(vibrant music) >> Everybody welcome to the special CUBE conversation here at the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Dayna Rothman, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. >> So you guys have a lot of action going on. >> Yes. >> A lot of funding, new CEO, a very successful KubeCon part of the CNCF, we saw each other there. The space is out of control right now. The growth is amazing. >> Yes. >> Amazon reinvent two weeks before in Vegas, packed. >> There's been a lot going on, geez. >> Talk about Mesosphere. You guys got some news and momentum. Talk about the momentum. >> Yeah, we've had a ton of momentum. We got 126 million in funding about eight months ago, or so, a little bit before I joined. I joined five, six months ago. Things have really kicked off in the space. Obviously, the space has gone crazy with everything around Kubernetes and all the different acquisitions and just almost crossing the chasm into some of those later adopters now, which has been really, really great for us. After the funding and hiring on a lot of seasoned executives, we're really taking marketing to the next place, taking what we're doing with product to the next phase, so it's been a great ride so far. >> Yeah, we've had a chance to interview you guys a lot over the years from OpenStack and then as the Cloud Native moves into the mainstream. It's interesting. The tech chops are solid, great company DNA, but it's interesting. You go back a year and a half or two years ago and say the word Kubernete, would be like, what language are you speaking? >> Yeah. >> Now, you see it in Forbes, see it everywhere. Kubernetes has risen to mainstream. Amazon Cloud, Google, Microsoft, they're all growing. Kubernetes is like a core, major generational thing in the tech world. You're new. >> Yes. >> What do you think about Kubernetes? Do you look at this, wow, what is Kubernetes? How did you get attracted to Mesosphere and what do you think about all this? >> Yeah, the funny thing about, just a Kubernetes story and me, I guess. A couple companies ago, working for MarTech company, I did have a boss that actually came from this space and I distinctly remember him talking about Kubernetes at that time and, coming from a different space, I just had like, what are you even talking about? He was going to KubeCon in the early days. So, I was actually familiar with it. Then, how I got attracted to Mesosphere and this space, I'd been at MarTech for a decade and really looking just to do something else and who's doing something really innovative, where's a different space that I can go in that's really growing. MarTech and SalesTech, a lot of these little players right now and nobody's really innovating. Actually, with Mesosphere, my husband actually works there as well and he started about a year and a half ago and I had spoken to the executive team several times about just marketing, best practices and marketing leadership, revenue and attribution, and the more I spoke to them, the more interested I got in the company, and then this role was available and it was just a great fit, plus I knew some of the ins and outs already just from having that connection to Mesosphere in the first place. >> Was it just saying too, you mentioned MarTech. We've been following that space for a long time. We actually got to see how this works with the first cloud before Cloud was a cloud. MarTech was very Cloud-oriented from day one. You think about what that was, self-service, lot of data issues, lot of applications that had real value, 'cause money's there. You got leads and all kinds of marketing activity, so MarTech has that almost cloud-first DNA to begin with and you come from that. Now when you come over to the Cloud Native, you're seeing the developer world building a whole 'nother generation of what looks like many industries that have that same characteristics, self-service, large scale, data. These are the top conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, interesting connection that you have that background. So when you come into this world and you see all these developers building out this application layer, CICD pipelining, and then below Kubernetes, you got all this tech, where are the opportunities? What's the value proposition from Mesosphere? What are you guys attacking? Who's your buyer? Are they developers, are they going to be businesses? Take a minute to explain that. >> A couple of different things to address some of your points. As far as our buyers and where the space is going, I think where we're really strong is really having that enterprise DNA where we can take a lot of this tech and a lot of these open-source projects and really make them enterprise ready so that companies that are much bigger and have all these security regulations and red tape can actually leverage them so that they can continue innovating. As we grow, our buyers are also evolving, from, in the earlier days, mostly developers, engineers, more of that technical crowd, but now we're coming across a lot more executive level folks. We're talking to the CIOs, the CTOs, the business users where we have to shift a little bit and have more of that business use case. The other thing is really that we're getting past the point of the really early adopters. We have customers that have been with us for awhile that are very innovative, Silicon Valley companies, and now we're seeing different industries. We have a lot of automotive clients, finance, manufacturings, some of these older industries that want to adopt technology like Kubernetes, but they don't know how to fit it into what their organization needs and wants from the IT department. >> So there's a lot of education involved, probably. >> I would imagine. >> Yes. >> Value creates other customers. Okay, I've got all these workloads. I see all the early adopters and the web-scale guys. We all live around here. We know all the Ubers and everyone else out there. Lift, what a great case study when you read those guys. But the mainstreamed America kind of companies that have data sets and are going to go to Cloud have to move these workloads around. Are they coming to you guys for specific help? Are they saying, teach us how to do it? What are the specific conversations that you guys have with those customers? >> Sure. Sometimes they come to us with a specific project, but the education piece I think is really big for us to get to the next level on what we're trying to do. That's where what I'm building out in the marketing team is going to be really powerful, so that instead of people coming to us on a project basis, we're educating some of these enterprise companies on how they can leverage it, what they should be thinking about, how they can make that transformation to more of a cloud-like environment and what they need to think about. That's a big part of the strategy going forward, is that we want to get out there as educators, as thought leaders in the space so that we can get in front of some of these folks that maybe have heard of Kubernetes or are thinking about it but don't quite understand what it is and how it fits into their business. We do, though, get several questions on just, hey, I'm interested in CICD, what is it, or what is this Kubernetes, can you guys help us? That's where we're jumping in. >> I want to ask you a question about the B2Bs and the BI space because one of the things I think is really interesting is you start to see the mainstream tech press go, whoa, Enterprise is hot, consumer's not. It tends to have these cycles and when you start to see companies like Mesosphere going to the next level, they're targeting customers in mainstream enterprise. They have to up their game and get on the marketing side. You're hired to do that. What's your strategy? Is it fill the pipeline, is it more educational, build more event, evangelism, localization, is it global? Take us through your vision of what's next level for Mesosphere. >> I think