>>Kirk focuses on the approach to modern data quality and how it can enable the continuous delivery of trusted data. Take it away. Kirk >>Trusted data has been a focus of mine for the last several years. Most particularly in the area of machine learning. Uh, I spent much of my career on wall street, writing models and trying to create a healthy data program, sort of the run the bank and protect the franchise and how to do that at scale for larger organizations. Uh, I'm excited to have the opportunity today sitting with me as Victor to have a fireside chat. He is an award-winning and best-selling author of delete big data and most currently framers. He's also a professor of governance at Oxford. So Victor, my question for you today is in an era of data that is always on and always flowing. How does CDOs get comfortable? You know, the, I can sleep at night factor when data is coming in from more angles, it's being stored in different formats and varieties and probably just in larger quantities than ever before. In my opinion, just laws of large numbers with that much data. Is there really just that much more risk of having bad data or inaccuracy in your business? >>Well, thank you Kirk, for having me on. Yes, you're absolutely right. That the real problem, if I were to simplify it down to one statement is that incorrect data and it can lead to wrong decisions that can be incredibly costly and incredibly costly for trust for the brand, for the franchise incredibly costly, because they can lead to decisions that are fundamentally flawed, uh, and therefore lead the business in the wrong direction. And so the, the, the real question is, you know, how can you avoid, uh, incorrect data to produce incorrect insights? And that depends on how you view trust and how you view, uh, data and correctness in the first place. >>Yeah, that's interesting, you know, in my background, we were constantly writing models, you know, we're trying to make the models smarter all the time, and we always wanted to get that accuracy level from 89% to 90%, you know, whatever we could be, but there's this popular theme where over time the models can diminish an accuracy. And the only button we really had at our disposal was to retrain the model, uh, oftentime I'm focused on, should we be stress testing the data, it almost like a patient health exam. Uh, and how do we do that? Where we could get more comfortable thinking about the quality of the data before we're running our models and our analytics. >>Yeah, absolutely. When we look at the machine learning landscape, even the big data landscape, what we see is that a lot of focus is now put on getting the models, right, getting it worked out, getting the kinks worked out, but getting sort of the ethics, right. The value, right. That is in the model. Um, uh, and what is really not looked at what is not focused enough that, um, is the data. Now, if you're looking at it from a compliance viewpoint, maybe it's okay if you just look at the model, maybe not. But if you understand that actually using the right data with the right model gives you a competitive advantage that your competitors don't have, then it is far more than compliance. And if it is far more compliance, then actually the aperture for strategy opens up and you should not just look at models. You should actually look at the data and the quality and correctness of the data as a huge way by which you can push forward your competitive advantage. >>Well, I haven't even trickier one for you. I think, you know, there's so much coming in and there's so much that we know we can measure and there's so much we could replay and do what if analysis on and kind of back tests, but, you know, do you see organizations doing things to look around the corner? And maybe an interesting analogy would be something like with Tesla is doing whether it's sensors or LIDAR, and they're trying to bounce off every object they know, and they can make a lot of measurements, but the advancements in computer vision are saying, I might be able to predict what's around the corner. I might be able to be out ahead of the data error. I'm about to see tomorrow. Um, you know, do you see any organizations trying to take that futuristic step to sort of know the unknown and be more predictive versus reactive? >>Absolutely. Tesla is doing a bit Lincoln, uh, but so are others in that space and not autonomous driving space, um, uh, Waymo, the, uh, the, the, uh, Google company that is, uh, doing autonomous driving for a long period of time where they have been doing is collecting training data, uh, through their cars and then running a machine learning on the training data. Now they hit a wall a couple of years ago because the training data wasn't diverse enough. It didn't have that sort of Moore's law of insight anymore, even though it was more and more training data. Um, and so the, the Delta, the additional learning was just limited. So what they then decided to do was to build a virtual reality called car crafting, which were actually cars would drive around and create, uh, uh, predictive training data. Now, what is really interesting about that is that that is isn't a model. It is a model that creates predictive data. And this predictive is the actual value that is added to the equation here. And with this extra predictive data, they were able to improve their autonomous driving quite significantly. Uh, five years ago, their disengagement was, uh, raped was every, uh, 2000 miles on average. And, uh, last year, uh, five years later, it was every 30,000 miles on average, that's a 15 K improvement. And that wasn't driven by a mysterious model. It was driven by predictive data. >>Right, right. You know, that's interesting. I, I'm also a fan of trying to use data points that don't exist in the data sets. So it sounds like they were using more data data that was derived from other sources. And maybe the most simple format that I usually get started with was, you know, what, if I was looking at data from Glassdoor and I wanted to know if it was valid, if it was accurate, but of course there's going to be numbers in the age, field and salary and years of experience in different things. But what if the years of experience and age and academic level of someone no longer correlates to the salary yet that correlation component is not a piece of data that even lives in the column, the row, the cell. So I do think that there's a huge area for improvement and just advancement in the role data that we see in collect, but also the data science metrics, something like lift and correlation between the data points that really helped me certify and feel comfortable that this data makes sense. Otherwise it could just be numbers in the field >>Indeed. And, and this challenge of, of finding the data and focusing on the right subset of the data and manipulating it, uh, in the right, in a qualitatively right way is really something that has been with us for quite a number of years. There's a fabulous, uh, case, um, a few years back, uh, when, um, in Japan, when there was the suspicion that in Sumo wrestling, there was match fixing going on massive max fiction. Um, and, and so investigators came in and they took the data from the championship bouts and analyzed them and, uh, didn't find anything. And, uh, what was, what was really interesting is then later researchers came in and read the rules and regulations of Sumo wrestling and understood that it's not just the championship bouts that matter, but it's also sometimes the relegation matches that matter. And so then they started looking at those secondary matches that nobody looked at before and that subset of data, and they discovered there's massive match fixing going on. It's just, nobody looked at it because nobody just, as you said, that connection, uh, between th those various data sources or the sort of causal connectivity there. And so it's, it's, it's really crucial to understand, uh, that, uh, driving insight out of data, isn't a black box thing where you feed the data in and get it out. It really requires deep thinking about how to wire it up from the very beginning. >>No, that's an interesting story. I kind of wonder if the model in that case is almost the, the wrestlers themselves or the output, but definitely the, the data that goes into it. Um, yeah. So, I mean, do you see a path where organizations will achieve a hundred percent confidence? Because we all know there's a, I can't sleep at night factor, but there's also a case of what do I do today. It's, I'm probably not living in a perfect world. I might be sailing a boat across an ocean that already has a hole in it. So, you know, we can't turn everything off. We have to sort of patch the boat and sail it at the same time. Um, what do you think the, a good approaches for a large organization to improve their posture? >>You know, if you focus on perfection, you never, you never achieved that perfection a hundred percent perfection or so is never achievable. And if you want some radical change, then that that's admirable. But a lot of times it's very risky. It's a very risky proposition. So rather than doing that, there is a lot of low hanging fruit than that incremental, pragmatic step-by-step approach. If I can use an analogy from history, uh, we, we, we talk a lot about, um, the data revolution and before that, the industrial revolution, and when we think about the industrial revolution, we think about the steam engine, but the reality is that the steam engine, wasn't just one radical invention. In fact, there were a myriad of small incremental invade innovations over the course of a century that today we call the industrial revolution. And I think it's the various same thing when the data revolution where we don't have this one silver bullet that radically puts us into data Nirvana, but it is this incremental, pragmatic step-by-step change. It will get us closer. Um, pragmatic, can you speak in closer to where we want to be, even though there was always more work for us left? >>Yeah, that's interesting. Um, you know, that one hits home for me because we ultimately at Collibra take an incremental approach. We don't think there's a stop the world event. There's, you know, a way to learn from the past trends of our data to become incrementally smarter each day. And this kind of stops us from being in a binary project mode, right. Where we have to wait right. Something for six months and then reassess it and hope, you know, we kind of wonder if you're at 70% accuracy today is being at 71% better tomorrow, right? At least there's a measurable amount of improvement there. Uh, and it's a sort of a philosophical difference. And it reminds me of my banking days. When you say, uh, you know, past performance is no guarantee of future results. And, um, it's a nice disclaimer, you can put in everything, but I actually find it to be more true in data. >>We have all of these large data assets, whether it's terabytes or petabytes, or even if it's just gigabytes sitting there on all the datasets to learn from. And what I find in data is that the past historical values actually do tell us a lot about the future and we can learn from that to become incrementally smarter tomorrow. And there's really a lot of value sitting there in the historical data. And it tells me at least a lot about how to forecast the future. You know, one that's been sitting on the top of my mind recently, especially with COVID and the housing market a long time back, I competed with automation, valuation modeling, which basically means how well can you predict the price of a house? And, you know, that's always a fun one to do. And there's some big name brands out there that do that pretty well. >>Back then when I built those models, I would look at things like the size of the yard, the undulation of the land, uh, you know, whether a pool would award you more or less money for your house. And a lot of those factors were different than they are now. So those models ultimately have already changed. And now that we've seen post COVID people look for different things in housing and the prices have gone up. So we've seen a decline and then a dramatic increase. And then we've also seen things like land and pools become more valuable than they were in the housing model before, you know, what are you seeing here with models and data and how that's going to come together? And it's just, is it always going to change where you're going to have to constantly recalibrate both, you know, our understanding of the data and the models themselves? >>Well, indeed the, the problem of course is almost eternal. Um, oftentimes we have developed beautiful models that work really well. And then we're so wedded to this model or this particular kind of model. And we can fathom to give them up. I mean, if I think of my students, sometimes, you know, they, they, they, they have a model, they collect the data, then they run the analysis and, uh, it basically, uh, tells them that their model was wrong. They go out and they collect more data and more data and more data just to make sure that it isn't there, that, that, that their model is right. But the data tells them what the truth is that the model isn't right anymore that has context and goals and circumstances change the model needs to adapt. And we have seen it over and over again, not just in the housing market, but post COVID and in the COVID crisis, you know, a lot of the epidemiologists looked at life expectancy of people, but when you, when you look at people, uh, in the intensive care unit, uh, with long COVID, uh, suffering, uh, and in ICU and so on, you also need to realize, and many have that rather than life expectancy. >>You also need to look at life quality as a mother, uh, kind of dimension. And that means your model needs to change because you can't just have a model that optimizes on life expectancy anymore. And so what we need to do is to understand that the data and the changes in the data that they NAMIC of the data really is a thorn in our thigh of revisiting the model and thinking very critically about what we can do in order to adjust the model to the present situation. >>But with that, Victor, uh, I've really enjoyed our chat today. And, uh, do you have any final thoughts, comments, questions for me? >>Uh, you know, Kirk, I enjoyed it tremendously as well. Uh, I do think that, uh, that what is important, uh, to understand with data is that as there is no, uh, uh, no silver bullet, uh, and there is only incremental steps forward, this is not actually something to despair, but to give and be the source of great hope, because it means that not just tomorrow, but even the day after tomorrow and the day after the day after tomorrow, we still can make headway can make improvement and get better. >>Absolutely. I like the hopeful message I live every day to, uh, to make data a better place. And it is exciting as we see the advancements in what's possible on what's kind of on the forefront. Um, well with that, I really appreciate the chat and I would encourage anyone. Who's interested in this topic to attend a session later today on modern data quality, where I go through maybe five key flaws of the past and some of the pitfalls, and explain a little bit more about how we're using unsupervised learning to solve for future problems. Thanks Victor. Thank you, Kurt. >>Thanks, Kirk. And Victor, how incredible was that?

