(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering PagerDuty Summit '18. Now, here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, San Francisco. About a thousand people getting together talking about the evolution of PagerDuty. We're really excited to have Jennifer Tejada here, the CEO just coming off a terrific keynote. And I got to say congratulations on your recent round of funding that made all the news a week ago. It's great to see you. >> Thank you very much. It's great to see you again as always, Jeff. We love having theCUBE with us at Summit. >> Thank you, and I have to say we do hundreds of events over six years I've been doing this. I've never seen a summit picture in the keynote until the Summit. So, you got it worked in twice. I love the message really about taking the team to the top of the mountain, that moment of truth, and then you got to just go for it. You got to be prepared, you got to have the team, and at some point in time, you just got to go. >> Point 'em down. >> Yeah, so let's jump into it. So, big topic, here before it's been kind of DevOps, but you guys are moving beyond that. You're kind of taking this classic play, start as an application, move into a platform space. And you guys now with all these integration announcements, the announcements of BI, the growth obviously, the support from the funding that you just got shows that you guys are well on your way to take what was a pretty special purpose application and take it into a platform play that crosses a whole bunch of other applications. >> Yeah, I'd take it even one step further, we almost started out more like a consumer app. It was really an application built for engineers to make better use of their time on call. And frankly, not being woken up when they didn't need to be, right? >> Right. >> And so, everything about our first product was designed around what does a developer need, what does an Ops person need, what does that look like, et cetera? As opposed to being designed for the CIO, or the CTO, or the company. >> Right, right. >> Right. And I think that that user centricity, that user ethos has served us really well, because we start there. That's our starting point. Who's the community that is using our products and services? How is their role changing? How is their world changing? And what do they need from us? And that was really the foundation of the trust that we built to start to become truly an ecosystem. Because all those users started pushing their data to us. Their monitoring data from their APM environments, or the data from their ticketing platforms, or the data from their cloud services. And with that information comes the power to be able to really create context. >> Right, right. >> And now, with the aggregation of nearly 10 years of data coming from our responders, and how they behave when they're under pressure of the workflows, which ones work better, which ones don't work so well. And the events, the signals that all of technology and the internet of things throws off in realtime all the time. You bring that data together and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to it, and we really are putting ourselves in a position not only to be the platform that serves a realtime business, and orchestrates teams as sort of the platform for action, but importantly, becomes the trusted engagement for automation or engagement of autonomy. >> Right. >> For a fast-moving business in the future. >> Right, 'cause you talked about realtime and I just want to throw a couple of numbers out that you had from the keynote. 3.6 billion events, so it becomes apparent really fast-- >> So far this year. >> Right, even the people who are at the center of that, that's kind of hard to manage. So, you have to start using intelligence. You have to start to use business intelligence and artificial intelligence to help filter and help that person do their job much better. So, you guys are making a lot of plays there. And we see it all the time. It's not the BI vendors per se, it's the use of this technology in the background to make apps work better. >> And it's the fact that not only do we correlate the signals and turn them into intelligent insights, but we can then route those signals intelligently to the right people, and orchestrate the actual physical work. So, a lot of the technology community has been focused on just that, technology. And our focus is really on people and teams. How do you empower teams closest to the action, closest to where the proverbial stuff hits the fan. >> Right, right. >> I had to really exercise restraint there. To be in a position to make the best possible decision in those tiny micro-moments that matter. And the consumer, like used to wait maybe six minutes for a website to download. Now, if an app doesn't work perfectly in six seconds, maybe three seconds, you're gone. I walk out of the building in our office in San Francisco, and see our employees and they're toggling back and forth between ride sharing apps and food delivery apps, and Tinder, and whatever else is going on. And it's literally like in a couple of minutes, they're working through eight, nine applications at once. And if any one of those does not work the way it's supposed to, they're done. >> Right, right. >> They just move on. And it's one or two times before they'll delete that. >> Right. >> So, the technology community is now responsible for delivering the perfect brand experience digitally every time. And they've got to be empowered to do that with the right tools and services. >> And the expectation is set by the best. That's the funny thing, right? What was the best or cutting edge quickly becomes the expected norm. >> What is the most delightful thing that ever happened to me, well, that's what I want from you. >> Right. >> That is basically the way it works. >> Right, right. And you talked about trust, and trust is such an important part because one of the key pieces that you guys are enabling, you talked about it in your keynote, is letting the person at the front line in that moment of decision have the tools, and the data, and the authority to make the right call. And it's not a escalation up the food chain, waits, and some emails. It's really empowering that individual to get the right thing done. >> And that's a core tenet of DevOps culture. It's actually born and agile, in fact. But what's really interesting about it is it's the way companies need to be run now. If PagerDuty waited for me to make every big decision, we would be back where we were three years ago. >> Right. >> Right. And as a result of being able to empower our teams with great information, very clear understanding of our goals, and the timeframes we expect to achieve those goals, and then context as we progress through our journey to understand how we're doing against those goals, it gives them the power and the intelligence to make better decisions every moment when I obviously can't be there, or their leadership can't be there. And in fact, it means that the most important decisions are getting made where the person's closest to our end customer, the user. >> Right. >> And that makes a ton of sense to me. Even if it's not the way I was taught leadership, or taught to manage. >> Right, well, you clearly get out front and run those people down that big, giant mountain. >> Well, I just, you know-- >> Every time we meet-- >> I got to figure it out, man. >> I learned about Australia last time I saw you speak at the Girls in Tech thing. So, this is great. Another thing that you acknowledge in your keynote I want to get into is that tech people are imperfect. They are imperfect and that's kind of part of what the DevOps ethos is is that that's okay, we're just going to make it better today than it was yesterday. And I think Ray Kurzweil's keynote about exponential growth and just the power of compounding, which so many people miss out on. So, that's really where you're trying to help people solve problems. It isn't to big eureka moment, it's how do we learn, how do we get better, how do we make improvements? >> Well, and a lot of people in the valley talk about failing fast. In order for failing fast to have a benefit