definitely all of those things and one of the most important things for me is, when I came on board, it was really, from an operational perspective, making sure that our marketing department is ready for scale in that we have all the things that we need in order to generate those leads and accelerate them through the pipeline and that we're really partnering with the sales team, so when I think about marketing, it's not just top funnel region, it's like what are the different programs that we're doing in the middle of the funnel to accelerate opportunities to help close deals and that's where we actually create different campaigns to serve some of the middle of the funnel functions. Content is a big piece of my strategy. I come from a content marketing background. I ran content marketing at Marketo for several years pre IPO into post and I really created the content engine there. So I've seen the value of thought leadership content, creating content for the different levels of the buyer journey, so that's a big focus for my team and then building that out with different multi-channel campaigns. Events are huge for us. I love events and we do big scale conferences and ancillary events around the conferences and then we also have a very active field marketing program where we're going into the regions and doing these smaller executive events that are very high-touch. So, it's really like all the different pieces. Right now, we're working on brand, we're working on look and feel, we'll redo the website, so we have everything. >> You're busy. >> Very. (laughs) >> You look great. >> Well, I'm going on. >> You look like you're not stressed at all. You look really relaxed. >> No. >> I want to ask you a question, 'cause you're on the cutting edge, you've got a great background. I love the MarTech. I've always said MarTech never really lived up to its promise because Cloud changed the game, but I still think MarTech will be huge, because with Cloud-scale and data driven strategies, I think it's going to be explosive even further than what we've seen, but there's been a lot of venture backing as Marketo has been successful, just recently bought by Adobe, but as you look at the digital landscape, you mentioned events, what's your thoughts on digital and physical events, 'cause you mentioned high-touch events, spectrum of activities you're deploying, you got physical events which are turning out to be quite fantastic, Face-to-Face is intimate. There's a lot of networking, and digital. How do you bring the event physical world with the digital. How do you view that as a marketer? We combine them, especially for the bigger event campaigns, so whether it's a trade show booth or an ancillary event around a trade show, like a very large party or something like that, we'll have a whole digital promotional strategy around that that includes, maybe we'll create a micro-site, we have ads that are targeted to people that we think that are going to attend these events, we'll do paid programs, other paid channels to drive attendance and to generate that visibility, so I really like to combine them and also email and nurturing is a big part of the strategy as well but it's important to have that online and offline presence and they should map to each other. >> It's interesting, we're seeing a trend, through theCUBE I've been to a lot of events where people want the digital experience to map to what's it like onsite; reputation, work with good people, have that kind of vibe, and it's evolving and search marketing has always been effective. Email marketing is out there, that's tried and true ways to fill the top of the funnel. Is there new techniques that you see coming that marketers should be aware of? You have that history with MarTech. You've seen where it's been and where it's going. What's a new hot area that you're watching that's evolving in real time, because we're go to a web 3.0 where the users have different expectations. It's not just email blasts anymore, although that's one mechanism. What's the new thing? What are you looking at? >> It's this like a new-old thing, I guess, (laughs) but comp-based marketing is something a lot of marketers are getting into right now and it's certainly a hot trend and a hot topic and it's really, I guess, an older way of thinking about marketing instead of that very wide top funnel region where you're just trying to get just thousands of people into your funnel and doing different things, you have your set key account list that you're going after, that your company and your reps and marketing all agree on and you're doing very targeted campaigns to those specific accounts, so we've been doing some really interesting things with different ad platforms. They have ad platforms now where you can actually target on an account by account basis, based on IP address and a lot of other attributes, and you can actually do account-based nurturing through ads, which is very interesting. I can have an ad that specifically calls out the company that only that company sees. Direct mail is actually also a pretty big piece of this, which again, is an older thing. Not direct mail like a little postcard you get, but like a dimensional mailer for an executive >> It's not a spray and pray, very targeted. >> No, it's very targeted. >> Talk about the dynamic, because you're now getting into what we're seeing as a trend where it's not just the marketing person, hey where are my Glengarry leads, or where are the leads, the leads aren't good enough, always that finger-pointing that's tended to go on traditionally, and I may be oversimplifying it, but-- >> It still happens. (laughs) >> The partnering with sales becomes even more critical because you have a lot of surface area in your marketing mix. That's not going away, you mentioned those variety of things, but tightening it up with sales and sales enablement seems to be a trend in marketing in general with data-driven things, because now you can measure everything. Now, it's like, what do you measure? So, having a tighter coupling with sales is a key thing. Talk about that dynamic and how it's changing and what you guys are doing. >> Being really tightly coupled with the sales development team and the sales team is a super important part of our strategy. Even when I think of what our goals are as a marketing organization, it's a lot later in the funnel than I think, historically, marketers have been measured. When I'm reporting out on performance, I report out on the entire funnel. I look at conversion rates for every single stage. Marketing is measured on pipeline and revenue and because of that reason, that requires a very tight coupling with the sales department, understanding who they're going after, what's working, what's not and where people are in the sales cycle so that marketing can jump in and it really assists them. It's not like a who gets credit for what type of situation. It's like we're all moving towards the same goal, so different things that we do, and I think attribution and measurement really helps quite a bit with this, is we can measure what campaign works for different regions. We know what campaigns are good for sourcing people, what campaigns are good for accelerating somebody from a meeting to an op. We can get very granular with topics, channels, campaign types and even accounts, looking at account engagement, so that information is really powerful when you partner with an AE and go at it together. We do a lot of later-stage field events as well, where we're going after key executives in open opportunities and doing very high-end dinners or maybe we're doing a track day or something like that. >> It's interesting because the world's changing from the, again, old to new, is interesting. I love how you put that, because the old way was big end budget, throw it out there, get the reach, and then now it's much more targeted, much more tactical. Still the same strategic objectives, but then cut up into