>> Announcer: From around the globe, It's theCUBE. Presenting Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and Multicloud. Brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Okay, Let's now get into the next segment where we'll explore data automation but from the angle of digital resilience within and as a service consumption model. We're now joined by Yusef Khan, who heads data services for Io-Tahoe and Suresh Kanniappan who's the vice president and head of US sales at Happiest Minds. Gents, welcome to the program, great to have you in theCUBE. >> Thank you, David. >> Suresh, you guys talk about at Happiest Minds this notion of born digital, foreign agile, I like that but talk about your mission at the company. >> Sure, far in 2011, Happiest minds is a born digital, born agile company. The reason is that, we are focused on customers. Our customer centric approach and delivering digital and seamless solutions, have helped us be in the race along with the Tier 1 providers. Our mission, Happiest People, Happiest Customers is focused to enable customer happiness through people happiness. We have been ranked among the top 25 ID services company in the great places to work in service. Our Glassdoor ratings, of four dot one against the rating of five, is among the top in the Indian ID services company, that shows the mission and the culture what we have built on the values, right? Is sharing, mindful, integrity, learning and social responsibilities, are the core values of our company. And that's where the entire culture of the company has been built. >> That's great, sounds like a happy place to be. Now Yusef, you had updated services for Io-Tahoe, we've talked in the past year, of course you're at London. What's your day to day focus with customers and partners? What are you focused on? >> Well David, my team worked daily with customers and partners to help them better understand their data, improve their data quality, their data governance, and help them make that data more accessible in a self-service kind of way to the stakeholders within those businesses. And this is a key part of digital resilience that we allow. We'll come on to talk about a bit later. >> You're right, I mean that self-service theme is something that we're going to really accelerate this decade Yusef. And so, but I wonder before we get into that, maybe you could talk about the nature of the partnership with Happiest Minds, why do you guys choose to work closely together? >> Very good question. We see Io-Tahoe and Happiest Minds as a great mutual fit. As Suresh said, Happiest Minds are a very agile organization. I think that's one of the key things that attracts the customers. And Io-Tahoe is all about automation. We're using machine learning algorithms to make data discovery, data cataloging, understanding data redundancy much easier and we're enabling customers and partners to do it much more quickly. So when you combine our emphasis on automation, with the emphasis on agility that Happiest Minds have. That's a really nice combination, works very well together, very powerful. I think the other things that are key, both businesses as Suresh have said, are really innovative, digital native type companies. Very focused on newer technologies, the cloud, et cetera. And then finally I think they're both challenge brands and Happiest Minds have a really positive, fresh, ethical approach to people and customers that really resonates with us at Io-Tahoe too. >> That's great, thank you for that. Suresh, let's get into the whole notion of digital resilience. I want to sort of set it up with what I see and maybe you can comment. Being prior to the pandemic, a lot of customers that kind of equated disaster recovery with their business continuance or business resilience strategy and that's changed almost overnight. How have you seen your clients respond to that? What I sometimes call the forced match to become a digital business and maybe you could talk about some of the challenges that they've faced along the way. >> Absolutely, So especially during this pandemic times when you see Dave, customers have been having tough times managing their business. So Happiest Minds being a digital resilient company, we were able to react much faster in the industry apart from the other services company. So, one of the key things is, the organizations are trying to adapt onto the digital technologies, right? There has been lot of data which has to be managed by these customers, and there've been a lot of threats and risk which has to be managed by the CIOs. So Happiest Minds Digital Resilient Technology, right? We're bringing the data complaints as a service. We were able to manage the resilience much ahead of other competitors in the market. We were able to bring in our business continuity processes from day one, where we were able to deliver our services without any interruption to the services what we are delivering to our customers. So that is where the digital, the resilience with business continuity process enabled was very helpful for us to enable our customers continue their business without any interruptions during pandemics. >> So, I mean some of the challenges that customers tell me if I may obviously had to figure out how to get laptops to remote workers, that whole remote, work from home pivot, figure out how to secure the end points, and those were kind of looking back they're kind of table stakes. And it sounds like, you got, I mean digital business means, a data business, putting data at the core, I like to say it. But so, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about, maybe the philosophy you have toward digital resilience and the specific approach you take with clients. >> Absolutely Dave, see in any organization, data becomes the key. And thus for the first step, is to identify the critical data, right? So, this is a six step process plot we follow in Happiest Minds. First of all, we take stock of the current state, though the customers think that they have a clear visibility of their data. However, we do more often assessment from an external point of view and see how critical their data is. Then we help the customers to strategize that, right? The most important thing is to identify the most important critical asset. Data being the most critical asset for any organization, identification of the data are key for the customers. Then we help in building a viable operating model to ensure these identified critical assets are secure and monitored duly so that they are consumed well as well as protected from external threats. Then as a fourth step, now we try to bring in awareness to the people. We train them, at all levels in the organization. That is a key for people to understand the importance of the digital lessons. And then, as a fifth step, we work as a backup plan. In terms of bringing in a very comprehensive and a wholistic distinct approach on people, process, as well as in technology, to see how the organization can withstand during a crisis time. And finally, we do a continuous governance of these data. Which is a key, right? It is not just a one-step process. We set up the environment, we do the initial analysis, and set up the strategy and continuously govern these data to ensure that they are not only not managed well, secure, as well as they also have to meet the compliance requirements of the organizations, right? That is where we help organizations to secure and meet the regulations of the organizations as per the privacy laws. So this is a constant process. It's not a one time effort, we do a constant process because every organization grows towards their digital journey, and they have to face all these as part of the evolving environment on digital journey. And that's where they should be kept ready in terms of recovering, rebounding and moving forward if things goes wrong. >> So, let's stick on that for a minute and then I want to bring Yusef into the conversation. So, you mentioned compliance and governance. When you're in digital business here as you say you're a data business, so that brings up issues, data sovereignty, there's governance, there's compliance, there's things like right to be forgotten, there's data privacy, so many things. These were often kind of afterthoughts for businesses that bolted on, if you will. I know a lot of executives are very much concerned that these are built in and it's not a one-shot deal. So, do you have solutions around compliance and governance? Can you deliver that as a service? Maybe you could talk about some of the specifics there. >> Sure, we offer multiple services to our customers on digital residents. And one of the key service is the data compliance as a service. Here, we help organizations to map the key data against the data compliance requirements. Some of the features includes in terms of the continuous discovery of data, right? Because organizations keep adding on data when they move more digital. And helping and understanding the actual data in terms of the resilience of data, it could be an heterogeneous data sources, It could be on data basis, or it could be even on the data lakes, or it could be even on on-prem or on the cloud environment. So, identifying the data across the various heterogeneous environment is a very key feature of our solution. Once we identify and classify these sensitive data, the data privacy regulations and the prevalent laws have to be mapped based on the business rules. So we define those rules and help map those data so that organizations know how critical their digital assets are. Then we work on a continuous monitoring of data for anomalies. Because that's one of the key features of the solution, which needs to be implemented on the day-to-day operational basis. So, we help in monitoring those anomalies of data, for data quality management on an ongoing basis. And finally, we also bring in the automated data governance where we can manage the sensitive data policies and their data relationships in terms of mapping and manage that business rules. And we drive limitations and also suggest appropriate actions to the customers to take on those specific data assets. >> Great, thank you. Yusef thanks for being patient. I want to bring in Io-Tahoe to the discussion and understand where your customers and Happiest Minds can leverage your data automation capability that you and I have talked about in the past. And I mean it'd be great if you had an example as well, but maybe you could pick it up from there. >> Sure, I mean at a high level as Suresh articulated really, Io-Tahoe delivers business agility. So that's by accelerating the times operationalized data, automating, putting in place controls, and also helping put in place digital resilience. I mean, if we stepped back a little bit in time, traditional resilience in relation to data, often meant manually making multiple copies of the same data. So you'd have a DBA, they would copy the data to various different places, and then business users would access it in those functional silos. And of course, what happened was you ended up with lots of different copies of the same data around the enterprise. Very inefficient, and of course ultimately increases your risk profile, your risk of a data breach, It's very hard to know where everything is. And I realized that expression you used David, the idea of the forced match to digital. So, with enterprises that are going on this forced match, what they're finding is, they don't have a single version of the truth. And almost nobody has an accurate view of where their critical data is. Then you have containers, and with containers that enables a big leap forward. So you can break applications down into microservices, updates are available via APIs, and so you don't have the same need to to build and to manage multiple copies of the data. So, you have an opportunity to just have a single version of a truth. Then your challenge is, how do you deal with these large legacy data states that Suresh has been referring to? Where you have to consolidate. And that's really where Io-Tahoe comes in. We massively accelerate that process of putting in a single version of truth into place. So by automatically discovering the data, discovering what's duplicate, what's redundant, that means you can consolidate it down to a single trusted version, much more quickly. We've seen many customers who've tried to do this manually and it's literally taken years using manual methods to cover even a small percentage of their IT estates. With Io-Tahoe you can do it really very quickly and you can have tangible results within weeks and months. And then you can apply controls to the data based on context. So, who's the user? What's the content? What's the use case? Things like data quality validations or access permissions, and then once you've done that, your applications and your enterprise are much more secure, much more resilient as a result. You've got to do these things whilst retaining agility though. So, coming full circle, this is where the partnership with Happiest Minds really comes in as well. You've got to be agile, you've got to have controls and you've got to drive towards the business outcomes. And it's doing those three things together, we really deliver for the customer. >> Thank you, Yusef. I mean you and I in previous episodes we've looked in detail at the business case you were just talking about the manual labor involved. We know that you can't scale, but also there's that compression of time to get to the next step in terms of ultimately getting to the outcome and we've to a number of customers in theCUBE and the conclusion is, it's really consistent that if you can accelerate the time to value, that's the key driver, reducing complexity, automating and getting to insights faster. That's where you see telephone numbers in terms of business impact. So my question is, where should customers start? I mean how can they take advantage of some of these opportunities that we've discussed today? >> Well, we've tried to make that easy for customers. So, with Io-Tahoe and Happiest Minds you can very quickly do what we call a data health check. And this is a two to three week process to really quickly start to understand and deliver value from your data. So, Io-Tahoe deploys into the customer environment, data doesn't go anywhere, we would look at a few data sources, and a sample of data and we can very rapidly demonstrate how data discovery, data cataloging and understanding duplicate data or redundant data can be done, using machine learning, and how those problems can be solved. And so what we tend to find is that we can very quickly as I said in a matter of a few weeks, show a customer how they can get to a more resilient outcome and then how they can scale that up, take it into production, and then really understand their data state better, and build resilience into the enterprise. >> Excellent, there you have it. We'll leave it right there guys. Great conversation. Thanks so much for coming into the program. Best of luck to you in the partnership, be well. >> Thank you David, Suresh. >> Thank you Yusef. >> And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our ongoing series on Data Automation with Io-Tahoe. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE virtual coverage of re:Invent 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person, this year because of the pandemic we're doing remote interviews and we've got a great coverage here of the APN, Amazon Partner Network experience. I'm your host John Furrier, we are theCUBE virtual. Got a great guest from Tel Aviv remotely calling in and videoing, Nimrod Vax, who is the chief product officer and co-founder of BigID. This is the beautiful thing about remote, you're in Tel Aviv, I'm in Palo Alto, great to see you. We're not in person but thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Great to see you as well. >> So you guys have had a lot of success at BigID, I've noticed a lot of awards, startup to watch, company to watch, kind of a good market opportunity data, data at scale, identification, as the web evolves beyond web presence identification, authentication is super important. You guys are called BigID. What's the purpose of the company? Why do you exist? What's the value proposition? >> So first of all, best startup to work at based on Glassdoor worldwide, so that's a big achievement too. So look, four years ago we started BigID when we realized that there is a gap in the market between the new demands from organizations in terms of how to protect their personal and sensitive information that they collect about their customers, their employees. The regulations were becoming more strict but the tools that were out there, to the large extent still are there, were not providing to those requirements and organizations have to deal with some of those challenges in manual processes, right? For example, the right to be forgotten. Organizations need to be able to find and delete a person's data if they want to be deleted. That's based on GDPR and later on even CCPA. And organizations have no way of doing it because the tools that were available could not tell them whose data it is that they found. The tools were very siloed. They were looking at either unstructured data and file shares or windows and so forth, or they were looking at databases, there was nothing for Big Data, there was nothing for cloud business applications. And so we identified that there is a gap here and we addressed it by building BigID basically to address those challenges. >> That's great, great stuff. And I remember four years ago when I was banging on the table and saying, you know regulation can stunt innovation because you had the confluence of massive platform shifts combined with the business pressure from society. That's not stopping and it's continuing today. You seeing it globally, whether it's fake news in journalism, to privacy concerns where modern applications, this is not going away. You guys have a great market opportunity. What is the product? What is smallID? What do you guys got right now? How do customers maintain the success as the ground continues to shift under them as platforms become more prevalent, more tools, more platforms, more everything? >> So, I'll start with BigID. What is BigID? So BigID really helps organizations better manage and protect the data that they own. And it does that by connecting to everything you have around structured databases and unstructured file shares, big data, cloud storage, business applications and then providing very deep insight into that data. Cataloging all the data, so you know what data you have where and classifying it so you know what type of data you have. Plus you're analyzing the data to find similar and duplicate data and then correlating them to an identity. Very strong, very broad solution fit for IT organization. We have some of the largest organizations out there, the biggest retailers, the biggest financial services organizations, manufacturing and et cetera. What we are seeing is that there are, with the adoption of cloud and business success obviously of AWS, that there are a lot of organizations that are not as big, that don't have an IT organization, that have a very well functioning DevOps organization but still have a very big footprint in Amazon and in other kind of cloud services. And they want to get visibility and they want to do it quickly. And the SmallID is really built for that. SmallID is a lightweight version of BigID that is cloud-native built for your AWS environment. And what it means is that you can quickly install it using CloudFormation templates straight from the AWS marketplace. Quickly stand up an environment that can scan, discover your assets in your account automatically and give you immediate visibility into that, your S3 bucket, into your DynamoDB environments, into your EMR clusters, into your Athena databases and immediately building a full catalog of all the data, so you know what files you have where, you know where what tables, what technical metadata, operational metadata, business metadata and also classified data information. So you know where you have sensitive information and you can immediately address that and apply controls to that information. >> So this is data discovery. So the use case is, I'm an Amazon partner, I mean we use theCUBE virtuals on Amazon, but let's just say hypothetically, we're growing like crazy. Got S3 buckets over here secure, encrypted and the rest, all that stuff. Things are happening, we're growing like a weed. Do we just deploy smallIDs and how it works? Is that use cases, SmallID is for AWS and BigID for everything else or? >> You can start small with SmallID, you get the visibility you need, you can leverage the automation of AWS so that you automatically discover those data sources, connect to them and get visibility. And you could grow into BigID using the same deployment inside AWS. You don't have to switch migrate and you use the same container cluster that is running inside your account and automatically scale it up and then connect to other systems or benefit from the more advanced capabilities the BigID can offer such as correlation, by connecting to maybe your Salesforce, CRM system and getting the ability to correlate to your customer data and understand also whose data it is that you're storing. Connecting to your on-premise mainframe, with the same deployment connecting to your Google Drive or office 365. But the point is that with the smallID you can really start quickly, small with a very small team and get that visibility very quickly. >> Nimrod, I want to ask you a question. What is the definition of cloud native data discovery? What does that mean to you? >> So cloud native means that it leverages all the benefits of the cloud. Like it gets all of the automation and visibility that you get in a cloud environment versus any traditional on-prem environment. So one thing is that BigID is installed directly from your marketplace. So you could browse, find its solution on the AWS marketplace and purchase it. It gets deployed using CloudFormation templates very easily and very quickly. It runs on a elastic container service so that once it runs you can automatically scale it up and down to increase the scan and the scale capabilities of the solution. It connects automatically behind the scenes into the security hub of AWS. So you get those alerts, the policy alerts fed into your security hub. It has integration also directly into the native logging capabilities of AWS. So your existing Datadog or whatever you're using for monitoring can plug into it automatically. That's what we mean by cloud native. >> And if you're cloud native you got to be positioned to take advantage of the data and machine learning in particular. Can you expand on the role of machine learning in your solution? Customers are leaning in heavily this year, you're seeing more uptake on machine learning which is basically AI, AI is machine learning, but it's all tied together. ML is big on all the deployments. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. So data discovery is a very tough problem and it has been around for 20 years. And the traditional methods of classifying the data or understanding what type of data you have has been, you're looking at the pattern of the data. Typically regular expressions or types of kind of pattern-matching techniques that look at the data. But sometimes in order to know what is personal or what is sensitive it's not enough to look at the pattern of the data. How do you distinguish between a date of birth and any other date. Date of birth is much more sensitive. How do you find country of residency or how do you identify even a first name from the last name? So for that, you need more advanced, more sophisticated capabilities that go beyond just pattern matching. And BigID has a variety of those techniques, we call that discovery-in-depth. What it means is that very similar to security-in-depth where you can not rely on a single security control to protect your environment, you can not rely on a single discovery method to truly classify the data. So yes, we have regular expression, that's the table state basic capability of data classification but if you want to find data that is more contextual like a first name, last name, even a phone number and distinguish between a phone number and just a sequence of numbers, you need more contextual NLP based discovery, name entity recognition. We're using (indistinct) to extract and find data contextually. We also apply deep learning, CNN capable, it's called CNN, which is basically deep learning in order to identify and classify document types. Which is basically being able to distinguish between a resume and a application form. Finding financial records, finding medical records. So RA are advanced NLP classifiers can find that type of data. The more advanced capabilities that go beyond the smallID into BigID also include cluster analysis which is an unsupervised machine learning method of finding duplicate and similar data correlation and other techniques that are more contextual and need to use machine learning for that. >> Yeah, and unsupervised that's a lot harder than supervised. You need to have that ability to get that what you can't see. You got to get the blind spots identified and that's really the key observational data you need. This brings up the kind of operational you heard cluster, I hear governance security you mentioned earlier GDPR, this is an operational impact. Can you talk about how it impacts on specifically on the privacy protection and governance side because certainly I get the clustering side of it, operationally just great. Everyone needs to get that. But now on the business model side, this is where people are spending a lot of time scared and worried actually. What the hell to do? >> One of the things that we realized very early on when we started with BigID is that everybody needs a discovery. You need discovery and we actually started with privacy. You need discovery in route to map your data and apply the privacy controls. You need discovery for security, like we said, right? Find and identify sensitive data and apply controls. And you also need discovery for data enablement. You want to discover the data, you want to enable it, to govern it, to make it accessible to the other parts of your business. So discovery is really a foundation and starting point and that you get there with smallID. How do you operationalize that? So BigID has the concept of an application framework. Think about it like an Apple store for data discovery where you can run applications inside your kind of discovery iPhone in order to run specific (indistinct) use cases. So, how do you operationalize privacy use cases? We have applications for privacy use cases like subject access requests and data rights fulfillment, right? Under the CCPA, you have the right to request your data, what data is being stored about you. BigID can help you find all that data in the catalog that after we scan and find that information we can find any individual data. We have an application also in the privacy space for consent governance right under CCP. And you have the right to opt out. If you opt out, your data cannot be sold, cannot be used. How do you enforce that? How do you make sure that if someone opted out, that person's data is not being pumped into Glue, into some other system for analytics, into Redshift or Snowflake? BigID can identify a specific person's data and make sure that it's not being used for analytics and alert if there is a violation. So that's just an example of how you operationalize this knowledge for privacy. And we have more examples also for data enablement and data management. >> There's so much headroom opportunity to build out new functionality, make it programmable. I really appreciate what you guys are doing, totally needed in the industry. I could just see endless opportunities to make this operationally scalable, more programmable, once you kind of get the foundation out there. So congratulations, Nimrod and the whole team. The question I want to ask you, we're here at re:Invent's virtual, three weeks we're here covering Cube action, check out theCUBE experience zone, the partner experience. What is the difference between BigID and say Amazon's Macy? Let's think about that. So how do you compare and contrast, in Amazon they say we love partnering, but we promote our ecosystem. You guys sure have a similar thing. What's the difference? >> There's a big difference. Yes, there is some overlap because both a smallID and Macy can classify data in S3 buckets. And Macy does a pretty good job at it, right? I'm not arguing about it. But smallID is not only about scanning for sensitive data in S3. It also scans anything else you have in your AWS environment, like DynamoDB, like EMR, like Athena. We're also adding Redshift soon, Glue and other rare data sources as well. And it's not only about identifying and alerting on sensitive data, it's about building full catalog (indistinct) It's about giving you almost like a full registry of your data in AWS, where you can look up any type of data and see where it's found across structured, unstructured big data repositories that you're handling inside your AWS environment. So it's broader than just for security. Apart from the fact that they're used for privacy, I would say the biggest value of it is by building that catalog and making it accessible for data enablement, enabling your data across the board for other use cases, for analytics in Redshift, for Glue, for data integrations, for various other purposes. We have also integration into Kinesis to be able to scan and let you know which topics, use what type of data. So it's really a very, very robust full-blown catalog of the data that across the board that is dynamic. And also like you mentioned, accessible to APIs. Very much like the AWS tradition. >> Yeah, great stuff. I got to ask you a question while you're here. You're the co-founder and again congratulations on your success. Also the chief product officer of BigID, what's your advice to your colleagues and potentially new friends out there that are watching here? And let's take it from the entrepreneurial perspective. I have an application and I start growing and maybe I have funding, maybe I take a more pragmatic approach versus raising billions of dollars. But as you grow the pressure for AppSec reviews, having all the table stakes features, how do you advise developers or entrepreneurs or even business people, small medium-sized enterprises to prepare? Is there a way, is there a playbook to say, rather than looking back saying, oh, I didn't do with all the things I got to go back and retrofit, get BigID. Is there a playbook that you see that will help companies so they don't get killed with AppSec reviews and privacy compliance reviews? Could be a waste of time. What's your thoughts on all this? >> Well, I think that very early on when we started BigID, and that was our perspective is that we knew that we are a security and privacy company. So we had to take that very seriously upfront and be prepared. Security cannot be an afterthought. It's something that needs to be built in. And from day one we have taken all of the steps that were needed in order to make sure that what we're building is robust and secure. And that includes, obviously applying all of the code and CI/CD tools that are available for testing your code, whether it's (indistinct), these type of tools. Applying and providing, penetration testing and working with best in line kind of pen testing companies and white hat hackers that would look at your code. These are kind of the things that, that's what you get funding for, right? >> Yeah. >> And you need to take advantage of that and use them. And then as soon as we got bigger, we also invested in a very, kind of a very strong CSO that comes from the industry that has a lot of expertise and a lot of credibility. We also have kind of CSO group. So, each step of funding we've used extensively also to make RM kind of security poster a lot more robust and invisible. >> Final question for you. When should someone buy BigID? When should they engage? Is it something that people can just download immediately and integrate? Do you have to have, is the go-to-market kind of a new target the VP level or is it the... How does someone know when to buy you and download it and use the software? Take us through the use case of how customers engage with. >> Yeah, so customers directly have those requirements when they start hitting and having to comply with regulations around privacy and security. So very early on, especially organizations that deal with consumer information, get to a point where they need to be accountable for the data that they store about their customers and they want to be able to know their data and provide the privacy controls they need to their consumers. For our BigID product this typically is a kind of a medium size and up company, and with an IT organization. For smallID, this is a good fit for companies that are much smaller, that operate mostly out of their, their IT is basically their DevOps teams. And once they have more than 10, 20 data sources in AWS, that's where they start losing count of the data that they have and they need to get more visibility and be able to control what data is being stored there. Because very quickly you start losing count of data information, even for an organization like BigID, which isn't a bigger organization, right? We have 200 employees. We are at the point where it's hard to keep track and keep control of all the data that is being stored in all of the different data sources, right? In AWS, in Google Drive, in some of our other sources, right? And that's the point where you need to start thinking about having that visibility. >> Yeah, like all growth plan, dream big, start small and get big. And I think that's a nice pathway. So small gets you going and you lead right into the BigID. Great stuff. Final, final question for you while I gatchu here. Why the awards? Someone's like, hey, BigID is this cool company, love the founder, love the team, love the value proposition, makes a lot of sense. Why all the awards? >> Look, I think one of the things that was compelling about BigID from the beginning is that we did things differently. Our whole approach for personal data discovery is unique. And instead of looking at the data, we started by looking at the identities, the people and finally looking at their data, learning how their data looks like and then searching for that information. So that was a very different approach to the traditional approach of data discovery. And we continue to innovate and to look at those problems from a different perspective so we can offer our customers an alternative to what was done in the past. It's not saying that we don't do the basic stuffs. The Reg X is the connectivity that that is needed. But we always took a slightly different approach to diversify, to offer something slightly different and more comprehensive. And I think that was the thing that really attracted us from the beginning with the RSA Innovation Sandbox award that we won in 2018, the Gartner Cool Vendor award that we received. And later on also the other awards. And I think that's the unique aspect of BigID. >> You know you solve big problems than certainly as needed. We saw this early on and again I don't think that the problem is going to go away anytime soon, platforms are emerging, more tools than ever before that converge into platforms and as the logic changes at the top all of that's moving onto the underground. So, congratulations, great insight. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it Nimrod. Okay, I'm John Furrier. We are theCUBE virtual here for the partner experience APN virtual. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation >> live in. Welcome to a special cube conversation here in Palo Alto. The Cube Studios. Jon, for your host. We're here with a special panel. Talk about the new brand of tech leaders in this era of cloud computing data. Aye, aye. And engineering excellence with us. We have Christine Heckart to CEO of Scaler J. P. Krishna of Marthe Moorthy. These s VP of engineering a Copa software and Patna saying, VP of engineering a glass door. Guys, welcome to come the Cube conversation. Welcome, engineer. And you guys are all running engineering organizations. You've been a former engineer now running a big company CEO, engineering led company. This is a big trend that's clearly defined. No one needs any validation. Cloud computing has certainly changed the game, eh? I certainly the hottest trend with respect, the data machine learning and the benefits. They're changing the cultures of companies changing how things were built, how people are hired. You're starting to see a complete shift towards old way and new ways. I want to get your thoughts about the engineering opportunities. What is engineering excellence today mean in this modern error? >> Well, for us it we talk a lot about mastery and setting up an environment where engineers have a chance to build their own mastery. But they can also have the necessary tools and technologies to be master of their domain. And these domains, especially if it's cloud base. They're very distributed. They're very, very fast moving. There's a lot of continual risk s so you have to set them up in the right way so they could be successful. >> What's your thoughts? I mean, you guys air cutting edge startup? >> Yes. For us, it's very important that the environment, the working moment for engineers, is organically inspiring. And what I mean by that is when every engineer no, why are there what are they doing? Well, how their work is impacting the company in the business initiators. At the same time, we are making sure that their interests are aligned with Albert projects and work in a way that we are also in a healthy, very extending and stretching their skills when their work has a purpose. And that's what our mission is, which is we want to make sure that everybody finds an opportunity where they feel there's a purpose that its purpose driven, that's when we feel like it. That's a great environment where they will be inspired to come every day and deliver their 110% >> J p excellence and engineering. I mean, this is what people strive for. >> So excellent points from both off them and I. I think I have a slightly different take on it as well. Today's business is we are asked to respond really, really fast, maybe hear the tongue a gel everywhere, John, right? So it's about how do we respond to the needs of the business as quickly as you can On dhe, it becomes the mantra for the organization. Having said that, there is another side to it. The dark side is technical debt. That's something we all have toe