for a company, you not only have to be allowed to fail, it has to be okay when you fail, and there has to be an open transparent conversation about what you learned, what went wrong? And that has to be a blameless, high-empathy discussion or it doesn't work. If someone thinks they're going to get fired by marching you through all the details of their failure, they're never going to tell you the truth. So, when we think about incidents as they come up, or something breaking, not working the way it's supposed to, or a business initiative not turning out the way we thought it would, there has to be a blameless conversation so that everybody in that community learns, so we're better the next time around. And that's where the compounding benefits come. >> Right, right, to the whole team, in fact. I thought the quote, I've never seen that quote that you brought up today. Teamwork remains the ultimate competitive advantage because it's both so powerful and so rare. That is a really scary statement, but we see it all the time. In fact, that was in another keynote and there was a behaviorist talking about, how do we get everybody pulling in the same direction? And John also talked about that in terms of incident post-mortems and how do you make sure that you're learning and not just filing reports. >> Totally. >> So, you guys are right in the middle of that. >> I thought John captured it really well when he said, "It's not about the technology. "We spend all of our time monitoring "and talking about the technology. "It's about us. "And it's us that actually makes this technology great "and applies it so effectively to problems, "and challenges, and opportunities "in our world and in our lives." what's also interesting is Patrick Lencioni's paradigm around the first team. So, most employees come into a business and they think the most important world for me in this company is my team, the people in the team who I report to, a leader, and it's just us. Or for leaders, they say it's just the team that reports into me. Your first team is your peer group. Your first team is that, and by first team I mean the most important, highest priority, aligned organism that is going to drive massive change in a business, it's your peer group. It's the people who work across functions to help reduce friction in a business. >> And drive fast outcomes and great results, right? But most people naturally kind of hunker down into their core team and that's the beginning of the silo mentality. >> Right. >> Right. And so, one of the things I love about Patrick's book, and you're going to hear about that tomorrow onstage, is this idea of what it takes to be an ideal team player, to be humble, to be hungry like good is never good enough, and to be smart, to like constantly be learning, to really care deeply about how you continue to push the envelope to get better. >> Right. So, I want to switch gears a little bit from the people in the individual teams to the ecosystem. You had the ton of partners here at the show, and you talked about in the keynote, 300 integrations. >> Yeah. >> And I think some people might be confused, right? Because it's always this wrestle for whose screen am I working on when I'm doing my daily job? But as you said, we're in a lot of different screens, right? And I'm going back from Salesforce. I'm in my G Suite. Maybe I'm jumpin' into Hootsuite for some social stuff. You guys have basically embraced the ecosystem for all these different types of systems, and really kind of plugged into that. I wonder if you can explain a little bit more. 'Cause I'm sure most people might be confused by that. >> You know, I sort of think of us in the same way I would think of like the brain of an Olympic athlete. That athlete, their arms, their legs, their muscles, their pulmonary capability, like the respiratory system is all super important to their performance. But the brain has to accept the signals from all the different parts of the body, and then work through them, correlate them, and then drive action, right? And I sort of think of PagerDuty as sitting at the center of this rapidly changing technology ecosystem, this live organism, and really understanding the signals no matter what, is it raining, is there a pothole in the ground, et cetera? And be able then to drive change in the process on the fly to help the body perform more effectively. The challenge is like if you try and fight with the arms, and the legs, and every other part of the body, they don't work nicely with you. >> Right. >> So, being central to the ecosystem is about being neutral, and agnostic, and really demonstrating you will not only say you will partner, but investing in those partnerships. So, we built first class integrations to companies that may see us as competition, if that's what our customers need. >> Right, 'cause like you said, it's got to be customer-- >> Totally. >> Customer centric first. >> And it's an open ecosystem, and this is what developers, and employees, and tech workers expect. >> Right, and to your point, the amount of data that's flowin' through that nervous system is only getting more. And the amount of noise to get through to the signal-- >> Figure out-- >> To take the right action. >> What really is important. >> Is not getting any easier, right? >> Yeah. >> All right, Jennifer, well thanks again for havin' us. Congratulations on the funding and the great show, and it's always great to catch up. >> Thank you, I have the best job in the world. I feel very lucky. >> All right. >> It's great to see you, Jeff. >> Thank you, all right, she's Jennifer Tejada, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watchin' theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit where they actually show summits on the keynotes screen. Thanks for watchin', we'll see you next time. (bouncy electronic music)

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in San Mateo, California right at the crossroads. The building's called The Crossroads but it's right at the crossroads of 92 and 101. It's a really interesting intersection over the years as you watch these buildings that are on the corner continue to change names. I always think of the Seibel, his first building came up on this corner and we're here to see a good friend of SnapLogic and their brand new building. Gaurav Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, great to see you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So how long you been in this space? >> Gosh, it's been about a year. >> Okay. >> Although it feels longer. It's a high-growth company so these are dog years. (laughs) >> That's right. and usually, you outgrow it before you all have moved in. >> The years are short but the days are long. >> And it's right next Rakuten, I have to mention it. We all see it on the Warriors' jerseys So now we know who they are and where they are exactly. >> No they're a good outfit. We had an interesting time putting a sign up and then the people who made their sign told us all kinds of back stories. >> Oh, good, good Alright. So give us an update on SnapLogic. You guys are in a great space at a really, really good time. >> You know, things been on a roll. As you know, the mission we set out to... engage with was to bring together applications and data in the enterprise. We have some of the largest customers in high technology. Folks like Qualcomm, Workday. Some of the largest customers in pharmaceuticals. Folks like Astrazeneca, Bristol-Meyers Squibb. In retail, Denny's, Wendy's, etc. And these folks are basically bringing in new cloud applications and moving data into the cloud. And it's really fun to wire that all up for them. And there's more of it every day and now that we have this very strong install-base of customers, we're able to get more customers faster. >> Right. >> In good time. >> It's a great time and the data is moving into the cloud, and the public cloud guys are really making bigger plays into the enterprise, Microsoft and, Amazon and Google. And of course, there's IBM and lots of other clouds. But integration's always been such a pain and I finally figured out what the snap in SnapLogic means after interviewing you >> (laughs) a couple