more tactical programs. Is that a challenge for some? Just while you're here, your insight is so amazing. Other marketers that aren't as savvy as you, try to tackle this, what's your advice to them when you start thinking about that, because I'm sure you get asked all the time, how do I tackle this new world? How do you advise friends and colleagues in the industry when they say, I've got to move from the 50/50 ad spin where I don't know where it's being measured, it's a big budget, big ad agency, I want to take those dollars and deploy them into what looks like programs that used to have smaller budgets but in totality can be effective? What's your advice? >> I think it's a hard jump for a lot of marketers. A lot of marketers that I've come in contact with do have that, even if it's not like that big ad budget mentality, it's like that, oh we're responsible for generating leads, and that's kind of where it ends, and you talk impressions in those types of metrics. I think in order to really survive as a marketer these days, you have to move to that next level where you're measuring things and you're really thinking about that full funnel. The advice that I give to a lot of high-end executive teams is to start measuring your marketing department, your VP, your CMO on later stage metrics so that potentially their comp, if it's a bonus or whatever, that it's aligned to the sales team and that we're looking at pipeline and revenue instead of leads generated or impressions or other things like that. >> So real conversion. >> Yeah, just a little bit of a forcing function to get folks there and that's what I do with my team when we look at performance. >> Well Dayna, you're a real pro. Looking forward to having more conversations. I love the MarTech background that you have. I think Cloud Native is essentially going to have, as a major feature, MarTech kind of things. Data, content, analysis, real time, full measurement across multiple spectrums. That's the premise of Cloud, so love to follow up with you. Final topic area is Mesosphere. As you guys go next level, got some big funding, new CEO, what's the positioning, what's the value statement, how are you guys posturing to the marketplace? >> Really focusing on that, how these leader adopters are able to have these enterprise standards by having the flexibility of what some of these different technologies and platforms are able to give these companies. We're definitely focusing a lot on innovating through IOT and we're doing some really cool projects with customers on how they can use our platform for those types of projects and really, from a Kupernetes perspective, we're continuing to work on how we can optimize and drive our value proposition there. Then, again, thinking more in that Cloud-like way, how can we continue pushing the envelope in that Cloud-like experience for our own platform and software. >> Takeaway for you when you look at Amazon reinvent, which was a couple weeks ago and then KubeCon CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation event in Seattle just last week. What was your big takeaway? If you had to look back and zoom out and go on the balcony and look at the stage of the industry, what was your takeaway? What was your personal takeaway? What anecdotal things popped out at you? What was the learnings that you saw in those two events? What's happening? >> I think, again, as time goes, I think a lot of the themes I've been talking about. Especially at KubeCon with 8000 people, they were sold out way before the event. We were actually very surprised that they sold out. We weren't prepared for that 'cause we still had to purchase a bunch of additional tickets, but I think just the popularity of some of these technologies and the business folks and the executives that are attending these events, it is starting to move more towards that enterprise. How can we adopt this stuff for the enterprise? For both events, for me that was a key takeaway. When you're looking at the different vendors, even on the expo floor, what are they talking about, what are they trying to do? Then the attendance at these events and even a lot of the talks were around bringing this stuff to the next level, having more of that cloud-like experience for the enterprise and having those best practices in there. >> As the serious marketer that you are, what was your impression of the role the community plays, because Mesosphere has a great position in the community. They've been a great steward in the community, have a great reputation. The role of the community now as part of the whole marketing production system in and of itself. Reputation, referrals, this is a big part of it. This is a dynamic. Your thoughts on role of the community in marketing in these new areas. >> Role of the community is huge. You need the community on your side in order to grow the business, because those are the folks that are going to evangelize. Those are where the influencers are coming from. For me, as I've gotten into this space, it's really been trying to understand who these people are, what they're interested in, how we can provide value, how we can provide fun, what are the ways we can partner with the community and approach it in more of like a humanistic way, so that's what we've been doing a lot of work, in just trying to get to know the community and creating marketing that is effective and an assistance to them as well. >> One that adds value is always, it's like an upstream project. You create value, you get respected for it, as long as you're not trying to overplay your hand. I do want to get your thoughts on reaction to KubeCon. I thought one of the things that happened there, besides theCUBE being there, of course, we were there from the beginning, was, you guys stole the show at Mesosphere. You had Ice Cube perform, and that was the buzz of the show. Talk about what happened, what was the response, Ice Cube performed, it was great reviews, saw it on Twitter. What was that all about? Share some stories. >> I thought, when we were trying to plan KubeCon, and how can we really, my goal was, I want to take over the show and really generate that buzz. Again, a big piece of that is the community and trying to think of, what can we do for the community that's going to get them excited. Picking an artist is a challenge, right? It's got to hit all these different goals, like you've got to pick somebody that's not crazy millions of dollars, you have to pick somebody that people are really familiar with, you have to pick somebody that most people like that's still relevant. So I think choosing Ice Cube was an important piece of that. Then, that it was just, to me, having come from the MarTech space and the sales-type space, I know what some of these huge, impactful parties and side events can have on a brand and that space is very, that happens a lot, and I've done that in several companies. I don't think it's really happening as much in this space from my experience so far, >> That KubeCon first and that was a big, big production. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What was the feedback? Were you happy with the results, 'cause I thought it was fantastic. >> It was great. We got fantastic feedback. I knew it would be, when we launched it, a very new thing, so it created a lot of buzz, a lot of chatter, could be controversial, which I was prepared for and I thought would be good to start that conversation, but at the event, it was just incredible. We had a completely packed house. Everyone was so excited to be there. We had great reactions on Twitter and I think that the community was just really happy to have that place where we can all come together and have a great time and that enabled us to put our brand out there as, so when people think of Mesosphere, they'll remember that event, so it's been incredibly successful. >> The Ice Cube, great job. Okay, I want to get your thoughts, 2019, what's going to happen for you in 2019? What can we expect from Mesosphere? >> We can definitely expect some great product innovations, different things we're working on, especially with the funding, and a new CEO. We're definitely looking to, we're going to take the brand into the next level. I think you're going to see us a lot more. I'm thinking through a potential, kind of our own user conference in San Francisco for next year, where we'll do a couple of days. Multi-track, thought leadership, a bigger production, so that's something that's exciting. We've got a lot of great programs planned for 2019. >> Awesome. Well, congratulations on a great event at KubeCon with Ice Cube and all of the successful momentum at Mesosphere. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Dayna Rothman here, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere, turning up the heat in the marketing, bringing Mesosphere to the next level. A lot of momentum. The industry's on fire, it's just an amazing time in Cloud Native. This is theCUBE covering every day in Cloud Native here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)

