a part of a foundation, an open source, has challenges. So that's what you're doing. So give us the plan, what's the strategy? >> Sure, so I'm actually relatively new to the space. I just became an executive director five months ago, and this is somewhat of a coming out party. This is the first big event that we've run as the first CloudNativeCon. And it's really just been extraordinary. I'm thrilled to see the range where we're getting some of the biggest companies in the world of the Cisco's, and Wallway's, and IBM's, Red Hat's and such. And then tons of startups, and a lot of real diversity in the end-users as well. Of startups looking at Kubernetes, massive companies, just saw a great presentation from Ticketmaster, about them having 50 year old technology that they're moving forward and putting into containers. >> So in the growth of the market, one of the challenges is to kind of, you know, not so much be a chess player, but be a gardener if you will, kind of like let the flowers bloom, if you will. And that's a challenge cause opensource is very opinionated, but there's also a lot of passion involved. So how do you look at, what's your philosophy on establishing kind of a rules of engagement? How do you foster the innovation? Certainly the market drivers are for more growth, but people have inhibitors on the enterprise that we hear about, support and these things of that nature. So how do you enable that? What's your strategy and what's your view? >> Sure, so CNCF is a very new organization. And my goal on it is to look at a lot of the giants that have come before us of like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Apache Software Foundation and OpenStack. And my goal is to try and learn from them and ideally to try and make entirely new and different mistakes as opposed to the ones that they may have made in the past. So one of the things that's a little unusual in our setup is that we very much separate all of the technology decisions from the business decisions. We have a governing board of a bunch of the biggest technology companies in the world, the ones I mentioned, plus Google and Samsung just joined, which we're very excited about, a number of others. But they can't actually adopt projects in. So we have a separate group called the technical oversight committee, which is some of the top architects in the cloud space. So we have folks like Ben Hindman of Mesosphere, and Solomon Hykes of Docker, Brian Gantt of Google, and six others, and that's the group that looks at new projects and evaluates them and talks to them and decides whether to adopt them into CNCF or not. And we feel that that separation is really critical so that the technology decisions are not being biased by the business one. >> Yeah, it's always hard to foster growth in the innovation around business models, conflicting with the technology enablement, that's really key. Great to see that decoupling. So on the business model side, thoughts on things that you've learned and observed, learnings that you've had in your past career and applying that now, I mean, the Bait, the rage is on, Open Core to Apache, GPL, you saw some things going on there. So there's like all kinds of different approaches. Are there any thoughts of the winds blowing any which way or the other? >> Sure, I was previously the chief operating officer at the Linux Foundation between '06 and '10, and I definitely think you can, CNCF as part of the Linux Foundation, we took that model of saying, "the technology decisions "need to be separate from business ones." One thing that's interesting to me is that when I was last in this space 10 years ago, people were perfectly fine. Linux Journals, GPL, people were fine with free licenses like MIT and BSD. Since then, and for this group, there is an enormous focus on the Apache license. And the reason why, is the fear of submarine patents. And so the whole goal of CNCF is for us to be an intellectual property no fly zone. That you can have all of these companies that compete very hard in the marketplace, but they can come together and collaborate and share their ideas and their technology without the belief that a couple years later, someone's going to be able to trick someone else in with a lawsuit, and win that. And the Apache license is really the industry consensus right now for best practices. >> It's interesting cause that no fly zone gives the freedom for the creation and the invention side of it. The patent thing is always worrisome, but in general, there's also the business model down the road kind of approach. Which is, "let's go innovate." Apache has done great on packaging. Have someone get some traction. It fosters the community aspect as well as a startup. Maybe not thinking about packaging. >> No, we have an advantage that we're not, unlike OpenStack as an example, we're not trying to come up with the projects ourself. What we're actually doing is scouring the Cloud Native landscape, talking to different groups and saying, "Oh, what do we think is "the best in class project out there?" And in some cases it's more than one, but today we just announced the fourth project that's added to the CNCF. So we have Kubernetes, we have Prometheus, which is a monitoring application. OpenTracing is a tracing, and then today we just added Fluentd, which is a logging solution. And this is the idea that if you have dozens or hundreds of different applications and projects that are each producing a log stream, and then you have a perhaps dozens of other applications that are consuming it, you don't want to have an M times N problem of creating adapters for all of them. Instead, you can plug them all into Fluentd, it has over 300 adapters for different solutions out there. And that provides one comprehensive approach. But what's interesting is that we don't need to win over the community and say, "Oh, here's this project you may not have heard of." There's actually over 2000 users of that today. But by having them here at CNCF, showing how it plugs into other technologies of ours, we think we can hope-- >> You're cross-pollinating? >> Dan: Exactly. >> You're letting it bubble up and you're not being a-- >> Dan: That's exactly the metaphor. >> (laughs) A dictator. Okay, and back to the project side, this is awesome. So you have some gravity around these projects. Is there any cadence or expectation, or is it free for all in terms of the velocity of adoption of projects that the technical committee will oversight? >> We would love to be at the pace of one a month. And I don't know that we'll quite get that fast. One big change that we're hoping to make in the next month or two. When our first two projects were Kubernetes and Prometheus, those are two of the fastest growing best respected projects on GitHub right now. We didn't want to have such a high milestone for every other project we considered. So we're adopting what we think we're going to call an inception stage of earlier projects that we're going to sort of try out, but they have to essentially prove themselves within 12 months. And hopefully that'll allow us to keep a pretty good velocity where we think there's a fantastic number of projects, we think as a community, we can-- >> Yeah, let people fight it out, surface stuff and let people