of times, right. But this whole idea of, non-developer development and you're taking that into integration which is a really interesting concept, enabled by cloud, where you can now think of snapping things together, versus coding, coding, coding. >> Yeah Cloud and A.I, right We feel that this problem has grown because of the change in the platform. The compute platform's gone to the cloud. Data's going to the cloud. There was bunch of news the other day about more and more companies moving the analytics into the cloud. And as that's happening, we feel that this approach and the question we ask ourselves when we started this company, we got into building the born in the cloud platform was, what would Apple do if they were to build an integration product? And the answer was, they would make it like the iPhone, which is easy to use, but very powerful at the same time. And if you can do that, you can bring in a massive population of users who wouldn't have been able to do things like video chat. My mom was not able to do video chat, and believe me, we tried this and every other thing possible 'till facetime came along. And now she can talk to my daughter and she can do it without help, any assistance from teenage grandchildren on that side, Right? >> Right, Right >> So what we've done with SnapLogic, is by bringing in a beautiful, powerful, sleek interface, with a lot of capability in how it connects, snaps together apps and data, we've brought in a whole genre of people who need data in the enterprise so they can serve themselves data. So if your title has analyst in it, you don't have to be programmer analyst. You could be any analyst. >> Right >> You could be a compensation analyst, a commissions analyst, a finance analyst, an HR analyst. All those people can self-serve information, knock down silos, and integrate things themselves. >> It's so interesting because we talk a lot about innovation and digital transformation, and in doing thousands of these interviews, I think the answer to innovation is actually pretty simple. You give more people access to the data. You give them more access to the tools to work with the data and then you give them the power to actually do something once they figure something out. And you guys are really right in the middle of that. So before, it was kind of >> (laughs) Yeah >> democratization of the data, democratization of the tools to work with the data, but in the API economy, you got to be able to stitch this stuff together because it's not just one application, it's not just one data source. >> Correct >> You're bringing from lots and lots of different things and that's really what you guys are taking advantage of this cloud infrastructure which has everything available, so it's there to connect, >> (laughs) Versus, silo in company one and silo in company two. So are you seeing it though, in terms of, of people enabling, kind of citizen integrators if you will, versus citizen developers. >> Yeah. Heck Yeah. So I'll give you an example. One of our large customers... Adobe Systems, right here in San Jose has been amazingly successful flagship account for us. About 800 people at Adobe come to www.snaplogic.com, every week to self-serve data. We replaced legacy products like TIBCO, informatica web methods about four years ago. They first became a customer in 2014 and usage of those products was limited to Java programmers and Sequel programmers, and that was less than 50 people. And imagine that you have about 800 people doing self-service getting information do their jobs. Now, Adobe is unique in that, it's moved the cloud in a fantastic way, or it was unique in 2014. Now everybody is emulating them and the great success that they've had. With the cloud economic model, with the cloud ID model. This is working in spades. We have customers who've come on board in Q4. We're just rounding out Q1 and in less than 60, 90 days, every time I look, 50, 100, 200 people, from each large company, whether it's a cosmetics company, pharmaceuticals company, retailer, food merchandise, are coming in and using data. >> Right >> And it's proliferating, because the more successful they are, the better they are able to do in their jobs, tell their friends about it sort-of-thing, or next cubicle over, somebody wants to use that too. It's so interesting. Adobe is such a great example, cause they did transform their business. Used to be a really expensive license. You would try to find your one friend that worked there around Christmas >> (laughs) Cause you think they got two licenses a year they can buy for a grand. Like, I need an extra one I can get from you. But they moved to a subscription model. They made a big bet. >> Yes. Yes >> And they bet on the cloud, so now if you're a subscriber, which I am, I can work on my home machine, my work machine, go to machine, machine. So, it's a really great transformation story. The other piece of it though, is just this cloud application space. There's so many cloud applications that we all work with every day whether it's Basecamp, Salesforce, Hootsuite. There's a proliferation of these things and so they're there. They've got data. So the integration opportunity is unlike anything that was ever there before. Cause there isn't just one cloud. There isn't just one cloud app. There's a lot of them. >> Yes. >> How do I bring those together to be more productive? >> So here's a stat. The average enterprise has most cloud services or SAS applications, in marketing. On the average, they have 91 marketing applications or SAS applications. >> 91. That's the average. >> 96% of them are not connected together. >> Right. >> Okay. That's just one example. Now you go to HR, stock administration. You go into sales, CRM, and all the ancillary systems around CRM. And there is this sort of massive, to us, opportunity of knocking down these silos and making things work together. You mention the API economy and whilst that's true that all these SAS applications of APIs. The problem is, most companies don't have programmers to hook up those API's. >> Right. To connect them. >> Yes, in Silicon Valley we do and maybe in Manhattan they do, but in everywhere else in the world, the self-service model, the model of being able to do it to something that is simple, yet powerful. Enterprise great >> Right. Right >> and simple, beautiful is absolutely the winning formula in our perspective. So the answer is to let these 100 applications bloom, but to keep them well behaved and orchestrated, in kind of a federated model, where security, having one view of the world, etc., is managed by SnapLogic and then various people and departments can bring in a blessed, SAS applications and then snap them in and the input and the way they connect, is done through snaps. And we've found that to be a real winning model for our customers. >> So you don't have to have like 18 screens open all with different browsers and different apps. >> Swivel chair integration is gone. Swivel chair integration is gone. >> Step above sneakernet but still not-- >> Step above but still not. And again, it may make sense in very, very specific super high-speed, like Wall Street, high frequency trading and hedge funds, but it's a minuscule minority of the overall problems that there needs to be solved. >> Right. So, it's just a huge opportunity, you just are cleaning up behind the momentum in the SAS applications, the momentum of the cloud. >> Cloud data. Cloud apps. Cloud data. And in general, if a customer's not going to the cloud, they're probably not the best for us. >> Right. >> Right. Our customers' almost always going towards the cloud, have lots of data and applications on premise. And in that hybrid spot, we have the capability to straddle that kind of architecture in a way that nobody else does. Because we have a born in the cloud platform that was designed to work in the real world, which is hybrid. >> So another interesting thing, a lot of talk about big data over the years. Now it's just kind of there. But AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence which should be automated intelligence and machine learning. There's kind of the generic, find an old, dead guy and give it a name. But