(vibrant music) >> Everybody welcome to the special CUBE conversation here at the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Dayna Rothman, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. >> So you guys have a lot of action going on. >> Yes. >> A lot of funding, new CEO, a very successful CubeCon part of the CNCF, we saw each other there. The space is out of control right now. The growth is amazing. >> Yes. >> Amazon reinvent two weeks before in Vegas, packed. >> There's been a lot going on, geez. >> Talk about Mesosphere. You guys got some news and momentum. Talk about the momentum. >> Yeah, we've had a ton of momentum. We got 126 million in funding about eight months ago, or so, a little bit before I joined. I joined five, six months ago. Things have really kicked off in the space. Obviously, the space has gone crazy with everything around Kubernetes and all the different acquisitions and just almost crossing the chasm into some of those later adopters now, which has been really, really great for us. After the funding and hiring on a lot of seasoned executives, we're really taking marketing to the next place, taking what we're doing with product to the next phase, so it's been a great ride so far. >> Yeah, we've had a chance to interview you guys a lot over the years from OpenStack and then as the Cloud Native moves into the mainstream. It's interesting. The tech chops are solid, great company DNA, but it's interesting. You go back a year and a half or two years ago and say the word Kubernete, would be like, what language are you speaking? >> Yeah. >> Now, you see it in Forbes, see it everywhere. Kubernetes has risen to mainstream. Amazon Cloud, Google, Microsoft, they're all growing. Kubernetes is like a core, major generational thing in the tech world. You're new. >> Yes. >> What do you think about Kubernetes? Do you look at this, wow, what is Kubernetes? How did you get attracted to Mesosphere and what do you think about all this? >> Yeah, the funny thing about, just a Kubernetes story and me, I guess. A couple companies ago, working for MarTech company, I did have a boss that actually came from this space and I distinctly remember him talking about Kubernetes at that time and, coming from a different space, I just had like, what are you even talking about? He was going to CubeCon in the early days. So, I was actually familiar with it. Then, how I got attracted to Mesosphere and this space, I'd been at MarTech for a decade and really looking just to do something else and who's doing something really innovative, where's a different space that I can go in that's really growing. MarTech and SalesTech, a lot of these little players right now and nobody's really innovating. Actually, with Mesosphere, my husband actually works there as well and he started about a year and a half ago and I had spoken to the executive team several times about just marketing, best practices and marketing leadership, revenue and attribution, and the more I spoke to them, the more interested I got in the company, and then this role was available and it was just a great fit, plus I knew some of the ins and outs already just from having that connection to Mesosphere in the first place. >> Was it just saying too, you mentioned MarTech. We've been following that space for a long time. We actually got to see how this works with the first cloud before Cloud was a cloud. MarTech was very Cloud-oriented from day one. You think about what that was, self-service, lot of data issues, lot of applications that had real value, 'cause money's there. You got leads and all kinds of marketing activity, so MarTech has that almost cloud-first DNA to begin with and you come from that. Now when you come over to the Cloud Native, you're seeing the developer world building a whole 'nother generation of what looks like many industries that have that same characteristics, self-service, large scale, data. These are the top conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, interesting connection that you have that background. So when you come into this world and you see all these developers building out this application layer, CICD pipelining, and then below Kubernetes, you got all this tech, where are the opportunities? What's the value proposition from Mesosphere? What are you guys attacking? Who's your buyer? Are they developers, are they going to be businesses? Take a minute to explain that. >> A couple of different things to address some of your points. As far as our buyers and where the space is going, I think where we're really strong is really having that enterprise DNA where we can take a lot of this tech and a lot of these open-source projects and really make them enterprise ready so that companies that are much bigger and have all these security regulations and red tape can actually leverage them so that they can continue innovating. As we grow, our buyers are also evolving, from, in the earlier days, mostly developers, engineers, more of that technical crowd, but now we're coming across a lot more executive level folks. We're talking to the CIOs, the CTOs, the business users where we have to shift a little bit and have more of that business use case. The other thing is really that we're getting past the point of the really early adopters. We have customers that have been with us for awhile that are very innovative, Silicon Valley companies, and now we're seeing different industries. We have a lot of automotive clients, finance, manufacturings, some of these older industries that want to adopt technology like Kubernetes, but they don't know how to fit it into what their organization needs and wants from the IT department. >> So there's a lot of education involved, probably. >> I would imagine. >> Yes. >> Value creates other customers. Okay, I've got all these workloads. I see all the early adopters and the web-scale guys. We all live around here. We know all the Ubers and everyone else out there. Lift, what a great case study when you read those guys. But the mainstreamed America kind of companies that have data sets and are going to go to Cloud have to move these workloads around. Are they coming to you guys for specific help? Are they saying, teach us how to do it? What are the specific conversations that you guys have with those customers? >> Sure. Sometimes they come to us with a specific project, but the education piece I think is really big for us to get to the next level on what we're trying to do. That's where what I'm building out in the marketing team is going to be really powerful, so that instead of people coming to us on a project basis, we're educating some of these enterprise companies on how they can leverage it, what they should be thinking about, how they can make that transformation to more of a cloud-like environment and what they need to think about. That's a big part of the strategy going