grapple with because you're moving fast, you're making decisions. You're hoping things all right, You want to prove your thesis out there, but at the same time, you don't wantto put yourself behind so that it might come and bite you later. So it's finding that balance is really, really important, and that becomes the focal point of the organization. How do you move fast, but at the same time Hold it. Oh, do you not slow yourself down in the >> future? That's a great point. I want to get probably your thoughts. That's because open source has been really a different game changer from the old way to the new way. Because you could work with people from different companies. You can work on projects that a better man for other people as well. So it's got a communal aspect to it. But also there is an element of speed the same time agile forces, this kind of concept. So technical debt. You want to move fast, we gotta recover. You kind of know how to get there. How is open source? Change that in Europe in >> well, number one thing that opens and allows all smaller company especially but more companies is that now you you can take on an open source project and start rather starting from ground zero. You can start somewhere where you know it's already helped, and you have a framework ready to start working on. So you're not every two single time we're building our thinking off a new idea you're not starting. Okay, Now let me school start from ground up, right? So you already are at a certain level, the second area where, like you said, you know, we're a Joe. Uh, we have open source, but we also have certain level of customization that the customers needed our application needs. And that's what inspires engineers as well, which is taking the challenger for K. We have a code based. Now let me build something more interesting, more innovative. And then what they also love is giving back to the community. It's we're not. The companies are not just tech community engineering team. We are have a bigger engineering community now, the whole tackle, and that's what makes a big difference for us working in Silicon Valley to even be part of that and contributing factor. >> J P Talk about technical debt when it comes back to the modern era because you can go back to It's been around for a while. Technical dead concerts, not new, but it's always been kind of the water cooler come with core lead engineer and the team. The Aussies have a term called feature creeping. You know, the old days. I don't get it. The feature creep. Actually, it kind of takes it away because of you. If you're applying technical debt properly, you're managing the velocity of the project. So the question is, how is technical debt evolved to the management levels of senior engineering managers? Because that seems to be a key variable in managing the speed and quality of the teams with managing the table. Done. Now, management is what some other conversations. >> So the game depends on the stage of the company Onda stage of the projects you are. If you're in a really mature suffer environment, very you're not making a lot of change. It's OK. It's not the primary conversation off the topic. But if you're trying to you capture a market or promote an idea, it becomes the fundamental thesis, forgetting things out there quickly Now, getting things out there quickly doesn't mean you get to let users suffer. You had to build it in the right way, needs toe work, but at the same time it needs to be just enough so that we can We can get the feedback from from the user's on. At the same time, you probably would have left out potentially features on. Maybe you didn't even make certain decisions on Let's say, hi availability or our scalability. Maybe you wanna prove it out in only one region of the world and so on. So you have to find those balances, and it becomes part of the planning conversations right in the front. And as you go into the further iterations of the product, it becomes part of the prioritization conversation of the product managers because it's not just about getting one part done and getting it out there. But as it reached the full level of maturity that you would want, >> I'm sure there's a lot of debates about an engineer organizations because, you know, engineers a very vocal you. Yeah, so you could fall in love with your product of your time to market, maybe taking some technical debt to get product market fit. And that's my baby, though, when you got a re platform or re scale it to make it scale, bringing with your point you mentioned. How do you guys manage? Because this becomes a talent management. People say, Oh, you gotta manage the ECOWAS. But if some people are managing the project in there. They're going to fire over their skis on technical debt. You gotta kind of rain that in. How do you guys manage the people side of the equation? That because it's an art and a science at the same time? What's your thoughts? >> Well, I'll say this, um, supporting al aspects of change, right? That's also is an injury leader. It's a core responsibility and call it a priority for us, not just the technical debt, but also the market shifts. Technology shifts. We have new tech coming in. We have involving in evolving every technology. So how do via dear to and make sure that it's very important that engineering is supporting and kind of coming up with these technologies a tte the same time? We are not just pulling down to their version of grades and all of them, so in a jest, it's it's a core aspect of leadership to make sure that you, as we are supporting these changes, were also making sure that these changes are not pulling us down. So that should be proper quality checks. There should be a proper conversation and roadmap items which is saying that it's not attack debt. It's more of a tech investment, and we are talking about so that we're in lock steps with our business partner and not behind, so that now we're saying Okay, we need a whole quarter to develop new things. So it's an aspect of filmmaking. Sure, team this motivated >> This comes back to culture. Next question. I want to get you guys thoughts on this building. A positive work culture given engineering led organization. Christine, you're leading that now to start up because your own real fast a lot. A lot of engineers. They're probably a lot of opinions on what that looks like. What is the cultural quick? Because this sets the DNA early on for startup. But as you're maturing organization, you gotta track the best talent. And some say, Well, we work on We saw hard problems. That's kind of cliche, but ultimately you do have to kind of have that problem solving aspect. You gotta have a culture what is a successful work culture for engineering. >> So every everybody talks about engineers wanna solve hard problems. I think that's true. But as Pablo said earlier, if you can help every engineer connect what they're doing, every day to the higher purpose. The organization to the problem that you're solving and how that makes the customers like better in our case, were accompanied by engineers for engineer. So our engineers get really excited about giving other engineers in the world a better day. We have taken it one step further recently by starting a peer network because one of my observations coming into this organization is there are so many peer networks in I t. Because it's been a 30 year industry. There are tons of pure organizations for CEOs. There are tons appear organizations for C. M. O's, but there really aren't for engineers. And if we want to help engineers really develop their career and their full skill set and therefore develop into their full potential, it's about more than just training them. It's about giving them context and full social skills and giving them places where they can learn not just from the other engineers in their company, but from engineers across the organization or across the industry at their same level, and maybe from very different industries and maybe in very different environments. So I think in our case, you know, really trying to bring these peer networks together has been one way that we can not only pay it forward for our own engineers, but also help a lot of other engineers around of the industry >> how you guys handling the engineering talent pertaining, attracting and keeping the best now. >> So I think that's where the whole company comes together, in my view. So as an injuring leader, it's not just that I said the tune of my engineering or as to what? That hiring his top priority. It's where the whole company comes together. You're recruiting team to build the stellar interview process. You are, you know, heads of other orcs to make sure that across the board you're helping define a mission for your company that resonates with your candidates who would want to work with you. So it's a collective effort of building a stellar environment for us glass door when one of the few values is transparency and we live and die by it, which means that when someone is higher, they need to see that be within the company. We are transparent, so we'd share a lot of data. A lot of information, good and bad with every single person in the company. It's never, um, hidden at the same time. We build and set up trust in them to say, Hey, it's confidential. Make sure that it doesn't leave the company and it's been 11 years and it hasn't It has never been the case. >> What class door you don't want have a glass door entry on black. Gotta be transparent. That's the culture. Culture matters minutes. Your culture is all about sharing and being open. >> You will see it. So that's what this is, what God goes down spike for as well, right? Building transparency within the company culture and more and more as we see many stories that we have seen for various companies. And sometimes I get a bad story, too, and I get an invitation. Oh, you're from class door, you know. But that helps overall Rios living and working for user's and professionals. >> Cross is big for you guys, >> absolutely professionals who are in this world looking for a job and life because you're spending a lot of time at work. So we want you to get up every day and be inspired and happy about where you're going to work and for that. That's why we have sharing a lot of the insights about the company's from reviews and ratings and CEO data to make sure that when you make your decision of the next move, you are you can be fully trust. You could be fully confident that the date of your sharing the new with that you're making a good decision. >> J. P. Your thoughts. You guys are on a tear. We've got a great coverage of your the annual conference in Vegas. Recent cube coverage. Your company on paper looks like you're targeting one segment, but you have a lot of range and you're technical platform with data. Um, how you guys articulating to engineering? How do you keep them? What if some of the stories you tell them to attract them to join you guys? >> So number one thing is about the talent that we already have in hopes. So people want to come to work at a place where they can learn, contribute on dhe, also for their Carrie Carrie Respert, both inside Cooper and as the lead on coming into Cooper. They look at it and they say, Oh, you have ah, wide variety of things going on here. You're solving a business problem. But at the same time, the technology stocks are different. You're on all the best clothes are there, so that's an easy attraction for them to come in. But also, it's not just about getting people, and how do you retain them on? We've been lucky. That had very low tuition for many years. Right now in the engineering organization, especially in the value, it is a big deal. Andi. I think part of the things that that is the collaboration and cooperation that they get from everybody on. You know, it's an age old saying diversity and thought, unity in action, right? So I really promote people thinking about radius ideas and alternatives. But there is a time for that debate. And once we agree on a solution, we all pulled in and try to make that successful. And then you repeat that often, and it becomes part of part of the culture and the way the organization operates as >> a follow up to culture. One thing that's become pretty clear is that's global engineering. You mention the valley very competitive, some start ups that they get on that rocket ship can get all the great talent. If you will public everyone. Everyone gets rich of one's happy, a good mission behind it, you know, win win outside. Some stars have to attract talent. You've got to start going on here. You might have a good colonel of great engineers, but you have development environments all over the world, so remote is a big thing. How do you manage the engineer remote? It's a time zone base. Does it put leaders in charge? Is there a philosophy in the Amazon? Has a two pizza team is their big thing. You get small groups. How did you guys view the engineering makeup? Because this becomes a part of the operational tension but operating model of engineering thoughts >> I can go first. I think there is a tension between keeping teams working on one problem on not distributing it across the world for efficiency reasons. But at the same time, how do you all owe for continuity, especially if you have a problem in one area? Can somebody else from another region step in in a different time zone continuing? That's always a problem, and then the other one is in a landscape like ours, in which is not uncommon for many, many companies. It is not that they built a lot of fragmented things. They all need to work together. So having a level of continuity within the radius remote centers is really critical on everybody has their own recipe for this one. But the ones that works for us and I've seen that played out many times, is if you can get a set off teams, toe, focus on certain problem areas and become experts in those >> cohesive within their >> within the physical, and then also have enough critical mass within a center that gives you the good balance between working on. One thing. Worse is knowing everything. So so that works for us, and I I think that's that's the way to get out >> of the operating system. It is a couple highly cohesive, >> and you need to have the right technical leaders on both sides and be willing to collaborate with each other >> partner thoughts >> I want to emphasize on the last statement you really need strong good, really, you know, trusted leaders in the location to Canada, then inculcated more bigger team everything Glassdoor groove from one location to four locations in last three years. And one thing that we learned after our first remote location that we started was that when we seeded our new remote location with few people from the original location that hoped start, you know, the similar aspects of what glassware stands for and over core at those and values. And then, as we added, new people, they just can easily just transfer to them so that hope does in a big way. And then he moved to Chicago with the same idea and, of course, Brazil. Now with the same >> knowledge transfer culture transfer, >> it all makes it easy. Even you have few people seating from the original location that was court for us. >> Pop in actually started their first remote office in San Francisco, which has now become their headquarters. So she has a lot of experience. Everyone of scale er's customers globally. You know, we sell the engineer, so we're dealing with with our customers who are dealing with this problem all the time. And in addition to culture, one thing that seems to bubble up regularly is can do you know when they need a common tool set and where they can do their own thing. How do you, you know, balance that and where do you need a single source of truth that people can agree on? And again, where can people have different points of view? >> You're talking sing associates from code base to what could >> be whatever, Like in our case, it's yeah, if you're going to troubleshoot something, you know, where the logs, the truth in the logs, Are you gonna have a single source for that? But for other people, it could be the data that they're bringing in or how they analyze the business. But if you can be proactive about understanding, when is commonality of tools of approach, of philosophy, of data, whatever, when it's commonality going to be what we drive and when are we going to allow people to do their own thing? And if you can put that framework in place than people know when they have the latitude and when they got a snap to grit and you could move a lot more quickly and there's kind of a technical debt that isn't code based? It's more about this kind of stuff, right? It's tool based its process and culture based. And if you can be more proactive about avoiding that debt, then you're gonna move more quickly. >> Videoconferencing. Very, very important. You should be able to jump on a video Constance very easily to be able to connect with someone driving just a phone calls all of these face time, different areas of face time Technology plays a big role >> technology. This is This is a modern management challenge for the new way to leave because it used to be just outsource. Here's the specs member, the old P. R. D S and M R D's. There's the specs, and you just kind of build it. Now it's much more collaborative to your point. There's really product and engineering going on, and it's gotta be. It's evolving. This is a key new ingredient >> because the expectation on the quality of product is so much more higher than competition is so much more. >> And when you know these engineers build in a lot of cases, they have to operate it now. So, like you say, whether it's a free service to a consumer, Aurens in enterprise, the expectation is perfect. No downtime, no hiccups >> and the reward incentives now become a big part of this now. New way of doing things. So I gotta ask the natural question. What's the reward system? Because Google really kind of pioneered the idea of a host 20% of your time work on your own project. That was about a decade or so ago. Now it's evolved