we're really seeing the values that's starting to bubble up in applications. It's not, AI generically, >> Correct. >> It's how are you enabling a more efficient application, a more efficient workflow, a more efficient, get your job done, using AI. And you guys are starting to incorporate that in your integration framework. >> Yes. Yes. So we took the approach, 'doctor heal thyself.' And we're going to help our customers do better job of having AI be a game changer for them. How do we apply that to ourselves? We heard one our CIOs, CI of AstraZeneca, Dave Smoley, was handing out the Amazon Alexa Echo boxes one Christmas. About three years ago and I'm like, my gosh that's right. That was what Walt Mossberg said in his farewell column. IT is going to be everywhere and invisible at the same time. Right. >> Right. >> It'll be in the walls, so to speak. So we applied AI, starting about two years ago, actually now three, because we shipped Iris a year ago. The artificial intelligence capability inside SnapLogic has been shipping for over 12 months. Fantastic usage. But we applied to ourselves the challenge about three years ago, to use AI based on our born in the cloud platform. On the metadata that we have about people are doing. And in the sense, apply Google Autocomplete into enterprise connectivity problems. And it's been amazing. The AI as you start to snap things together, as you put one or two snaps, and you start to look for the third, it starts to get 98.7% accurate, in predicting how to connect SAS applications together. >> Right. Right. >> It's not quite autonomous integration yet but you can see where we're going with it. So it's starting to do so much value add that most of our customers, leave it on. Even the seasoned professionals who are proficient and running a center of excellence using SnapLogic, even those people choose to have sort-of this AI, on all the time helping them. And that engagement comes from the value that they're getting, as they do these things, they make less mistakes. All the choices are readily at hand and that's happening. So that's one piece of it >> Right. >> Sorry. Let me... >> It's Okay. Keep going. >> Illustrate one other thing. Napoleon famously said, "An army marches on its stomach" AI marches on data. So, what we found is the more data we've had and more customers that we've had, we move about a trillion documents for our customers worldwide, in the past 30 days. That is up from 10 million documents in 30 days, two years ago. >> Right. Right >> That more customers and more usage. In other words, they're succeeding. What we've found as we've enriched our AI with data, it's gotten better and better. And now, we're getting involved with customers' projects where they need to support data scientists, data engineering work for machine learning and that self-service intricate model is letting someone who was trying to solve a problem of, When is my Uber going to show up? So to speak. In industry X >> Right. Right. >> These kinds of hard AI problems that are predictive. That are forward changing in a sense. Those kind of problems are being solved by richer data and many of them, the projects that we're now involved in, are moving data into the cloud for data lake to then support AI machine learning efforts for our customers. >> So you jumped a little bit, I want to talk on your first point. >> Okay. Sorry >> That's okay. Which is that you're in the very fortunate position because you have all that data flow. You have the trillion documents that are changing hands every month. >> Born in the cloud platform. >> So you've got it, right? >> Got it. >> You've got the data. >> It's a virtual cycle. It's a virtual cycle. Some people call it data capitalism. I quibble with that. We're not sort-of, mining and selling people's personal data to anybody. >> Right. Right. >> But this is where, our enterprise customers' are so pleased to work with us because if we can increase productivity. If we can take the time to solution, the time to integration, forward by 10 times, we can improve the speed that by SAS application and it gets into production 10 times faster. That is such a good trade for them and for everyone else. >> Right. Right. >> And it feeds on itself. It's a virtual cycle. >> You know in the Marketo to the Salesforce integration, it's nothing. You need from company A to company B. >> I bet you somebody in this building is doing it on a different floor right now. >> Exactly. >> (laughs) >> So I think that's such an interesting thing. In the other piece that I like is how again, I like your kind of Apple analogy, is the snap packs, right. Because we live in a world, with even though there 91 on-averages, there's a number of really dominant SAS application that most people use, you can really build a group of snaps. Is snap the right noun? >> That's the right word. >> Of snaps. In a snap pack around the specific applications, then to have your AI powered by these trillion transactions that you have going through the machines, really puts you in a unique position right now. >> It does, you know. And we're very fortunate to have the kind of customer support we've had and, sort of... Customer advisory board. Big usages of our products. In which we've added so much value to our customers, that they've started collaborating with us in a sense. And are passing to us wonderful ideas about how to apply this including AI. >> Right. >> And we're not done yet. We have a vision in the future towards an autonomous integration. You should be able to say "SnapLogic, Iris, "connect my company." And it should. >> Right. Right. >> It knows what the SAS apps are by looking at your firewall, and if you're people are doing things, building pipelines, connecting your on-premise legacy applications kind of knows what they are. That day when you should be able to, in a sense, have a bot of some type powered by all this technology in a thoughtful manner. It's not that far. It's closer at hand than people might realize. >> Which is crazy science fiction compared to-- I mean, integration was always the nightmare right back in the day. >> It is. >> Integration, integration. >> But on the other hand, it is starting to have contours that are well defined. To your point, there are certain snaps that are used more. There are certain problems that are solved quite often, the quote-to-cash problem is as old as enterprise software. You do a quote in the CRM system. Your cash is in a financial system. How does that work together? These sort of problems, in a sense, are what McKinsey and others are starting to call robotic process automations. >> Right. >> In the industrial age, people... Stopped, with the industrial age, any handcrafted widget. Nuts, and bolts, and fasteners started being made on machines. You could stamp them out. You could have power driven beams, etc., etc. To make things in industrial manner. And our feeling is, some of the knowledge tasks that feel like widget manufactures. You're doing them over and over again. Or robotic, so to speak, should be automated. And integration I think, is ripe as one of those things and using the value of integration, our customers can automate a bunch of other repeatable tasks like quote-to-cash. >> Right. Right. It's interesting just when you say autonomous, I can't help but think of autonomous vehicles right, which are all the rage and also in the news. And people will say "well I like to drive "or of course we all like to drive "on Sunday down at the beach" >> Sure. Yeah. >> But we don't like to sit in traffic on the way to work. That's not driving, that's sitting in traffic on the way to work. Getting down the 101 to your exit and off again is really not that complicated, in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. >> Indeed. Indeed. >> Sets itself up. >> And there are times you don't want to. I mean one of the most pleasant headlines, most of the news is just full of bad stuff right. So and so and such and such. But one of the very pleasing headlines I saw the other day in a newspaper was, You know what's down a lot? Not bay area housing prices. >> (laughs) >> But you know what's down a lot? DUI arrests, have plummeted. Because of the