forward, is that we want to get out there as educators, as thought leaders in the space so that we can get in front of some of these folks that maybe have heard of Kubernetes or are thinking about it but don't quite understand what it is and how it fits into their business. We do, though, get several questions on just, hey, I'm interested in CICD, what is it, or what is this Kubernetes, can you guys help us? That's where we're jumping in. >> I want to ask you a question about the B2Bs and the BI space because one of the things I think is really interesting is you start to see the mainstream tech press go, whoa, Enterprise is hot, consumer's not. It tends to have these cycles and when you start to see companies like Mesosphere going to the next level, they're targeting customers in mainstream enterprise. They have to up their game and get on the marketing side. You're hired to do that. What's your strategy? Is it fill the pipeline, is it more educational, build more event, evangelism, localization, is it global? Take us through your vision of what's next level for Mesosphere. >> I think definitely all of those things and one of the most important things for me is, when I came on board, it was really, from an operational perspective, making sure that our marketing department is ready for scale in that we have all the things that we need in order to generate those leads and accelerate them through the pipeline and that we're really partnering with the sales team, so when I think about marketing, it's not just top funnel region, it's like what are the different programs that we're doing in the middle of the funnel to accelerate opportunities to help close deals and that's where we actually create different campaigns to serve some of the middle of the funnel functions. Content is a big piece of my strategy. I come from a content marketing background. I ran content marketing at Marketo for several years pre IPO into post and I really created the content engine there. So I've seen the value of thought leadership content, creating content for the different levels of the buyer journey, so that's a big focus for my team and then building that out with different multi-channel campaigns. Events are huge for us. I love events and we do big scale conferences and ancillary events around the conferences and then we also have a very active field marketing program where we're going into the regions and doing these smaller executive events that are very high-touch. So, it's really like all the different pieces. Right now, we're working on brand, we're working on look and feel, we'll redo the website, so we have everything. >> You're busy. >> Very. (laughs) >> You look great. >> Well, I'm going on. >> You look like you're not stressed at all. You look really relaxed. >> No. >> I want to ask you a question, 'cause you're on the cutting edge, you've got a great background. I love the MarTech. I've always said MarTech never really lived up to its promise because Cloud changed the game, but I still think MarTech will be huge, because with Cloud-scale and data driven strategies, I think it's going to be explosive even further than what we've seen, but there's been a lot of venture backing as Marketo has been successful, just recently bought by Adobe, but as you look at the digital landscape, you mentioned events, what's your thoughts on digital and physical events, 'cause you mentioned high-touch events, spectrum of activities you're deploying, you got physical events which are turning out to be quite fantastic, Face-to-Face is intimate. There's a lot of networking, and digital. How do you bring the event physical world with the digital. How do you view that as a marketer? We combine them, especially for the bigger event campaigns, so whether it's a trade show booth or an ancillary event around a trade show, like a very large party or something like that, we'll have a whole digital promotional strategy around that that includes, maybe we'll create a micro-site, we have ads that are targeted to people that we think that are going to attend these events, we'll do paid programs, other paid channels to drive attendance and to generate that visibility, so I really like to combine them and also email and nurturing is a big part of the strategy as well but it's important to have that online and offline presence and they should map to each other. >> It's interesting, we're seeing a trend, through theCUBE I've been to a lot of events where people want the digital experience to map to what's it like onsite; reputation, work with good people, have that kind of vibe, and it's evolving and search marketing has always been effective. Email marketing is out there, that's tried and true ways to fill the top of the funnel. Is there new techniques that you see coming that marketers should be aware of? You have that history with MarTech. You've seen where it's been and where it's going. What's a new hot area that you're watching that's evolving in real time, because we're go to a web 3.0 where the users have different expectations. It's not just email blasts anymore, although that's one mechanism. What's the new thing? What are you looking at? >> It's this like a new-old thing, I guess, (laughs) but comp-based marketing is something a lot of marketers are getting into right now and it's certainly a hot trend and a hot topic and it's really, I guess, an older way of thinking about marketing instead of that very wide top funnel region where you're just trying to get just thousands of people into your funnel and doing different things, you have your set key account list that you're going after, that your company and your reps and marketing all agree on and you're doing very targeted campaigns to those specific accounts, so we've been doing some really interesting things with different ad platforms. They have ad platforms now where you can actually target on an account by account basis, based on IP address and a lot of other attributes, and you can actually do account-based nurturing through ads, which is very interesting. I can have an ad that specifically calls out the company that only that company sees. Direct mail is actually also a pretty big piece of this, which again, is an older thing. Not direct mail like a little postcard you get, but like a dimensional mailer for an executive >> It's not a spray and pray, very targeted. >> No, it's very targeted. >> Talk about the dynamic, because you're now getting into what we're seeing as a trend where it's not just the marketing person, hey where are my Glengarry leads, or where are the leads, the leads aren't good enough, always that finger-pointing that's tended to go on traditionally, and I may be oversimplifying it, but-- >> It still happens. (laughs) >> The partnering with sales becomes even more critical because you have a lot of surface area in your marketing mix. That's not going away, you mentioned those variety of things, but tightening it up with sales and sales enablement seems to be a trend in marketing in general with data-driven things, because now you can measure everything. Now, it's like, what do you measure? So, having a tighter coupling with sales is a key thing. Talk about that dynamic and how it's changing and what you guys are doing. >> Being really tightly coupled with the sales development team and the sales team is a super important part of our strategy. Even when I think of what our goals are as a marketing organization, it's a lot later in the funnel than I think, historically, marketers have been measured. When I'm reporting out on performance, I report out on the entire funnel. I look at conversion rates for every single stage. Marketing is measured on pipeline and revenue and because of that reason, that requires a very tight coupling with the sales department, understanding who they're going after, what's working, what's not and where people are in the sales cycle so that marketing can jump in and it really assists them. It's not like a who