beyond that to free lunches and all these other perks, but this has got to appeal to the human being behind it. What are some of the reward mechanisms? You guys see his management that's that's helpful in growing, nurturing and scaling up engineering organizations. >> Well, engineers are human, and as every human autonomy is critical for any aspects of moderation. And that's what please the core level. Then, of course, lunches, matter and other perks and benefits matter. Snacks of pours. Good coffee machine definitely is the core of it, but autonomy of what you want to do and is that the line. But what we want or what we are trying to deliver, and the aspect and the information of I did and rolled this out, what was the impact of it? That new should go back to that engineer who built that. So threading it through to the end and from the start is its very core for everybody to know because I want to know what I'm as I'm going every day. How is it helping >> and we really try. I personally try Thio. Make sure that each human on the team, regardless of their function, that we understand their potential and their career aspirations because a lot of times the the normal ladder, whatever that lander is, might not be right for every person. And people can pivot and use their skills in very, very different ways, and we need to invest in their ability to try new things. If it doesn't work out, let him come back. So you know, we try to spend time as a company for engineers not just in our company, but beyond. To really help them build out their own career, build out their own brands. Engineers more and more could be, you know, on TV shows and doing blog's and building out their own personal brand in their point of view. And that gives them impact. That goes beyond the one piece of code that they're writing for a company in a given day or a week. >> J. P you guys went public stock options. All these things going on as well. Your thoughts? Yeah, >> I just came back from a trip to my newest Dev center in Hyderabad, India. It's funny. I had sessions with every team over there. The number one topic was full >> s >> so excited about food. So there is something primal about food. Having said that, I think, uh, praise and recognition the age old things. They matter so much. That's what I've seen You acknowledge what somebody has done and kind of feedback to elect partner was saying, The impact that it creates, you know, it's it's a lot more fulfilling than monetary incentives. Not that they're not useful. Occasionally they are. But I think repeating that on doing it more often creates a sense off. Okay, here's what we can accomplish as a team. It is how I can contribute to it, and that creates a normal sense of purpose. >> Austin, you guys talked about tools of commonality is kind of key. It's always gonna be debates about which tools, much codes, languages to use, encoding, etcetera. But this brings up the notion of application development as you get continuous development. This is the operating model for modern engineering. What's the state of the art? What do you guys seeing as a best practice as managers to keep the machinery humming and moving along? And what what's on the horizon? What's next? >> Yeah, in my view, I would just say So what's humming and what state of the art I think I is core thio. Most of the systems and applications, the, uh, the core aspect of pretty much every company as you see, and that's the buzz word, even in Silicon Valley for the right reasons, is how we have built our platforms, insistence and ideas. But now let's make it smarter, and every company now has a lot of data. We are swimming in data, but it's very important that we can pick and pull the the core insides from that data to then power the same product and same system to make it more smarter, right? The whole goal for us ourselves is where they're making our platform or smarter, with the goal of making it more personalized and making sure that as users are navigating a project, pages they are seeing more personalized information so that they're not wasting their time there. We can make faster decisions in more rich data set, which is very catered towards them. So smart, so building that intelligence is core. >> And with continues, integration comes, continues risk. All right, so no risk, no reward. And so we live in an era of freemium. Free service is so you know why not take the risk? You don't have to do an A B test. You got digital. You do a B, C D and use all kinds of analytics. So this is actually a creative opportunity for engineering as they get to the front lines you mentioned earlier getting part of the empowerment. How is the risk taking changing the management? >> You know, I deal with class off users were willing to pay money, so I don't know if I can talk a lot about the freedom aspect of the problem. But now there's always desire for new functionality. If you want it, otherwise you don't want it. There's a lot of risk of worsens that's still floating around, especially in the interprets there today. On it is a big tension that you have to deal with. If you're not careful, then you can introduce problems on believing you're operating on the cloud and you're servicing thousands of customers. A small change can bring down the entire ecosystem, so you'll take it very seriously. You're helping others run their business, and that means you had invest in the right tools and processes. >> So you guys are actually Freemium business model, but still engineers. I got a test that they want to take the rhythms. So is it a cloud sand boxing? How is the risk taking managed? How you guys encouraging risk without having people hurt? You don't >> wantto overburden engineers to the point. They feel stifled and they cannot do anything. So there is a right balance. So you know, there are many techniques we follow the. For example, we roll out the software, tow US staging environment so customers can play around and make sure things are not breaking for their comfort more so than for us. But it is an important part of the equation, and then internally, you have to invest a lot of planning. Appropriately, there are the high risk content on the features, and then there are the low risk ones. You want to think about experimentation frameworks in no way be testing and so on and more importantly, about automation and testing. I don't think if a customer logs a bug and finds the problem, they don't want to see it one more time. Ever really have to make sure that those things don't happen when you're investing robust automation around testing processes because there isn't enough time for the complexity of these applications for destiny thing, man, >> this whale automation with cloud comes in containers kubernetes. All of >> those things, you know you heard will enable engineers with the technology said so that they contested scale. You have to provide access to production like data because you have to worry about no privacy, security and all those aspects. But at the same time, they need to have access to the variety off configurations that are out there so that they contested meaningful so to invest in all of those things. >> But I'll take it back to kind of where we started. This, which is the human factor with continuous delivery, is this continuous risk, and it doesn't matter if this engineer is supporting a free consumer application or the highest end of enterprise. When something goes wrong, this, their stress level goes through the roof and you know, how can we equipped? These people, too, solve problems in real time to have that visibility, to have whatever tool said or date or whatever they need? Because at the end of the day, a bad day for an engineer is a day when something is breaking and they're the ones that have to stay up all night and fix it and a good day for an engineer. A human being is the day they get to go home and have dinner with the family or not be woken up in the night. And there is >> for kite surfing or whatever, you >> know, whatever they dio, there's, you know, there is truly a human way. We think about engineers and engineers get up every day, and they want to change the world and they want to make an impact. And thank God we have, you know, teams of engineers that do that for all of us, and they're human beings, and there's a level of continuous stress that we've injected into their lives every day and to the extent that we, as companies and managers and leaders, can help take some of that burden off of them. The world becomes >> the whole being seeing the results of their work to is rewarding as well. >> Scaler does a lot of stuff there, so I have to call that are at the same time in a lot of very good nuggets, J P. Brother. But one more thing that has shifted in terms of how process of practice works is more of more. Engineers now participate very early on in product development is in the day. They try to understand what is the context and why are we doing. And we do a lot of users research to understand that that process, so that they have full context, that they are building in developing eso they're more of a partner now and not an afterthought. >> Think agile And Dev ops to me has proven that the notion of silos and waterfall practices has democratizing flatten. The organization's out where interdisciplinary crossovers are happening. >> Oh, yes, >> and this has been an interesting art of management is encouraging the right person that crust over the right line was you give people little taste, but sometimes they may not belong there kind of called herding cats in the old days. But now it's more of managing kind of interests and growth there. >> That original Dev ops model, though if you have anybody read the Phoenix project like years ago, but it it was really about bringing different points of view. It's a diversity thing. It's bringing different points of view around the table before the first line. It is written so that you're thinking about every angle on the problem and on the ongoing operation of whatever you're building >> Well, it's all about diversity and inclusion and diversity. I was with states, inclusion and diversity, diversity, inclusion Because male and females are involved. We have two females in tech here. This has been a discussion. We still don't have the numbers up to the senior levels within engineering in general. What has to happen to move the needle for women in tech and or inclusionary people involved in engineering to get the right perspective? What's what's >> not? Start with J P because he's actually a huge champion, and without the men involved, we don't have a solutions, >> inclusion and diversity, J. P your thoughts on this was super important. >> Yeah, Number one is recognition. I was stealing Christine yesterday. I just came back from India. That's like told you I took a picture there of my management team. Came back here, looked at it. There is no female, No right, it's crazy. I mean, it's not that we're not trying on gum it. We had the same problem and we started our center in 2015 right? There was a group picture off the team. There was like they were like two women on the thing. We put a lot of effort into it on. Two years later, a significant chunk of the organization has got women embedded in the team's came because we tried. We went out. Look, for those who are good in this area is not that we compromised on the qualifications. It's really about putting some energy in tow, getting the right resumes and then looking at it. The other thing. We're also doing his cultivation. You have to go to the grassroots because there are just enough women engineers. It's unfortunate, for whatever reasons, they're not taking up that professional military enough studies written on it So last two years we weigh, have conducted something called rails. Girls in India, 150 school age children, Women. I mean, girls come in and then we have supported them, run their classes, hold a class. And that helps, you know, even if 10% off them, you know, choose to take up this profession. It's gonna be a big boost. And we have to do a lot more of those in my opinion. >> Europe T rex President Leading Engineering. What's your view? >> Well, I'll say this, you know, for the people who are participating in helping drive this mission just like J. P. I say thank you, especially for men who are participating in it. We cannot do this without you, but for all the people who, if they're not participate in participating in helping drive this mission, I have all share this one data, uh, one of the initiative that glass or drives this gender pay gap, which is also an outcome off, not having diverse outlook at all levels into in the workplace. And we in our economic research team. They did a study and they shared a projection off when will be closed. The gender pay gap. It's 2017. That's depressing. So for for me, when I hear people who say you know, they, they don't want to participate or they don't think this is the right approach of solving for diversity in workplace, I say Okay, but that's not the reason for you to not participate and stay out. If it join it, join it in your own way. But it's only when l offers. Can I see it as a real problem and participate just like Gibby, as you said grassroot level as well as outside One of the example that I told my team when they say, You know, we don't want to drop the bar, the quality bar, I say Sure, don't drive it, but don't drop it. But if you have two candidates, one with a diverse background, Um, who who might be after cable to the same job in 2 to 3 months over someone who slam dunk today, let's invest in the person who is bringing the diverse background for 2 to 3 months and then make them successful. That's not dropping the bar that's still supporting and investing in helping diversity. >> My good friend and heat you saw at IBM. They put out a survey said Diversity, inclusion, diversity. First companies have a bit of advantage, so the investment is so much lower in the bars, more bringing perspective because if we tell about software here has male and female and that's being 17% female, it's >> not just, you know, I had two things to the comments, all of which I agree with one. It's not just a pipeline problem. It is a a culture problem where people have to feel welcome and it has to be a comfortable environment, and they have to believe that their diverse point of view matters and doesn't matter if they're men or women. But there are lots of times when we all make it hard for somebody with a different point of view to enter the conversation. So we have to do a better job of creating the culture, and secondly, there's a saying you have to see it to be it. We have to see people of diversity, gender and of every other type, cognitive diversity of all types at every level in the company. And, you know, we had the same thing, so I'm lucky enough to send a Fortune 500 public board. And I spend a lot of my time helping women and people of color and diversity get on public boards. But if you go back seven years ago, we were 14% women on public boards and it did not move and it did not move and it did not move and in one year popped over 20%. And that's before the loss. So you know, you make these linear projections we can with effort, yes, actually make >> a >> difference. It just takes a very concerted effort. And in this case, particularly for engineering and for leadership, it is making a concerted effort at every level, from board to CEO to executive team to all levels down. Making sure we have inclusion and diversity in >> this is a modern management challenge in the new way of leading managing >> this process. These things, This >> is the big challenge, folks, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate. Final question for you guys is what if you could summarize the new way to lead and his modern error from an engineering standpoint, building out of companies building along durable value creation with its company a product or service. What is the key keys to success >> as a leader >> as a leader has a new brand of leaders. >> I would say, You know, this lot goes into, I'm sure you need to know engineering and all the strategic aspect of your job. But the core aspect I feel, is as a leader, my success depends on the quality of relationships I'm building with my team and members that I work with. So that goes into the people aspect, the people connection that goes into it, >> J p. >> Absolutely People are are a big portion of the story. I also feel understanding the problem and driving for results. You know, it's not just about building something. It's about building for a purpose. What is it that you're you're tryingto accomplish and continuing to find that? And working with the teams is so critical for success, especially in a fast moving in Christine. >> Yeah, I agree. It is all about the people, and I think old and new. This hasn't changed. People need to feel like they belong and they're being appreciated, and they're being heard >> scaler. Glass door Copa software. You guys do a great work. Thanks for sharing the engineering inputs, Thio. Leading successful companies. >> Thank you for >> your leadership. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm shot for the Q. Thanks for watching. >> Well.