benefits of Lyft and Uber. More and more people are saying, "You know, I don't have to call a black cab. "I don't need to spend a couple hundred bucks to get home. "I'm just getting a Lyft or an Uber." So the benefits of some of these are starting to appear as in plummeting DUIs. >> Right. Right >> Plummeting fatalities. From people driving while inebriated. Plunging into another car or sidewalk. >> Right. Right. >> So Yes. >> Amara's Law. He never gets enough credit. >> (laughs) >> I say it in every interview right. We overestimate in the short term and we underestimate in the long term the effects of these technologies cause we get involved-- The Gartner store. It's the hype cycle. >> Yeah, Yeah >> But I really I think Amara nailed it and over time, really significant changes start to take place. >> Indeed and we're seeing them now. >> Alright well Gaurav, great to get an update from you and a beautiful facility here. Thanks for having us on. >> Thank you, thank you. A pleasure to be here. Great to see you as well. >> Alright He's Gaurav, I'm Jeff. And you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic's headquarters Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in San Mateo, California right at the crossroads. The building's called The Crossroads but it's right at the crossroads of 92 and 101. It's a really interesting intersection over the years as you watch these buildings that are on the corner continue to change names. I always think of the Seville, his first building came up on this corner and we're here to see a good friend of SnapLogic and their brand new building. Gaurav Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, great to see you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So how long you been in this space? >> Gosh, it's been about a year. >> Okay. >> Although it feels longer. It's a high-growth company so these are dog years. (laughs) >> That's right. and usually, you outgrow it before you all have moved in. >> The years are short but the days are long. >> And it's right next Rakuten, I have to mention it. We all see it on the Warriors' jerseys So now we know who they are and where they are exactly. >> No they're a good outfit. We had an interesting time putting a sign up and then the people who made their sign told us all kinds of back stories. >> Oh, good, good Alright. So give us an update on SnapLogic. You guys are in a great space at a really, really good time. >> You know, things been on a roll. As you know, the mission we set out to... engage with was to bring together applications and data in the enterprise. We have some of the largest customers in high technology. Folks like Qualcomm, Workday. Some of the largest customers in pharmaceuticals. Folks like Astrazeneca, Bristol-Meyers Squibb. In retail, Denny's, Wendy's, etc. And these folks are basically bringing in new cloud applications and moving data into the cloud. And it's really fun to wire that all up for them. And there's more of it every day and now that we have this very strong install-base of customers, we're able to get more customers faster. >> Right. >> In good time. >> It's a great time and the data is moving into the cloud, and the public cloud guys are really making bigger plays into the enterprise, Microsoft and, Amazon and Google. And of course, there's IBM and lots of other clouds. But integration's always been such a pain and I finally figured out what the snap in SnapLogic means after interviewing you >> (laughs) a couple of times, right. But this whole idea of, non-developer development and you're taking that into integration which is a really interesting concept, enabled by cloud, where you can now think of snapping things together, versus coding, coding, coding. >> Yeah Cloud and A.I, right We feel that this problem has grown because of the change in the platform. The compute platform's gone to the cloud. Data's going to the cloud. There was bunch of news the other day about more and more companies moving the analytics into the cloud. And as that's happening, we feel that this approach and the question we ask ourselves when we started this company, we got into building the born in the cloud platform was, what would Apple do if they were to build an integration product? And the answer was, they would make it like the iPhone, which is easy to use, but very powerful at the same time. And if you can do that, you can bring in a massive population of users who wouldn't have been able to do things like video chat. My mom was not able to do video chat, and believe me, we tried this and every other thing possible 'till facetime came along. And now she can talk to my daughter and she can do it without help, any assistance from teenage grandchildren on that side, Right? >> Right, Right >> So what we've done with SnapLogic, is by bringing in a beautiful, powerful, sleek interface, with a lot of capability in how it connects, snaps together apps and data, we've brought in a whole genre of people who need data in the enterprise so they can serve themselves data. So if your title has analyst in it, you don't have to be programmer analyst. You could be any analyst. >> Right >> You could be a compensation analyst, a commissions analyst, a finance analyst, an HR analyst. All those people can self-serve information, knock down silos, and integrate things themselves. >> It's so interesting because we talk a lot about innovation and digital transformation, and in doing thousands of these interviews, I think the answer to innovation is actually pretty simple. You give more people access to the data. You give them more access to the tools to work with the data and then you give them the power to actually do something once they figure something out. And you guys are really right in the middle of that. So before, it was kind of >> (laughs) Yeah >> democratization of the data, democratization of the tools to work with the data, but in the API economy, you got to be able to stitch this stuff together because it's not just one application, it's not just one data source. >> Correct >> You're bringing from lots and lots of different things and that's really what you guys are taking advantage of this cloud infrastructure which has everything available, so it's there to connect, >> (laughs) Versus, silo in company one and silo in company two. So are you seeing it though, in terms of, of people enabling, kind of citizen integrators if you will, versus citizen developers. >> Yeah. Heck Yeah. So I'll give you an example. One of our large customers... Adobe Systems, right here in San Jose has been amazingly successful flagship account for us. About 800 people at Adobe come to www.snaplogic.com, every week to self-serve data. We replaced legacy products like DIBCO, informatica web methods about four years ago. They first became a customer in 2014 and usage of those products was limited to Java programmers and Sequel programmers, and that was less than 50 people. And imagine that you have about 800 people doing self-service getting information do their jobs. Now, Adobe is unique in that, it's moved the cloud in a fantastic way, or it was unique in 2014. Now everybody is emulating them and the great success that they've had. With the cloud economic model, with the cloud ID model. This is working in spades. We have customers who've come on board in Q4. We're just rounding out Q1 and in less than 60, 90 days, every time I look, 50, 100, 200 people, from each large company, whether it's a cosmetics company, pharmaceuticals company, retailer, food merchandise, are coming in and using data. >> Right >> And it's proliferating, because the more successful they are, the better they are able to do in their jobs, tell their friends about it sort-of-thing, or next cubicle over, somebody wants to use that too. It's so interesting. Adobe is such a great example, cause they did transform their business. Used to be a really expensive license. You would try to find your one friend that worked there around Christmas >> (laughs) Cause you think they got two licenses a year they can buy for a grand. Like, I need an extra one I can get from you. But they moved to a subscription model. They made a big bet. >> Yes. Yes >> And they