kick the tires, right? That's the incubation period basically. What about the forking and all the battle cage matches that go on, how do you want to handle that or you just let nature take its course? Is that philosophy there? >> Thankfully, when we look at the space and this is really coming out of the Linux Space as well, anyone can fork, and of course it has a slightly different connotation now with GitHub, where when you make a change, you fork it, but there's also just a massive centripetal force pushing people together. And when you have a really high velocity of changes, the idea of forking and you would lose out on that, becomes a lot less appealing. And so, so far thankfully, all of our members and everyone in the community has really been on board on having a single head on working together to have that consultation. >> We just had Richard Kaufman on from, I think Robert Kaufman, I mean, from Samsung, he was talking about that the number two contributor is other. >> Dan: Yes. >> Which is a nice balance to the whole critical mass. >> It's an incredible accomplishment cause for Google to pull in enough people that they're no longer the majority contributor, is something that we're thrilled with. >> Yeah, it's great to see you have Richard Kaufman. Google is the number one contributor, are you worried about that? Maybe, they've been certainly good actors in the community. I mean, they had MapReduce and let Cloudera run with it, look at what happened with that? So, we kind of all know this backstory of Kubernetes, they're kind of letting it bloom on its own. That's consistent with their current posturing? >> Well, I don't think they want to have another Cloudera. >> Which is why they embraced Kubernetes. >> But I definitely don't think it's fair to say that they're doing it on their own. They're still the largest contributor of any one company and they have a massive amount of resources, and I think they see it as a really key technology, it's something they mentioned-- >> What I was referring to is that Cloudera kind of took MapReduce under their wing and made a commercial venture out. >> Dan: Oh yeah, absolutely. >> I think Google didn't want that. >> No, and they, I mean, the way I think about it is, they had this technology a few years ago. This is definitely oversimplified. They could have kept it as a proprietary in the house thing, like Amazon Elastic Container Service. They could have made it an internal open source project, like Go, or they could have just created a Kubernetes foundation that allowed other people in, but they still controlled it. But instead they were really interested in working with the Linux Foundation and creating this Cloud Native Computing Foundation that was always designed to be much more than just Kubernetes. And that really was about trying to push the project out of the nest. But I will say that my understanding is they're still see that as an absolutely core for their business. >> Yeah, I got to give Google props out there for that because they did do the right thing there. they put it out in the open, they did a line, and they could have land grabbed that, in a different way, I mean, certainly not the way that one was above. Final question on this event, KubeCon or KubernetesCon, KubeCon, it's KubeCon, however people call it. Not to confuse with the Cube, this Cube product which is seven years and might be trademark infringement but yeah, we'll get that later. >> Dan: With a K. (both laughing) >> It's still causing a lot of confusion. But that aside, CloudNativeCon also is in conjunction, this is part of the expansion you were mentioning. Talk about the vision for the events, you got one in Berlin coming up, and certainly you could have had probably at least a few more thousand people here for sure. >> Oh well, certainly a few more hundred. And we do feel a little bad that we didn't quite aim high enough. So our vision going forward is that we have CloudNativeCon that represents all of our projects, and that KubeCon represents the biggest part of CloudNativeCon. So it's multiple tracks. It's what a ton of folks go for but we think that it also gives us a chance to expose those people to our other projects, and by the time we get to Berlin, we're certainly hoping that we have another two or three or more projects-- >> And the date on Berlin? >> It's March 29th and 30th. And then we also announced that we're going to be in Austin, in early December. And I'll say that for both of those events, we're tripling the capacity from what we had last year. So we're hoping not to be so crowded. >> I was talking to Andy Jassy last night, we had a one-on-one with him and he's talking about the first Reinvent, he didn't think he can get 4,000 people there as packed. I think you might be, having to look at more capacity potentially. I mean, at this pace. >> It's the hard question is we'd actually like to be signing contracts for 2018, and it's just really hard to predict what the right size is to get for that, because I feel terrible about the fact that we did turn people away, especially end-users that we'd like to be introducing to this space. >> Yeah, well, I can attest people watching this, definitely a fire marshal issue, because it's really packed. That's why we're in a separate room here. There was sunlight in the background earlier. Normally, we're on the show floor with the Cube, but yeah, every space is taken, hallways are jamming. >> The other thing I'll mention though, is that we are also interested in going out and reaching customers and vendors where they are. So we're going to have a booth at AWS Reinvent, and we're looking at other conferences that we can be at to help spread the Cloud Native word. >> We're certainly going to be able to have a hundred events this year, so let us know where you're at, we'll certainly bring you guys on. Let me give you the final word. Tell the folks why Kubernetes is so important. Why is this movement, why are people so excited here? For the folks that couldn't make it, what's the vibe, why is it important, and what's the impact to customers in the industry? >> So the belief is that if you're deploying a new modern software application that, putting into containers, using an orchestration platform like Kubernetes, dividing your app up into microservices is a really such a benefit in terms of optimizing your resources, and tying into a whole rapid development process, continuous integration, continuous deployment, that not doing it almost makes it impossible to compete. And so we think there's just a ton of momentum around containerization and orchestration. >> And the speed of the innovation is one of those things if you're not on it, you fall further behind and it takes more energy to catch up if you try to do it by yourself. That's the benefit of the collective communities and it highlights open source. >> Right. >> Big time in terms of successes. Dan, thanks so much for coming on, sharing the perspective, congratulations and sorry for the folks who couldn't make it, hopefully this video will help. This is the Cube here in Seattle for special coverage of CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, here in Seattle. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. >> Dan: Thanks. (upbeat music)