>> Announcer: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground at Coupa Inspire '19 from the Vegas. I'm very pleased to welcome not Bono, not Sting, it's Chandar, the CMO of Coupa. Chandar, welcome to theCUBE. >> Lisa, thank you, it's great to be here today. >> This is a really cool event. Procurement is sexy. >> It is sexy. >> It can be so incredibly transformative to any organization. I loved how the last two days, what you guys have done is a great job of articulating Coupa's value in procurement, invoicing, payments, expense, through the voices of your customers and I think there's no better brand value that you can get. >> Sure, absolutely. >> Tell us a little bit about your role as the CMO of Coupa and marketing in a fast-growing company with a product that people might go, "I haven't heard of that, what is that again?" >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I look at it, my role is at Coupa, especially, for Coupa, what's interesting about it, as you said, is that every company makes money, every company spends money. So, invariably, Coupa can be used across a set of different companies. One from the Golden State Warriors to Procter & Gamble to the Lukemia & Lymphoma Society. Across the board. And then, from our perspective, holistically, we're looking at business, but managed from different aspects of spend. You said procurement was in expenses. So, my role is to build a marketing engine to get the flywheel effect of first you drive awareness. All marketing starts with awareness and you said people haven't heard of it. And so, to first to drive awareness in a very thoughtful way to the right contextual community we want to go after. And, two, drive acquisition, we'll drive close synergies between sales and marketing to ultimately drive pipeline and win rates and ultimately deals. And then, very importantly in today's world, is to drive the advocacy and get your most passionate customers to evangelize about the brand, so that you create the flywheel effect of awareness, acquisition, and advocacy. And, that's really what my role today is. >> And, I love how I read an article where you call that the stairway to marketing heaven. So, I thought, I wonder if you're a guitar guy, but you're right. It's how to drive awareness, but in a meaningful, thoughtful way. Especially today, with all all the technology, we wake up with it, right? Our phone is our alarm clock. We are bombarded by ads. If we're on Instagram, following our favorite celebrities or whatnot and it's scary when they have the right context, but it has to be thoughtful. We need to know our audience. So, you describe this stairway to marketing heaven, as you just mentioned, it's awareness, it's acquisition, which is key. But, I feel like a lot of companies don't forget the advocacy part, but they don't invest enough in it because that's the best salesperson for your technology, is the people that are using it successfully, right? >> Totally. Yeah, so, in fact, there was a study about a couple of years which looked at how balanced the boat is in terms of spending in presale versus post-sale. And, it's interesting that 87% of B2B marketing spend was presale. In other words, only 13% of people were investing in retention marketing, adoption mastery, customer marketing, and this is what advocacy marketing. And, in today's world, that doesn't work because you got to balance the boat because, to your point, you're getting in a peer-bond world where your existing customers are your best sellers. And, prospects who have all the buying power today are looking to your existing customers to guide them in their purchasing decisions. So, as an organization, if you balance the boat, then you're going to get the flywheel effect going for you in terms of driving the right advocacy across all channels. Just not your own channel if you earn channels to ultimately drive that acquisition going. >> Do you think that's actually more valuable? 'Cause it's one thing to have on your .com site, your social media sites, all these great things about your technologies, etc., coming from customers or from product experts, from influencers. Talk about the value. As technology advances so much and we are influenced by so many other channels, the value of the earned channel and that peer-to-peer relationship. >> Yeah, I think, as I say, that every mom says her baby is good-looking. But, in software, not every baby is really good-looking. Which means, if you take that analogy and extend it, if you're coming to your own channel, invariably, you're going to see some great customer videos about your product, you're going to see some great endorsements and testimonials, you're going to see some great quotes about your product. The reality, there's no bad news about your product on your own website, on your own channel. But, the reality is there are some, some people who might have different opinions. If you go to Glassdoor, no company gets a five on Glassdoor. And, if you take the same thing and extend it to earned channels for advocacy, folks like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, and B2B, for example, are becoming more relevant today than before because two things. One is 85% of our customers' journey is self-directed. >> Lisa: That much? >> That much and Forrester has anywhere from 60 to 80, but reality is whether you're buying a car or you're buying Coupa. Today, a customer is discovering more journeys. And, in that process, they are looking to more of these earned channels as validation of which ones to go after than just your own channels. So, that's why we got to balance the boat and distribute our advocacy spend dollars across both your own channels and your earned channels. And, that's really important for you and the flywheel will pay off for you over time from that perspective. >> It will and that seems like a lot of the things that Suzy Irwin was talking about to the audience earlier. That's common sense. Why is it that you see these marketing budgets that are so heavily weighted towards just getting awareness, getting customers acquired, and then not thinking about retention marketing account based marketing. >> I'll tell you why. I think any smart CMO will conceptually agree with you. Nobody's going to say, of course, this is not important for me to get advocacy. The challenge comes in in terms of how that marketing department is measured. What gets measured gets funding at the end of the day. >> Lisa: That's a good point. >> And, reality is a lot of these B2B companies are still measuring marketing based on, what's the pipeline you're driving and what's at the top of the funnel metrics that you're driving? In reality, that's a little bit of a skewed thing because then if that's what you're being measured at the board level, at the executive level, then guess what? All your funding is going to go towards that. But, really, the true measurement of marketing, one, is about, yes, you have to get pipeline. You have to influence win rates at the bottom of the funnel and that's where product marketing comes in. But, as importantly, you have to look at the number of brand advocates you create and lifetime value of a customer. >> Yes, CLV, yes. >> And, that's really, really, customer lifetime value is so important because in a SaaS business, ultimately, the Mufasa metric, I'm a Lion King fan. The Mufasa metric is really lifetime value because if a customer stays longer with you, pays you more, and is shouting from the rooftop, then, invariably, that SaaS business is doing well. And, that's why you have to balance the boat in terms of post-advocacies, post-acquisition spend into advocacy, as much as you've done in pre-acquisition. >> When you came into Coupa a couple of years ago, have you been able to shift those budgets because you're able to demonstrate the value that that advocacy piece generates with the flywheel? >> Absolutely and I have a very progressive-thinking CEO who's partners with me on this too. So, we've been absolutely able to do that. In fact, what we're trying to do at the end of the day and most software companies, the real goal should be creating a tribe. In technology, you have to create a tribe to be a titan. And, it's just not about the capability, it's about the community. And, that's really what we're trying to do at Coupa is to create the tribal community feeling. So, if the community is bigger than the brand, it is about the community itself and learning, sharing, and growing with each other and being successful. And, we're just fostering that. So, from that perspective, if you look at this conference and the investment we're making here, some of the programs we're doing in terms of advocacy, what we call spend sellers, etc., is all about that community tribal feeling and go establish that. To use some inspiration from our consumer brands, if you really think about it, people don't buy what they want. People buy what they want to be. So, let me give you what I mean by that. What I want could be a bike. It could be any motorbike, but what I want to be could be part of a very special community and that's why Harley Davidson is successful. What I want could be any stationary bike today, but what I want to be is part of some cool community like Peloton. That's why Peloton is successful. So, similarly for us, what I want could be some spend management software, but what I want to be is part of this community, this cool club, and that's the feeling we're trying to create in the post-acquisition cycle. >> I love that you said that because you talked about that this morning and I loved how you had the word community on the slide and then broke that out into communication unity. And, one of the senses that I got yesterday when-- >> Chandar: Rob was talking about it. >> Yeah, when Rob kicked off everything is this is a very collaborative community. We think about that in terms in terms even like a developer community or something like that. But, Coupa is now managing $1.2 trillion of spend through the platform that every other business that's using Coupa gets to benefit from. It's customer-centric, it's supplier-centric, but it's about applying the right technologies, AI, machine learning, to all this data, so everybody benefits. >> That's right and one of the interesting aspects of community building is one aspect of community building is that Marc Benioff had a great, evangelistic marketing was a way of community building. He would come in and really evangelize and this is where we're going and you all need to come with us. When I was at Marketo, it was interesting. Community building was through more educational marketing and doing it through this, I'm going to educate you through though leadership. Another good way of community building is through product intelligence, which is community intelligence. So, collectively, the sum of all parts are smarter than the parts themselves. And, Rob has a great line, which says, "None of us is as smart as all of us." And, the fundamental community intelligence offering is based on this first principle. So, example, if I'm the community of Coupa customers, the next customer is smarter than the previous customer because the collective intelligence grew, which means I can then go benchmark it myself. I gave an example this morning of USO, the company that provides services to the United States troops. And, when Rick Quaintance at USO benchmarked himself using community intelligence, versus the rest of the community, he realizes that his invoice cycle times are seven times lower. So, that kind of intelligence is extremely beneficial and invaluable to companies. So, that's the value of the community, is providing the collective intelligence. Waze is a great consumer example. Those of us who use Waze for traffic know that it's all community driven and each one of us is smarter because we're collectively using it. It's the same concept in applying that to B2B software. >> So, as we see, you mentioned the over 80% of the buying decision is self-directed whether we're buying a car or Coupa software. Did Coupa foresee that in the last decade to see we're going to have to go to a more community-driven collaboration because the consumer of any thing, any product or service, is going to be so empowered 'cause that's a part of the Coupa foundation. >> It is. >> Lisa: Which, we don't see a lot in companies that are 10 plus years old. >> Yeah, and credit to Rob for his vision for this. It's because I think early part of the company, he wrote into the contracts that the company can benefit. Collectively, every company can benefit by being part of this community. And, the fact is data's aggregated, abstracted, there's no information that is sensitive, etc. But, the fact is we all can collectively benefit through it. That was a great vision of Rob and early people and that's benefited us because the benefit is really over scale and time. Now, your $1.2 trillion, it is really statistically significant in each different industry to get that intelligence. And, that is one of the other reasons we launched our business spend index. It's called spendindex.com. Where we can use the billions of dollars spent in the community to provide a leading indicator of economic growth based on current business spend sentiment. You think of ADP as this payroll, it's called ADP payroll thing that comes out and the gross domestic product report comes out. Those tend to be rear-view mirror lagging indicators. But, as we're using community-based intelligence to provide a windshield, a leading indicator of where the economy is going. So, there's so many different use cases. Benefiting based on spend you're doing as well as where the economy is going and all this is based on the intelligence. >> It's so powerful because, to your point, you're not looking behind. >> Chandar: It's the windshield. >> Exactly, able to be looking forward. So, with all the announcements and the great things that have come out with the AWS expansion, what you guys are doing with Coupa Pay. I was shocked to learn the percentages of businesses that are still writing paper checks. Or, the fact that a lot of companies have 10 plus banks that they're working with. There's still so much manual processes. You must just be, the future is so bright, you got to wear shades with Coupa. But, what excites you about what you guys have announced the last coupe of days and the feedback that you're hearing from your tribe? >> I think there's two kinds of things. One is continue to set the innovation agenda for the industry. And, really, you have to look at every customer on their unique journey of maturity and maturation, so we have a very thoughtful, what we call, maturity index, The business spend management index. Whereas, you are seeing some of these customers, for example, you mentioned, may be in the first stage of this maturity, where, for them, it's just getting automation and going from paper to paperless could be the first step. But, some other customers might say, "I've gotten there, "but I want to get the next level of sophistication "to orchestrate these business spend processes." So, what's exciting for us in the feedback is we're creating product capability across this maturation journey for our customers to make them successful at each of those places. And, Coupa Pay is one example of that. Whereas, some of the other pieces we talked about, we announced about some of the community offerings that we did also is on that. So, that's one exciting piece. The other exciting piece that customers tell us at this conference is, "Foster platforms for us "to engage with each other, learn from each other, "share from each other, and grow with each other." So, even stuff that Rob talked about, which is sourced together. This concept of customers coming together to drive a sourcing process and, again, the collective intelligence in the community, that, we're getting very, very positive feedback from that perspective. And, ultimately, Rob has a really good saying that, "It is not about customer satisfaction. "It is about customer success." That's a delineation there. A customer could be very satisfied with you, but they may not be necessarily successful. And, we say, it's not about satisfaction. It's about success. And, by creating this innovation cycle and then having a post-implementation process that's getting true value, that's truly how we drive customer success. >> And, something that I've heard over and over as I've talked to a number of your customers yesterday and today is how much they're feeling Coupa is listening. Their feedback is being incorporated. They're actually influencing the development of the technology and that was loud and clear the last two days. >> Yeah, I think there is, Rob talked about the number of features that are being influenced by the community and we have these-- >> 300 plus in the last 12 months. >> Yes, 300 plus in the last 12 months. And, there's this concept of two ears, one mouth. And, listen, learn, and innovate and that's the philosophy here. But, it's a right mix of listening to customers, learning from them, and getting the right input from them for driving innovation, as well as having strategic vision on where this market is going and having the right mix of those to provide the capability to customers. >> Wow, you're on a rocket ship. Chandar, it was great to have you on theCUBE. You'll have to come back. >> Yes, Lisa, absolutely, I'll come back and it was a pleasure being here. Awesome. >> Awesome, thank you so much. For Chandar, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire '19. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Vegas! Lisa Martin with John Furrier. You're watching us on theCUBE live. The end of Day One of our three days of coverage of Dell Technologies World. Can you hear the music? The party's already getting started. We have more content to bring you. Please welcome a couple of guests from DXE Technology, Kevin Johnston, Chief Sales and Revenue Officer, Cloud and Platform Service. Kevin, it's great to have you. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be here. >> Our pleasure. We've got Graham Stringer, Managing Director of Workplace and Mobility for DXE Americas. >> Thank you. Good to be here as well. >> Yeah, you waited just in time for the concert, guys! >> We did. >> Just in time. Here we go. >> All right, so, Kevin, let's go ahead and start with you. Give our audience and understanding of DXE. What you guys do, who you are, all that good stuff. >> Yeah, okay. That's great. So DXE was formed two years ago as a result of the merger of legacy HP Enterprise Services Business and CSC. DXE was formed really for the purpose of helping our large enterprise clients accelerate their digital transformation. So we're about a $22 billion IT services company, really aligned with our partners helping our clients transform digitally. >> And you guys were on the cloud early, too. There's a lot of devops going on. >> Yep. >> You guys had your hands in all the clouds. >> We have. >> What's your take on, here at Dell Technologies World, Microsoft's partnering with VMware? >> Yeah, so we would share a lot of beliefs with Dell Technology and VMware in particular, in that multi-cloud is a real thing. And we see multi-cloud, especially for the large enterprise clients, really being an answer for quite some number of years to come. We also believe that a large percentage of application portfolios will migrate to cloud. Whether it's private clouds or public clouds, and that there's a lot of work to be done to transform those applications to really take advantage of cloud native features. >> So last year's theme of Dell Technologies World was Make It Real, 'It' being digital transformation, security transformation, IT transformation, and workforce workplace automation. Graham, I'd love to get your perspectives on workplace mobility and some of the things that were announced this morning with Unified Workspace, Workspace ONE, and recognizing, hey, for our customers to transform digitally successfully, we've got to make sure that their are people are successful, and their people are highly distributed. What are some of the things that you heard this morning that are exciting, aligning with some of the trends that you're seeing in the workplace? >> Well the big trend that we're seeing is the role that HR is now playing in digital transformation of the workplace. If you go back two, three, four years, it was very IT centric. Conversations were predominantly with the CIO. We're now seeing 30, 40% of organizations or more engaging at the HR level. We did a recent project with one of the big retailers in the industry and right out of the bat, this chief HR officer was engaged right from the get-go. They want to know that their employees are going to experience work very differently. So that's one of the big trends we're seeing emerging. >> When did this shift happen? When was this going on? Past year, two years? Because this is a shift. >> I would say the shift has definitely happened the last couple of years. Millennials are having a huge impact. You're getting quite the cross-pollination of a lot of different generations. Millennials are now having an enormous impact. If you look at outlets like Glassdoor, millennials want to know when they go to an organization can I bring my own device? Am I going to have a great workplace experience? And you can't stick with a very traditional, legacy way of delivering IT where everything was shift left and you got to a point where everybody hated each other. >> That's a problem for productivity. >> Yes, a very big problem for productivity, absolutely. >> Talk about some of the challenges that customers have overcome with digital transformation, as it starts to become less of a buzz word and actually more of a reality and strategic imperative that has some visibility at the unit economics and value. >> Yeah, I think every large enterprise client we talk to has a digital transformation agenda of some sort and at some varying place along the path to trying to adopt a new business model or adapt to a different business process, so the challenges that we see with these clients in general is how do we scale? So I have legacy IT that won't disappear overnight and I have all the possibilities of digitally enabling or bringing new digital technologies that enable these processes or models. So this is a challenge: how to enable digital at scale where traditional and digital have to live together for some period of time. >> And it's not just a tech challenge, it's culture, too. How far has tech come because you've mentioned containers with legacy? That has been a great message to IT is I can put a container around it and hold onto it for a little while longer, I don't have to kill it, and make the changes to cloud-native. >> For the tech guys, there's been a lot of fun things and containers probably is the bridge for legacy apps into cloud for sure. For the rest of the folks, for the normal people, the way work gets done and the way to rethink how to do work in the mix of IT or technology into business is just different. >> Graham's point is beautiful because the expectation of the employee or the worker whether they're in the firm or outside the firm, outside in or inside out, however they look at it, is the new experience they want. So the expectations are changing. What's the biggest thing, we saw some stats on stage about remote working, three places, two places, I mean, hell, I'm always on the road. What is some of the expectations that you're seeing? Obviously millennials and some of the older folks. >> They want to see IT delivered in the way they want to receive it. That's one of the biggest trends we're seeing. So for Millennials, my son's kind of in that age category, right, they love to text. To pick up a phone for a younger generation is a little bit foreign. You go and deal with baby boomers, they want to be dealt with in a much different manner. So you've got that whole change, and then you've got the whole notion now of work is changing; where do I work, the ability to basically work 24/7, wherever I want, however I want, using whatever device that I want. And that of course is now creating a whole new set of challenges for IT, particularly around security. >> But employee experience is absolutely fundamental to a business' success; their ability to delight costumers, their ability to deliver outcome, so it's really pretty core. Talk to us about those conversations that you're having with customers. Are they understanding how significant that employee experience is to bottom line business outcomes differentiation? >> Very much so. We're working right now with a large manufacturing firm and they're doing not just an inside out, but outside in, so they're actually coming to watch. It's part of a workplace strategy to look at it from the outside as well. In other words, how can our client take innovation to their suppliers, their customers, to demonstrate that they understand it? So that's extremely exciting when we see that they're not just focused on their own employees and the experience germane to them. >> One thing I might add is that maybe less so from a user experience per say, but the individuals as an employee. So the shift to digital and the skill shift that's required to go with that is really probably the most monumental change that all of us technology companies and the business part of our large enterprise clients is dealing with. Whether it's a skills gap or whether it's a culture gap, this idea of just simply waterfall to agile and the way to think about that or silo versus end-to-end as just simple ways to think differently about how to go faster. So the experience, how you recruit, whose going to make it, who can be trained, and then where you need to be able to source the new talent from as well. >> I totally agree with you. We do hundreds of shows a year, this is our tenth year doing theCUBE, that is the number one things that we hear over and over again from practitioners and customers and from people working. It's not the check, you can always get a check solution, it's the cultural and the skills gap. Both are huge problems. >> And this is part of the digital at scale point. So we'll hire something in the neighborhood of six to eight thousand digital skills people. We're just about to close on active position of Luxoft, an agile devops digital company. We'll bring another 13,000 in. But if you think about the normal large enterprise and what you need to do to be able to have the university networks and to be able to really source that scale in order to effect the transformations that business need to make to stay competitive. >> And the other point, the engagements have changed too. I'm sure you guys have seen your end but every IT or CIO we talk to says, "I outsourced everything decades ago and now I've got a couple guys running the show. Now I need to have a hundred x more people coding and building core competency." That's still going to need to engage people in the channel or our service providers but they need to build core talent in house. It's swinging back and they don't know what to do. (laughter) Is that why they call you guys? Is that how you guys get involved? >> We'll help train. We'll help clients think through what does an IT or business organization need to look like profile wise, skill wise, operating model wise, and in many cases it's I have my digital model but I still have my traditional model that needs to coexist with it and then here's where the opportunities are for people to develop career paths and progress. >> Kevin, talk about the sweet spot of your engagements that you're doing right now. Where's the heart of your business? Is it someone whose really hurting, needs an aspirin, they've got a headache, is it a problem? Is it an opportunity? Is it a growth issue? Where do you see the spectrum of your engagements? >> We kind of find clients in one of three spots normally. "Hey, I know I need to do something but I'm not sure what it is, can you help me figure out to get started?" So more design thinking, problem solving. We have other clients at the other end of the spectrum who are, "Hey, I've got this figured out. I need a partner to help me execute it's scale. And I know the model that I want to do, I know the business reason for doing it." And then we have a lot of folks that are in the middle, which is, "I've started, I've got a few hundred AWS accounts. I got private clouds sitting idle. Someone help me." Or, "I've got security issues, compliance issues." >> So they're in the middle of the journey and they just need a little reboot or a kickstart. >> They need help scaling. >> They ran out of gas. (laughter) >> And how are you working with Dell Technologies and their companies, Dell EMC, if they were to do that? >> The partnership with Dell Technologies, VMware, are really center to how we go to market. DXE is one of the top few partners largest in the ecosystem. The breadth of our portfolios are extremely complementary, whether it's things like device as a service or multi- and hybrid cloud, or pivotal and devops. So the breadth of the portfolios max up really well which makes it the impact potential for our clients even more important. Dell Technology broadly is really one of the few partners that we're shoulder-to-shoulder going with to the market as well. >> Awesome. Great stuff. What's the biggest learnings you guys can share with the audience that you gathered over your multiple engagements holistically across your client base? That's learnings, that could be a best practice, or just either some scar tissue or revelations or epiphanies. Share some experience here. >> I think one of the big learnings we're seeing is the shift now to very much business outcome driven decision making. If you go back to your point about the big ITO outsourcing days, that was all about just strictly driving cost out, and that's why you got to that point where everybody was left hating each other. Now it's about business outcomes. You've got the impact of Millennials, you've got organizations wanting to create a new and better experience for the employees and they're coming to us to say, "How do we accomplish that?" We've got an organization we're working with right now, they're trying to elevate themselves to be one of the top 50 best places to work for in the US. How do they arrive at that? For them, that's their barometer and so it's not about driving costs out, it's really achieving that overall experience and enhance a business outcome. >> So they're betting on productivity gains from morale and happy workers. >> Right. And also they're recognizing the downstream impact on their customers, productivity, the level of employee engagement, right? I mean those are the things that the organization knows that if they hit on those, I mean the sky's the limit. >> Right. Anything on your end? Learnings? >> Yeah, I would say the "don't understand the talent" challenge. The ability to pivot from here's the way we all know and are familiar with doing things to the new way. There will be a big talent challenge. The other thing is the operating model from an IT standpoint. Traditional IT operating model operates at a particular speed, cloud operates at a different speed. And the tools, the talents, the skills that go with that are just completely different. And then I think the last thing is just it seems maybe surprising, but compliance at scale and at speed. So security and regulatory compliance, we see that falling over all the time. >> Great practice you guys. I've been following you guys for many years, you've got a great organization, lots of smart people there we've interviewed many times. My final question is a tech question: what technologies do you guys like that you think is ready for prime time or almost ready for prime time worth having customer keep focusing on and which one's a little more over hyped and out of reach at the moment? >> I'll take a stab at that. If you look at today's Wall Street Journal, Deloitte talks to I believe the figure they quoted was roughly 25% of organizations are doing AI in some form already, PoC or at least are committing to it in terms of strategy. We're seeing that inside DXE as well. AI is now being incorporated into our workplace offerings. The potential for that is enormous, it's real. The technology in the last couple of years, particularly with cloud computing, has really enabled it. When you look at platforms like Watson, these are capabilities that just weren't there 10, 12, 15 years ago, and now the impact that it can have on the workplace, help lines, chats, chatbots, and so forth, is enormous and it's real. Five, 10 years ago it definitely was not in it's maturity. >> Okay, over hyped. >> What's over hyped? I don't know, what comes to mind for you? >> Or maybe I'll rephrase it differently: not yet ready for prime time, but looks good on the fairway but not yet known. . . >> I think for me through workplace, IoT has still got a ways to go. AI and analytics is definitely there. IoT I would say is a little bit behind. I'm sure that Kevin has cloud and platform thoughts. >> Yeah, I would say from an over hyped standpoint, we've seen a lot of companies, large enterprises, legacy application portfolios think they're going to refactor all their applications and cloud native everything. So it feels that people are now kind of getting past that point, but we still see that idea a lot. I think the opportunity that is really in front of us, and you kind of called out, containers. Legacy applications into cloud feel like a remaining frontier for the large enterprise. We think containers and the idea of autonomous, continue optimization, financial performance, is a way to make apps run in cloud financially and performance wise in a way that we don't see a lot of companies fully solving for that yet. >> Awesome. >> A lot of work to do, a lot of opportunity. Kevin, Graham, thank you so much for sharing some of your time and thoughts and insights with John and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> Very good. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, and you've been watching theCUBE live from Vegas. Day One of our coverage of Dell Technologies World is now in the books. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(bouncy, melodic music) - The world's kind of revolting against these mega-siloed platforms. - That's the risk of having such centralized control over technology. If you remember in the old days, when Microsoft dominance was rising, all you had to do was target Windows as a virus platform, and you were able to impact thousands of businesses even in the early Internet days, within hours. And it's the same thing happening right now, as a weaponization of these social media platforms, and Google's search engine technology and so forth, is the same side effect now. The centralization, that control, is the problem. One of the reasons I love the Blockstack technology, and Blockchain in general, is the ability to decentralize these things right now. And the most passionate thing I care about nowadays is being driven out of Europe, where they have a lot more maturity in terms of handling these nuisance-- - You mean the check being driven out of Europe. - Their loss, - The loss, okay. - being driven out of Europe and-- - Be specific, we'd like an example. - The major deadline that's coming up in May 25th of 2018 is GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, where European citizens now, and any company, American or otherwise, catering to European citizens, has to respond to things like the Right To Be Forgotten request. You've got 24 hours as a global corporation with European operations, to respond to European citizens, EU citizens, Right To Be Forgotten request where all the personally identifiable information, the PII, has to be removed and auto-trailed, proving it's been removed, has to be gone from two, three hundred internal systems within 24 hours. And this has teeth by the way. It's not like the 2.7 billion dollar fine that Google just flipped away casually. This has up to 4% of your global profits per incident where you don't meet that requirement. - And so what we're seeing in the case of GDPR is that's an accelerant to adopt Cloud, because we actually isolate the data down into regions and the way we've architected our platform from day one is always been a true multi-tenant SaaS technology platform. And so there's not that worry about data resiliency and where it resides, and how you get access to it, because we've built all that up. And so, when we go through all of our own attestations, whether it's SOC Type One, Type Two, GDPR as an initiative, what we're doin' for HIPAA, what we're doin' for plethora of other things, usually the CSO says, "Oh, I get it, you're way more secure, now help me," because I don't want the folks in development or operations to go amuck, so to speak, I want to be an enabler, not Doctor No. - I'm a developer, I search for data, I'm just searching for data. - That's right. - What's