bet on the cloud, so now if you're a subscriber, which I am, I can work on my home machine, my work machine, go to machine, machine. So, it's a really great transformation story. The other piece of it though, is just this cloud application space. There's so many cloud applications that we all work with every day whether it's Basecamp, Salesforce, Hootsuite. There's a proliferation of these things and so they're there. They've got data. So the integration opportunity is unlike anything that was ever there before. Cause there isn't just one cloud. There isn't just one cloud app. There's a lot of them. >> Yes. >> How do I bring those together to be more productive? >> So here's a stat. The average enterprise has most cloud services or SAS applications, in marketing. On the average, they have 91 marketing applications or SAS applications. >> 91. That's the average. >> 96% of them are not connected together. >> Right. >> Okay. That's just one example. Now you go to HR, stock administration. You go into sales, CRM, and all the ancillary systems around CRM. And there is this sort of massive, to us, opportunity of knocking down these silos and making things work together. You mention the API economy and whilst that's true that all these SAS applications of APIs. The problem is, most companies don't have programmers to hook up those API's. >> Right. To connect them. >> Yes, in Silicon Valley we do and maybe in Manhattan they do, but in everywhere else in the world, the self-service model, the model of being able to do it to something that is simple, yet powerful. Enterprise great >> Right. Right >> and simple, beautiful is absolutely the winning formula in our perspective. So the answer is to let these 100 applications bloom, but to keep them well behaved and orchestrated, in kind of a federated model, where security, having one view of the world, etc., is managed by SnapLogic and then various people and departments can bring in a blessed, SAS applications and then snap them in and the input and the way they connect, is done through snaps. And we've found that to be a real winning model for our customers. >> So you don't have to have like 18 screens open all with different browsers and different apps. >> Swivel chair integration is gone. Swivel chair integration is gone. >> Step above sneakernet but still not-- >> Step above but still not. And again, it may make sense in very, very specific super high-speed, like Wall Street, high frequency trading and hedge funds, but it's a minuscule minority of the overall problems that there needs to be solved. >> Right. So, it's just a huge opportunity, you just are cleaning up behind the momentum in the SAS applications, the momentum of the cloud. >> Cloud data. Cloud apps. Cloud data. And in general, if a customer's not going to the cloud, they're probably not the best for us. >> Right. >> Right. Our customers' almost always going towards the cloud, have lots of data and applications on premise. And in that hybrid spot, we have the capability to straddle that kind of architecture in a way that nobody else does. Because we have a born in the cloud platform that was designed to work in the real world, which is hybrid. So another interesting thing, a lot of talk about big data over the years. Now it's just kind of there. But AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence which should be automated intelligence and machine learning. There's kind of the generic, find an old, dead guy and give it a name. But we're really seeing the values that's starting to bubble up in applications. It's not, AI generically, >> Correct. >> It's how are you enabling a more efficient application, a more efficient workflow, a more efficient, get your job done, using AI. And you guys are starting to incorporate that in your integration framework. >> Yes. Yes. So we took the approach, 'doctor heal thyself.' And we're going to help our customers do better job of having AI be a game changer for them. How do we apply that to ourselves? We heard one our CIOs, CI of AstraZeneca, Dave Smoley, was handing out the Amazon Alexa Echo boxes one Christmas. About three years ago and I'm like, my gosh that's right. That was what Walt Mossberg said in his farewell column. IT is going to be everywhere and invisible at the same time. Right. >> Right. >> It'll be in the walls, so to speak. So we applied AI, starting about two years ago, actually now three, because we shipped iris a year ago. The artificial intelligence capability inside SnapLogic has been shipping for over 12 months. Fantastic usage. But we applied to ourselves the challenge about three years ago, to use AI based on our born in the cloud platform. On the metadata that we have about people are doing. And in the sense, apply Google Autocomplete into enterprise connectivity problems. And it's been amazing. The AI as you start to snap things together, as you put one or two snaps, and you start to look for the third, it starts to get 98.7% accurate, in predicting how to connect SAS applications together. >> Right. Right. >> It's not quite autonomous integration yet but you can see where we're going with it. So it's starting to do so much value add that most of our customers, leave it on. Even the seasoned professionals who are proficient and running a center of excellence using SnapLogic, even those people choose to have sort-of this AI, on all the time helping them. And that engagement comes from the value that they're getting, as they do these things, they make less mistakes. All the choices are readily at hand and that's happening. So that's one piece of it >> Right. >> Sorry. Let me... >> It's Okay. Keep going. >> Illustrate one other thing. Napoleon famously said, "An army marches on it's stomach" AI marches on data. So, what we found is the more data we've had and more customers that we've had, we move about a trillion documents for our customers worldwide, in the past 30 days. That is up from 10 million documents in 30 days, two years ago. >> Right. Right >> That more customers and more usage. In other words, they're succeeding. What we've found as we've enriched our AI with data, it's gotten better and better. And now, we're getting involved with customers' projects where they need to support data scientists, data engineering work for machine learning and that self-service intricate model is letting someone who was trying to solve a problem of, When is my Uber going to show up? So to speak. In industry X >> Right. Right. >> These kinds of hard AI problems that are predictive. That are forward changing in a sense. Those kind of problems are being solved by richer data and many of them, the projects that we're now involved in, are moving data into the cloud for data lake to then support AI machine learning efforts for our customers. >> So you jumped a little bit, I want to talk on your first point. >> Okay. Sorry >> That's okay. Which is that you're in the very fortunate position because you have all that data flow. You have the trillion documents that are changing hands every month. >> Born in the cloud platform. >> So you've got it, right? >> Got it. >> You've got the data. >> It's a virtual cycle. It's a virtual cycle. Some people call it data capitalism. I quibble with that. We're not sort-of, mining and selling people's personal data to anybody. >> Right. Right. >> But this is where, our enterprise customers' are so pleased to work with us because if we can increase productivity. If we can take the time to solution, the time to integration, forward by 10 times, we can improve the speed that by SAS application and it gets into production 10 times faster. That is such a good trade for them and for everyone else. >> Right. Right. >> And it feeds on itself. It's a virtual cycle. >> You know in the Marketo to the Salesforce integration, it's nothing. You need from company A to company B. >> I bet you somebody in this building is doing it on a different floor right now. >> Exactly. >> (laughs) >> So I think that's such an interesting thing. In the other piece that I like is how again, I like your kind of Apple analogy, is the snap packs, right. Because we live in a world, with even though there 91 on-averages, there's a number of really