gets credit for what type of situation. It's like we're all moving towards the same goal, so different things that we do, and I think attribution and measurement really helps quite a bit with this, is we can measure what campaign works for different regions. We know what campaigns are good for sourcing people, what campaigns are good for accelerating somebody from a meeting to an op. We can get very granular with topics, channels, campaign types and even accounts, looking at account engagement, so that information is really powerful when you partner with an AE and go at it together. We do a lot of later-stage field events as well, where we're going after key executives in open opportunities and doing very high-end dinners or maybe we're doing a track day or something like that. >> It's interesting because the world's changing from the, again, old to new, is interesting. I love how you put that, because the old way was big end budget, throw it out there, get the reach, and then now it's much more targeted, much more tactical. Still the same strategic objectives, but then cut up into more tactical programs. Is that a challenge for some? Just while you're here, your insight is so amazing. Other marketers that aren't as savvy as you, try to tackle this, what's your advice to them when you start thinking about that, because I'm sure you get asked all the time, how do I tackle this new world? How do you advise friends and colleagues in the industry when they say, I've got to move from the 50/50 ad spin where I don't know where it's being measured, it's a big budget, big ad agency, I want to take those dollars and deploy them into what looks like programs that used to have smaller budgets but in totality can be effective? What's your advice? >> I think it's a hard jump for a lot of marketers. A lot of marketers that I've come in contact with do have that, even if it's not like that big ad budget mentality, it's like that, oh we're responsible for generating leads, and that's kind of where it ends, and you talk impressions in those types of metrics. I think in order to really survive as a marketer these days, you have to move to that next level where you're measuring things and you're really thinking about that full funnel. The advice that I give to a lot of high-end executive teams is to start measuring your marketing department, your VP, your CMO on later stage metrics so that potentially their comp, if it's a bonus or whatever, that it's aligned to the sales team and that we're looking at pipeline and revenue instead of leads generated or impressions or other things like that. >> So real conversion. >> Yeah, just a little bit of a forcing function to get folks there and that's what I do with my team when we look at performance. >> Well Dayna, you're a real pro. Looking forward to having more conversations. I love the MarTech background that you have. I think Cloud Native is essentially going to have, as a major feature, MarTech kind of things. Data, content, analysis, real time, full measurement across multiple spectrums. That's the premise of Cloud, so love to follow up with you. Final topic area is Mesosphere. As you guys go next level, got some big funding, new CEO, what's the positioning, what's the value statement, how are you guys posturing to the marketplace? >> Really focusing on that, how these leader adopters are able to have these enterprise standards by having the flexibility of what some of these different technologies and platforms are able to give these companies. We're definitely focusing a lot on innovating through IOT and we're doing some really cool projects with customers on how they can use our platform for those types of projects and really, from a Kupernetes perspective, we're continuing to work on how we can optimize and drive our value proposition there. Then, again, thinking more in that Cloud-like way, how can we continue pushing the envelope in that Cloud-like experience for our own platform and software. >> Takeaway for you when you look at Amazon reinvent, which was a couple weeks ago and then CubeCon CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation event in Seattle just last week. What was your big takeaway? If you had to look back and zoom out and go on the balcony and look at the stage of the industry, what was your takeaway? What was your personal takeaway? What anecdotal things popped out at you? What was the learnings that you saw in those two events? What's happening? >> I think, again, as time goes, I think a lot of the themes I've been talking about. Especially at CubeCon with 8000 people, they were sold out way before the event. We were actually very surprised that they sold out. We weren't prepared for that 'cause we still had to purchase a bunch of additional tickets, but I think just the popularity of some of these technologies and the business folks and the executives that are attending these events, it is starting to move more towards that enterprise. How can we adopt this stuff for the enterprise? For both events, for me that was a key takeaway. When you're looking at the different vendors, even on the expo floor, what are they talking about, what are they trying to do? Then the attendance at these events and even a lot of the talks were around bringing this stuff to the next level, having more of that cloud-like experience for the enterprise and having those best practices in there. >> As the serious marketer that you are, what was your impression of the role the community plays, because Mesosphere has a great position in the community. They've been a great steward in the community, have a great reputation. The role of the community now as part of the whole marketing production system in and of itself. Reputation, referrals, this is a big part of it. This is a dynamic. Your thoughts on role of the community in marketing in these new areas. >> Role of the community is huge. You need the community on your side in order to grow the business, because those are the folks that are going to evangelize. Those are where the influencers are coming from. For me, as I've gotten into this space, it's really been trying to understand who these people are, what they're interested in, how we can provide value, how we can provide fun, what are the ways we can partner with the community and approach it in more of like a humanistic way, so that's what we've been doing a lot of work, in just trying to get to know the community and creating marketing that is effective and an assistance to them as well. >> One that adds value is always, it's like an upstream project. You create value, you get respected for it, as long as you're not trying to overplay your hand. I do want to get your thoughts on reaction to CubeCon. I thought one of the things that happened there, besides theCUBE being there, of course, we were there from the beginning, was, you guys stole the show at Mesosphere. You had Ice Cube perform, and that was the buzz of the show. Talk about what happened, what was the response, Ice Cube performed, it was great reviews, saw it on Twitter. What was that all about? Share some stories. >> I thought, when we were trying to plan CubeCon, and how can we really, my goal was, I want to take over the show and really generate that buzz. Again, a big piece of that is the community and trying to think of, what can we do for the community that's going to get them excited. Picking an artist is a challenge, right? It's got to hit all these different goals, like you've got to pick somebody that's not crazy millions of dollars, you have to pick somebody that people are really familiar with, you have to pick somebody that most people like that's still relevant. So I think choosing Ice Cube was an important piece of that. Then, that it was just, to me, having come from the MarTech space and the sales-type space, I know what some of these huge, impactful parties and side events can have on a brand and that space is very, that happens a lot, and I've done that in several companies. I don't think it's really happening as much in this space from my experience so far, >> That CubeCon first and that was a big, big production. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What was the feedback? Were you happy with the results, 'cause I thought it was fantastic. >> It was great. We got fantastic feedback. I knew it would be, when we launched it, a very new thing, so it created a lot of buzz, a lot of chatter, could be controversial, which I was prepared for and I thought would be good to start that conversation, but at the event, it was just incredible. We had a completely packed house. Everyone was so excited to be there. We had great reactions on Twitter and I think that the community was just really happy to have that place where we can all come together and have a great time and that enabled us to put our brand out there as, so when people think of Mesosphere, they'll remember that event, so it's been incredibly successful. >> The Ice Cube, great job. Okay, I want to get your thoughts, 2019, what's going to happen for you in 2019? What can we expect from Mesosphere? >> We can definitely expect some great product innovations, different things we're working on, especially with the funding, and a new CEO. We're definitely looking to, we're going to take the brand into the next level. I think you're going to see us a lot more. I'm thinking through a potential, kind of our own user conference in San Francisco for next year, where we'll do a couple of days. Multi-track, thought leadership, a bigger production, so that's something that's exciting. We've got a lot of great programs planned for 2019. >> Awesome. Well, congratulations on a great event at CubeCon with Ice Cube and all of the successful momentum at Mesosphere. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Dayna Rothman here, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere, turning up the heat in the marketing, bringing Mesosphere to the next level. A lot of momentum. The industry's on fire, it's just an amazing time in Cloud Native. This is theCUBE covering every day in Cloud Native here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (techno beats) >> Hello everyone, welcome to SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, with flagship programming, we go out to the events, and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, my cohost this week at Oracle Modern Customer Experience, in Las Vegas. A lot going on in Las Vegas, at the NAB Show, down the street where the Cube is, also we're here, for the second year in a row at the Oracle Modern Customer Experience, #ModernCX. Tweet at us @theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris. Kicking off two days of wall-to-wall coverage, we have some amazing guests. We have the top executives at Oracle Marketing Cloud, as well as some of their customers, as well as some other guests in the industry. Peter, we've been covering this marketing cloud kind of, as part of the bigger picture of the systems of engagement that is growing out of cloud infrastructure and big data. There's really a collision going on between accelerating applications with infrastructure, powered by the cloud, powered by hybrid cloud, and data's at the center of the value proposition, and literally is the key point in all this. So, I want to get your thoughts, and we talked about this last year, what's different from last year to this year, with Oracle Marketing Customer Experience, from your perspective? >> Well, I think there's three things that are different, John. The first thing that's different is that, the reality of how difficult it is to integrate technology into the marketing function is setting in, in a lot of marketers. So, we're not hearing anymore comments or promises about how marketing expenditure is going to exceed IT expenditures for technology. So, there's a reality set in about, what does it really mean to incorporate technology in the working market? The second thing that's happening is AI. We're going to hear a lot about AI, we're going to hear a lot about these new ways of taking big data and making them more useful to the business, and that's going to have an enormous impact on marketing, for a variety of different reasons. When you talk about next best action, predicting customer experience, prognosticating value propositions, all those other things, AI is going to have a role to play. How fast it gets adopted, we'll see, but we're going to hear a lot about it. >> John: It's interesting, we always talk on the cube here, if you follow the Cube you know, we always kind of, always pontificate on this notion of horizontally-scalable, and we talked about it last year, but there's an era of specialization, that you need to have vertically-oriented into some of these industries. But what's interesting, Pete, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because I was commenting last year at the show that, marketing was always a silo, and Oracle has had a integration strategy that's been kind of horizontal, and the trends in cloud computing and data is horizontal-scalability, with value propositions differentiate at the applications So, this begs the question, what does that mean for marketing in a digital business? If you go digital all the way, from the beginning of the journey to the moment of truth to the customer, sales or conversion, it's all digital, marketing's in every piece of the equation along the way, and that's what Mark Hurd was saying yesterday. >> Peter: Well, customer engagement's in every piece of the equation along the way and then the question is, is marketing going to evolve to become primary in customer engagement? It's not going to be just your direct sales force, customers are going to move amongst different channels. We've heard a lot about on the channel, so, to what role, to what degree will marketing become primary? And the third point I was going to make, John, is related to this, and that is, one of the big changes between this year and last year, is that Oracle has really thrown the tiller over, and tacked towards the cloud. And it's going to be interesting to see whether or not the cloud customer experience story, or the marketing cloud customer experience story, in the cloud, is lining up with the rest of Oracle's cloud story. >> John: It's as with, Don Clien, from our team, who last night in the hallway conversations here, in the Mandalay Bay with the convention, that the conference is happening, it's interesting, we were talking about the role of platforms, and you can't see in the news these days, anything from Facebook's relative to fake news, to some of the killings on Facebook Live, to YouTube and moderating comments, these emergence of platforms has been a very interesting dynamic, but at the end of the day, content needs to have an authentic piece to it. So, you now blending in a marketing and conversion, with customers, we're living in a content world. I'm wearing a wearable, my content is my interface to wherever I am in real time. My experience at the rental car dealership, or wherever I'm at, is going to be all about, the content is not some siloed, "Hey, hello, buy this." It's everything is content-driven. >> Well everything is value-driven, right? And the question is, is the content going to be valuable? And if there's a big, going back to that first point, what's the big issue about marketing? We thought that if we just through technology, we could automate the same ways that marketing is already, always done stuff, but the reality is marketing does a lot of stuff that is not valuable to customers. It may be valuable to the organization or their ways, but it's not valuable to customers. And often it's really annoying, and so marketing has to decide, if in fact they are going to take a primary role in engagement across channel over time, as customers move amongst organizations, then they're going to have to start dedicating themselves to