the controls available for making sure that I don't go afoul of GDPR. - So absolutely. So we have phenomenal security capabilities that are built into our product, both from an identification point of view, giving rights and privileges, as well as protecting that data from any third party access. All of this information is going to be compliant with these regulations, beyond GDPR. There's enormous regulations around data that require us to keep our securities levels as high as we go. In fact, we would argue that AWS itself is now typically more secure, more secure, - [Mike] They've done the work. - than your classic data center. - [Mike] Yeah, they've done the work. - AI-ers, explicable machine learning. - Yeah, that's a hot focus, - Indeed. - or concern of enterprises everywhere, especially in a world where governance and tracking and lineage, - Precisely. - GDPR and so forth, so hot. - Yes, you have mentioned all the right things. Now, so given those two things, there's normal web data, NML is not easy, why the partnership between Hortonworks and IBM makes sense? Well, you're looking at the number one, industry leading big data platform, Hortonworks, Then you look at a DSX Local, which I'm proud to say I've been there since the first line of code, and I'm feeling very passionate about the product, is the merge between the two. Ability to integrate them tightly together, gives your data scientists secure access to data, ability to leverage the Spark that runs inside of Hortonworks Glassdoor, ability to actually work in a platform like DSX, that doesn't limit you to just one kind of technology but allows you to work within multiple technologies, Ability to actually work on your, not only Spark-- - You say technologies here, are you referring to frameworks like TensorFlow, and-- - [Piotr] Precisely. - Okay, okay. - Very good, now, that part I'm gonna get into very shortly. So please don't steal my thunder. - So GDPR you see as a big opportunity for Cloud providers, like Azure. Or they bring something to the table, right? - Yeah, they bring different things to the table. You have elements of data where you need the on-premise solution, you need to have control, and you need to have that restriction about where that data sits. And some of the talks here that are going on at the moment, is understanding, again, how critical and how risky is that data? What is it you're keepin' and how high does that come up in our business value it is? So if that's gonna be on your imperma-solution, there may be other data that can get push out into the Cloud, but, I would say, Azure, the AWS Suites and Google, they are really pushing down that security, what you can do, how you protect it, how you can protect that data, and you've got the capabilities of things like LSR or GSR, and having that global reach or that local repositories, for the object storage. So you can start to control by policies. You can write into this country, but you're not allowed to go to this country, and you're not allowed to go to that one, and Cloud does give you that to a certain element, but also then, you have to step back into, maybe the sorts of things that-- - So does that make Cloud Orchestrator more valuable, or has it still got more work to do? Because under what Adam was saying, is that the point and click, is a great way to provision, right?

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We have Deepak Bharadwaj joining us. He is the General Manager of HR Business Unit at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Deepak. >> My pleasure, glad to be here. >> Good to see you again. >> Likewise. >> So we know that ServiceNow is expanding beyond IT, and HR is a huge business opportunity. Describe for our viewers how you view your role, and how you see HR in the modern organization. >> Yeah, that's a great question, so what we are trying to do, really, is help our customers' HR organizations provide their employees with what I call the Google Maps for their employee journey. So if you think about Google Maps, and what it has done in terms of the transformation of the travel journey, it provides you proactively with the guidance that you need as you make your way. And so if you think about the employee journey, it could be long in an organization, it could be short, but they all have these moments that matter, whether they are personal, whether they are professional. So when you think about personal moments, that could be birth of a baby, I changed my address, I got married, things like that. It could be professional. If I'm a manager, I want to promote someone. If I'm a new hire, I'm being onboarded. So how do we help guide these employees through each of these moments that matter in that journey? And why that's important is because that's when employees need their organization's support the most, and so, if you don't get that right, then it starts to have an impact on everything from productivity and engagement, and eventually that starts to impact customer satisfactions, right? So if you really think about happy employees equals happy customers, you can really bring it back to things like employment brand, productivity, engagement, and really where the rubber meets the road and where things could fall apart is during these moments that matter. So what we do is we help HR departments manage that, provide the proactive guidance to these employees, provide high touch help when they need it because not everything can be automated, right? You might order a Starbucks on your app, but sometimes you just want to go and walk up and talk to the barista. And so we want to make sure that we can provide flexibility to our customers in being able to manage how they interact, how employees interact with these HR departments and make them feel like they've got the peace of mind, get the emotion and the stress out of these moments that matter, and get them back into what they are doing best, which is their day-to-day job. >> You said that companies are investing in, you were talking about investing in employee, in customer success, but that's really about investing in employee success because happier employees lead to happier customers. >> Deepak: Absolutely. >> They're happier to come to work. >> Deepak: Yep. >> Do companies get it? Do companies get that? >> I think they do. They get it at a philosophical level, it makes sense. I think where companies struggle with is they are trying to figure out how do they make that linkage happen. And the reality is there's no silver bullet. It's not a, you fix this one thing over here, and that's going to make an impact. And so our approach is, while there may be many other things that you need to address, right? What we focus on really is making sure that we give this employee that guidance, that help, when they need it the most because we believe that that's where things could fall apart very easily. But, on the other hand, if you actually take care of them during those moments that matter, that represents a great opportunity to differentiate themselves and create what we call competitive differentiation, right? In fact, the topic of my keynote this morning was how employee experience creates competitive differentiation. And that's what we are here to enable. >> You guys talk a lot about the HR onboarding experience. You got to get a desk. You got to get a badge. You got to sign up on this portal, that portal, and it's just a slow and somewhat painful, not really productive period in an employee's life. When I think, and you and I talked about this at headquarters. When I think about how I interact with Netflix, and Fred Levy talks about this all the time, bringing that consumer experience to the enterprise. I don't talk to Netflix's sales department or marketing department or customer service department. I just interact with Netflix. I'd like to interact with HR the same way. I believe that's what you're trying to do. Is that a reality, can that happen in our lifetimes? Is it happening today? >> Absolutely, why not, right? We've got the technology, for sure. It is a very well-known pain point. Everybody knows this pain exists. I think where we are in terms of maturity of the market for these types of solutions is trying to figure out, well, who owns this problem. So this is a very distributed problem. It's across the enterprise. And anything across the enterprise, we at ServiceNow do very well. But a lot of times, it also means that we have to go and make the case, or help our champions make the case, with many departments. So, in this case, you need to get IT on board, and facilities on board. Obviously, HR has to be on board. And there's a number of departments that have to come together. And so we still have to figure out who owns this problem, who owns the budget, how are we planning to roll this out, can we do this in a phased manner. And that's where we are today in terms of its maturity, but at this point, we launched the product last year, right? We had customers that were creating bespoke solutions before that. We productized it, we launched Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions last year at Knowledge, in fact. And we've seen, we're starting to see, the early customers starting to implement, based again on the foundation of case and knowledge management. You know, start there, get your unstructured interactions more structured. And then eventually start to automate the things that are going to make that difference, especially when they start to cut across these multiple departments. >> I know we ask you this all the time, but for our viewers who aren't as familiar with what you guys are doing in HR, if I just brought in a Workday or a SuccessFactors, or I'm a PeopleSoft customer, why do I need ServiceNow? What do you guys do? We talked to John Donahoe about, you guys are a platform of platforms, but explain that, please. >> Sure, we absolutely, and maybe I'll go back to the Google Maps metaphor. The way I think about this is, you know in my mind, Workday, you can think about them as a highway system. You have to drive on them. Yes, it's got signage, and you need to know what exits to take, right? So, to me, Workday has a good user interface, if you will. But a lot of times what employees are looking for is, where do I go? Where do I begin? What's the policy? What's the process? And so that's where the Google Maps equivalent comes in. And these two go hand in hand. And they're extremely complementary. And you just cannot imagine going out there without a maps application these days. And in fact, my, where I feel that things have truly transformed is this is not just when I don't know the way to get somewhere. You're using this for every trip now. When I go home every day after work, I'm using Google Maps. Whether I know it or not, it turns on and it tells me, oh, you're headed home, and it's going to take you 35 minutes to get home. And I didn't ask it anything. But I'm using Google Maps every day for a route that is well-traveled because I know that if there is a traffic backup, it's going to let me know. >> Dave: Police ahead. (laughing) Or whatever. >> Yeah, and so I think that's where we are different from systems that are extremely important for, you know, managing our core data, core business processes, talent management, workforce management. I mean, there are systems that do that, do that very effectively, but we are really trying to provide that guidance, especially when what you're trying to get done involves multiple departments, and a number of times, multiple systems, even within HR. >> So when you're thinking about, when you're talking to customers, what are their, what are they telling you about their biggest pain points? And then what is your, if you have any sort of overarching advice for these HR practitioners, what is it? >> That's a good question. So, we engage with customers typically three different ways. They're all related, but typically our engagement starts off either because we are talking to someone that runs shared services, and what they're trying to do is bring order to how employees are interacting with HR. And typically they will go through some sort of organizational change. They'll setup a shared services organization, which basically means that becomes a single entry point for employees to go to, and, in that case, really, the pain point is too many unstructured interactions, and they may have no technology or they may have technology that is inadequate. And we bring a method to that madness, if you will. We help them structure those interactions and help them provide the right type of support to these employees. The other way we engage with customers is they're going through a full-blown HR transformation, and they've decided that technology is going to be a big piece of their transformation. And as they are looking to move everything to the cloud, for example, we start to talk about how the interaction aspect of employees still needs to be managed. And you cannot ignore that. You cannot just move your systems to the cloud and then just hope that employees will figure this out themselves, right? Because, again, it's not about the user interface, it's about the entire end-to-end experience. So that's the other pain point that we help solve for them, in the context of a cloud-based application or set of applications, how do you make sure that they know what they need to do. And then the third piece is, it's usually a CHRO type conversation, where they are really starting to make this association between happy customers means happy employees, and so they are trying to, they have several strategic initiatives then that are on a C Suite level, trying to find out, okay, what does that really mean, and they're trying to drive great employee experiences. And so they're working top down. As part of that, they may end up with a shared services set up to manage that. They may end up with moving systems to the cloud. But it's a different angle, and they are really thinking about the holistic end-to-end experience for that employee, and what they're going to feel, how does that impact employment brand, so kind of higher order benefits that they're trying to accomplish. But ultimately, we make the HR department much more effective and efficient, and we make it very, very easy for the employee. That's what we end up doing. >> You guys completed some research with chief human resource officers. >> Deepak: Yeah, the CHRO Point of View Study. >> 500, I think, in the study? >> Deepak: Yeah, absolutely. >> Tell us about the study, the findings, what'd you learn? >> Yeah, so this was a study that was done recently. 500 CHROs and HR leaders that we studied. I think the number one thing that popped out for me was that the CHROs are thinking of their role as not someone that is managing talent, management processes, and people data and things like that. That's obviously very important and that's been the focus. But as those disciplines mature, the technologies that manage that mature, what's happening is that they're focusing towards how to create these great experiences. How to leverage digital technologies and create what we call consumerized experiences, especially during these moments that matter. So when they are thinking about their employee population, they are looking at where do these breakdowns happen? This is where, you know, things are likely to snap, quite literally, right? Employees can get angry, frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed out. This is very, you know, intrinsic, you know, it's from the gut. And so, that's where your employment brand starts to take a dip, and that ends up on Glassdoor. That will end up with those employees speaking with a friend, and that starts to directly impact employment brand. So they're starting to focus on these moments that matter. And then I think what they're trying to do is also develop digital proficiency. One of the things that came out of the study is how can CHROs be the change agent when it comes to digital transformation so that this just doesn't have to come from IT. Doesn't have to come from a different line of business. HR can manage and guide their own destiny. Obviously, IT is going to be involved. But how can HR be more and more in the driver's seat, become more digitally proficient? And we see that in our customer base. We've got a number of customers where HR deployed ServiceNow first, and really set the bar for the other departments to follow. But ultimately, we absolutely believe that every department should be on the same platform because that's where you get the economies of scope, if you will, in terms of solutions to these problems. >> What can you tell us about your business? How are you guys doing? Couple years now since you've launched this product. How's it going? >> Well, it couldn't be better. As John mentioned in our earnings column last quarter, it was last month actually, we had six million dollar plus ACV deals, just for HR, right? And that's just in one quarter, so. That starts to show you how the business is really picking up. We have hundreds of customers now using us for HR. 80% of them are off our customer bases live. In fact, we had a customer in my keynote, they did a global rollout, and they took 14 weeks to complete that global rollout. So the time to value is extremely fast, and that's one of the things that really makes it, you know, a solution that our buyers are attracted to. But, you know, the business is doing very well. Lot of interest from organizations that are all sizes, really. You know, you look at thousand person organizations. We are selling to hundreds of thousand person organizations. We're selling globally, in all geographies. We are selling to all verticals. And, you know, it's just great to see the business take off. >> Rebecca: Great, well, Deepak, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, and love being here. And thank you for having me. >> Dave: Awesome seeing you again, thanks. >> Rebecca: We can't wait to see you again next year. >> Likewise, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more just after this. (upbeat music)