dominant SAS application that most people use, you can really build a group of snaps. Is snap the right noun? >> That's the right word. >> Of snaps. In a snap pack around the specific applications, then to have your AI powered by these trillion transactions that you have going through the machines, really puts you in a unique position right now. >> It does, you know. And we're very fortunate to have the kind of customer support we've had and, sort of... Customer advisory board. Big usages of our products. In which we've added so much value to our customers, that they've started collaborating with us in a sense. And are passing to us wonderful ideas about how to apply this including AI. >> Right. >> And we're not done yet. We have a vision in the future towards an autonomous integration. You should be able to say "SnapLogic, Iris, "connect my company." And it should. >> Right. Right. >> It knows what the SAS apps are by looking at your firewall, and if you're people are doing things, building pipelines, connecting your on-premise legacy applications kind of knows what they are. That day when you should be able to, in a sense, have a bot of some type powered by all this technology in a thoughtful manner. It's not that far. It's closer at hand than people might realize. >> Which is crazy science fiction compared to-- I mean, integration was always the nightmare right back in the day. >> It is. >> Integration, integration. >> But on the other hand, it is starting to have contours that are well defined. To your point, there are certain snaps that are used more. There are certain problems that are solved quite often, the quote-to-cash problem is as old as enterprise software. You do a quote in the CRM system. Your cash is in a financial system. How does that work together? These sort of problems, in a sense, are what McKinsey and others are starting to call robotic process automations. >> Right. >> In the industrial age, people... Stopped, with the industrial age, any handcrafted widget. Nuts, and bolts, and fasteners started being made on machines. You could stamp them out. You could have power driven beams, etc., etc. To make things in industrial manner. And our feeling is, some of the knowledge tasks that feel like widget manufactures. You're doing them over and over again. Or robotic, so to speak, should be automated. And integration I think, is ripe as one of those things and using the value of integration, our customers can automate a bunch of other repeatable tasks like quote-to-cash. >> Right. Right. It's interesting just when you say autonomous, I can't help but think of autonomous vehicles right, which are all the rage and also in the news. And people will say "well I like to drive "or of course we all like to drive "on Sunday down at the beach" >> Sure. Yeah. >> But we don't like to sit in traffic on the way to work. That's not driving, that's sitting in traffic on the way to work. Getting down the 101 to your exit and off again is really not that complicated, in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. >> Indeed. Indeed. >> Sets itself up. >> And there are times you don't want to. I mean one of the most pleasant headlines, most of the news is just full of bad stuff right. So and so and such and such. But one of the very pleasing headlines I saw the other day in a newspaper was, You know what's down a lot? Not bay area housing prices. >> (laughs) >> But you know what's down a lot? DUI arrests, have plummeted. Because of the benefits of Lyft and Uber. More and more people are saying, "You know, I don't have to call a black cab. "I don't need to spend a couple hundred bucks to get home. "I'm just getting a Lyft or an Uber." So the benefits of some of these are starting to appear as in plummeting DUIs. >> Right. Right >> Plummeting fatalities. From people driving while inebriated. Plunging into another car or sidewalk. >> Right. Right. >> So Yes. >> Amara's Law. He never gets enough credit. >> (laughs) >> I say it in every interview right. We overestimate in the short term and we underestimate in the long term the effects of these technologies cause we get involved-- The Gartner store. It's the hype cycle. >> Yeah, Yeah >> But I really I think Amara nailed it and over time, really significant changes start to take place. >> Indeed and we're seeing them now. >> Alright well Gaurav, great to get an update from you and a beautiful facility here. Thanks for having us on. >> Thank you, thank you. A pleasure to be here. Great to see you as well. >> Alright He's Gaurav, I'm Jeff. And you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic's headquarters Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (bouncy techno music) >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, live in San Francisco at the AWS Summit here. I'm Lisa Martin, joined by my co-host Jeff Frick. Our next guest is from Sumo Logic. We have the VP of Product Marketing, Kalyan Ramanathan. Welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you very much. Very excited to be here. >> Very excited to have you here. So, tell us a little bit about what Sumo Logic is doing with AWS and machine data. What services are you delivering, who's your target audience, all that good stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely. We are a cloud native, i.e., SaaS-based, machine data analytics platform, and what we do is to help our customers manage the operations and security of their machine-critical applications. Right, so we are an entirely AWS-based customer, we've been using AWS since our inception. What we do is to provide machine data and machine learning so that our customers can manage the performance of their applications, right. So, what is machine data, you might ask. So machine data typically includes logs, metrics, events, anything that your application is generating when it is running, when it is serving the enterprise's customers. And what Sumo Logic excels at is to ingest this data. We collect and ingest this data, and then we apply a lot of analytics on that data. We have some patented machine learning technologies that helps us correlate this data, get insights from this data, and then using this data, our customers manage the applications that they are providing to their end customers. >> And it's not just their applications that are co-located at AWS with your application, it's beyond that, I assume. >> Absolutely, I mean, we have customers from, you know, very different walks of life, we have customers who are on-prem, customers who are down the hybrid path and moving to AWS, and customers who are on an AWS. You know, I can rattle off a queue of great names, Pinterest, Twitter, Airbnb, are examples of customers who are born in the cloud. They run on AWS from the very get-go. And they use us today to manage the security and performance of their applications. We have other customers who have migrated to AWS, Scripps Network, the guys behind HGTV, it's a great example of a customer who was running applications in their on-prem data center, and then one day decided that they are a content company, and they don't want to be running their own data center. >> Right. >> And so they wanted to move their applications to the cloud, and they used Sumo Logic to help migrate their applications to AWS. >> What are some of the barriers that you help customers overcome when it comes to maybe that daunting task of migrating services? >> Yeah, that's a great question. You know, the first thing that someone has to do before they start to migrate their applications to the cloud is to understand what is it that they have within the data centers, right. If I don't know what I have, how do I even migrate that to the cloud? The first task is obviously provide visibility into what is within their data center. And that's where Sumo Logic comes in, right. If you deploy Sumo Logic, and if you implement Sumo Logic as a SaaS service, the first thing that we do is to provide you complete visibility into your applications. All the application components, the infrastructures that the application is deployed on, the services that the application may be using. The next thing that you want to do is start to migrate your workload