creating content that's valuable to the customer, in the form that the customer needs, when the customer needs it, where the customer needs it. And that's a challenge. >> And the engagement piece is critical, I love that angle, but let's take it to the next level. Every example of marketing cloud or any kind of digital experience use case has data in it. It's data-driven. Even Mark Hurd, on his keynote, talked about his experience at the rental car place, that's data-driven. You got to know, that's the CEO of Oracle. So, this is again, the data is at the center of this. It's flowing through all the apps, and has to be available, has to be real time, this is fundamental. >> Peter: And digital assets are data as well, and applications, when you go back to what computer science says, applications themselves are data. So, increasingly, it's all data. Customers want to be engaged digitally. They want to be able to take their digital experience, whatever channel, the data has to follow them. You have to anticipate what data you're going to generate in the form of content. You have to be able to capture data without annoying them. So, in many respects, John, this all comes down, the challenge for marketing is, how do we capture data without being annoying? How do we provision data in a way that's valuable, so that we increase the view of the brand. >> John: I want to put you on the spot, because I know marketing's a lot of different components to it, but one of the things that everyone in the industry is talking about, is the role that salesforce.com has taken in its SaaS cloud platform, vis-a-vis an app, where you just put your contacts in, and you manage your relationships, and how that's grown and shifted over to being a SaaS platform. And here's the question I want to ask, and get your thoughts on, and just riff here in real time. Back in the old days, analog sales needed a system to provide automation for those sales guys. Boom. Salesforce.com is born. Marketing would provide email marketing and content, here's a package of content, if you're interested, click on it and we'll get you more information. Marketing department sends those leads to the analog sales team. The leads aren't good enough, the leads are crap. Glengarry, Glen Ross kind of thing going on there. Now that's shifted with the digital fabric, end to end, from initiation to moment of truth. Digital. That kind of goes away. So, sales cloud and marketing cloud are blurring, yes or no, what're your thoughts on the role of sales kind of thing, and the marketing piece? >> Well, it all comes down to, and again this is one of the precepts of the whole notion of customer experience, it all comes down to the customer is on a journey to solve a problem, to generate some utility out of the purchase that they're making, whether it's a product or service. They go through discovery process, they go through a buying process, they go through a utilization process. All of that requires engagement. And so the data, and they way you provision your resources, to that customer has to fit naturally in the way the customer does stuff. So one of the reasons why this is blurring is because customers themselves are demanding that they be treated digitally in some coherent manner. Now, institutionally and organizationally, there's still a lot of tensions, as you said, between sales and marketing, and it's not enough to just say we're going to do a marketing cloud because there's marketing budgets, and we're going to do a sales cloud, because the sales budgets, and a product cloud because of product budgets, etc. This has to come together. We have to render this coherently in front of customers, or in front of businesses because businesses have to render themselves coherently in front of customers as they go through their journey. >> Great observation, I would just add that this notion of a platform is an indicator of where the market's going. Certainly we're seeing in the mainstream some things are being tweaked, and Facebook admitted in the New York Times that they're working on it. They're going to work on these things. But let's bring that platform, if what you say is true, which I believe it is, everything has to come together, because it's not one or the other, there's not mutually exclusive. Now, sales guys had the data from the old days, but now it's all digital, so the question is, that shifts the scales, because in the old days, marketing was to provide value to the organization, the enterprise itself, the business value of the enterprise, and that comes from selling something. >> Peter: Right, right, right, right. >> John: And so, to your value point, which I think that this market shifts the value to the marketing team because they have a broader perspective in that journey. Or have more touch points in the engagement of the customer. >> Peter: And that's key. The question is can they be the orchestrator of a coherent and holistic engagement strategy with a customer. >> John: So, I'm a CIO, I'm looking at a complete replatforming. I think that's a better approach than trying to take Salesforce and make it work over here, and if you look at Salesforce, they've done a bunch of different acquisitions, not always kind of tightly coupled, a little bit of awkwardness here, chatter, all these components. Oracle's taking a different approach, they're saying we're going to integrate all this stuff, and you pick and choose. I think, if I'm a CIO, I might want to take a more holistic view from initiation, to moment of truth with the customer, and the lifecycle that journey. There's more marketing touch points in there, so I'm probably designed that way, your thoughts. >> Peter: Well, so, it's interesting John. The whole CRM industry went through an extremely challenging birth. One of the biggest challenges is that, as you said, we used to be analog. Sales people would go on a call, they'd write up a trip report, they'd hand it to and administrator, and the administrator would do the data entry, and we'd get it into the system someway. But the minute you start automating that, now the sales guys are doing data entry. And if you talk to sales organizations today, one of the biggest problems is how much time are my folks doing data entry, how much time are my folks generating content for customers, how much time are they doing all these other things, and not selling, and that's an issue. So, when we think about where this is going to go, at the end of the day, Salesforce has done the best job of presenting CRM to the marketplace, for a variety of different reasons. But it still is a let's capture sales activity kind of a platform. The question is, are we actually going to get to a platform that is truly able to provide coherent, holistic value at the moment that the customer wants it, and that includes delivery. And I think Oracle has an opportunity in all of this. It's to actually utilize their various clouds, to provide a way of engaging customers across the entire journey, because they can do the discovery piece, they can do the sales piece, and they can also do digital products, and digital capabilities anyway, the delivery piece. >> Well, Peter Burris from Wikibon.com, head of research over there. Check out some of the work they're doing with the digital, role of the digital business and assets, digital experiences, they're all assets, whether it's content, engagement, or an experience that someone has, it's all a data asset, it's a digital asset, and that needs to be harnessed and looked at holistically in a way. You got some great research over at Wikibon.com, check it out. I'm John Furrier, here for two days at Oracle Modern Customer Experience Show. Should be great, really cutting edge stuff, really as the world replatforms in the cloud, content and experiences will be fundamental, and data's at the center of it. We'll bring you all the coverage here. We'll be right back with more great coverage after this short break. (techno beats)