to the cloud. But you want to do this in a very thoughtful way, and what that means is that you start to move your applications and your infrastructure to AWS, but then you do this cut of work to AWS, only when you are convinced about the performance as well as the security of that application in this new environment. So the ability to baseline what you have in your current environment, and then compare it to what it might look like in this new environment within AWS is extremely critical, and what Sumo Logic helped Scripps Network do is to essentially compare and contrast how they are performing in this new environment. And when they were extremely comfortable that their security and their performance was no less in this new environment compared to what they were doing in the data center, they were able to flip that switch and complete the move over to AWS. >> You guys are in an interesting position, because you were born in AWS, essentially, cloud-native, and you have a lot of customers that are running in AWS. And so you guys did a survey, a report, really kind of taking a look at what's actually happening with cloud-native companies running their apps in AWS. I wonder if you can kind of give-- What did you guys find in this thing? >> Yeah, absolutely Jeff. And this is, the report that we put out towards the end of last year, I think is one of the first start leadership reports that gives, you know, people in AWS, a birds-eye view into how are their peers, you know, deploying, architecting, and managing their applications within the AWS environment. So, how did we put this report together? Sumo Logic has over 1200 customers under management today and more than 80% of our customers are, you know, using AWS today. They are implementing their applications within AWS. So what we did was to anonymously mine data from our customers, and publish a report that provides the set of best practices, and the commonly-used techniques and architectures that, you know, the leaders are doing and implementing today as they move to AWS. Now there were some great learnings that we found out as we put this report together, alright. First and foremost, we discovered that the stack, that a customer typically deploys in AWS, is very unlike the stack that they deploy within their on-premise data center. So, how does that work out? I mean, so, many of the AWS customers that we mined here, happen to use Docker extensively within their AWS environment. In fact, 18% of our customers, this was last year, already are using Docker, you know, for the production application. Which is pretty amazing, given that Docker is just, you know, two or three years-- >> Well hopefully Solomon and Ben are watching, we actually have another crew with Docker-- >> Absolutely. >> Right now. >> We'll have to report that back. >> You know, Docker is all the rage, no doubt about, and we are seeing, you know, increased adoption of Docker across the board, among all of, for AWS customer. The other thing that we found very interesting was that the applications that you may typically expect to succeed in your data center, are not quite doing that well in the AWS world. I'll give you a good example, in the database world, you would expect to see Oracle and SQL Server, you know, ruling the root within a typical data center today. You go on AWS, that's not the case at all. The NoSQL databases, right, are the leading vendors of databases within the AWS world. MongoDB, Redis, you know, are well ahead of Oracle and SQL Server when it comes to AWS. When it comes to web server technologies. You know, Nginx and Apache, you know, are well ahead of IAS, which happens to be the web server of choice within the data center world. Now we've also seen, you know, pretty amazing adoption of Lambda Technologies within AWS. I mean, that's to be expected, a certain bit, because I know AWS is definitely pushing it, but again, 12% use it within a production environment. You know, one year into Lambda, GA in some sense, is pretty astonishing numbers, so-- >> What was your takeaway? Was it because of the applications that are deployed, is it because, kind of, historical legacy of what Amazon offered, kind of for an on-prem versus an on-prem, you know, those early business decisions, not so much today, but, you know, years ago, when there was the security and public cloud, you know, it was a very different conversation three years ago. What were some of your takeaways as to the why? >> The takeaways that I think, there's a meta takeaway here, and let me start with that. The meta takeaway is that as people are building applications in AWS, native AWS applications, or as they are migrating their applications from an on-prem data center to, let's say, AWS, this is giving IT architects the opportunity rethink how their applications are constructed. You know, they are no longer bound by the old shackles of, if I have to use a database, it's Oracle or SQL Server. If I have to use a IIS web server, it's IIS or some other option. >> Right. >> So, once you are unchained from these shackles, you have the ability now to rethink and re-architect your application from scratch to target and to focus on this amazing new world that the cloud, you know, offers. So that's the, that's a big meta takeaway for us, and, what we have learned is that once you are unbound, you can come up with new technologies and new ways of doing things that are adopted and better suitable for this new space. That's one. The second thing that we do see, obviously, is that the vendors of yesterday are not yet focused on the cloud technologies. It may be heresy to say this, but, you know, Oracle has not found a cult religion until very recently. And that's why you see Oracle as not doing a lot, or not making a dent in, you know, in cloud places or in cloud technologies like AWS. >> Right, right, it's just interesting, that procurement angle, because, as anyone who's ever been at a relatively small company, trying to sell into a big company, one of the biggest hurdles is actually just getting on the procurement list, becoming an approved vendor. So, it's interesting to think about that from the other side as a consumer. That if now you are unshackled from the approved vendor list, and you, because if now the only approved vendor is Amazon, and now you have this whole breadth of things to choose from within that ecosystem, that, how that could really impact your behavior and what you actually buy, build, and deliver. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great point too. I mean, there are economics involved here, there is the friction of adopting certain technologies to AWS, which also makes it a little harder to adopt some of the more traditional software applications in the AWS world. Now that's why AWS obviously has come up with the notion of a marketplace, and Sumo Logic, you know, we face the same challenges when we are signing up customers, right. We have some big-name customers who, you know, if we have to sell into those customers, you know, we have to get into their procurement list, we have to, you know, go through a few rigamaroles-- >> Jeff: Right, Right >> To even get into that list. That's where, you know, getting into the AWS marketplace has really helped us a lot. Now you have one vendor, you have one relationship, you have one payment terms, and that vendor is already on your approved list. And so, hey, Sumo Logic comes along with the rights. >> So, definitely a simplification there, which was one of the themes in the keynote this morning, as well as this unshackling. What are your objectives for the report, are you going to be either going back to some of your existing customers or to new customers to show them all of these best practices that you've developed? >> Yeah, I mean, I think our goal of this report, obviously, first thing from us is to make this an annual report, we plan to do this every year, write it on reinvent. And what we want to do is to provide our community, who are mostly AWS shops today. We do have a few Microsoft Azure customers, and we are starting to see some Google Cloud platform customers too. But what we want to do is become the hot leader, who not only serves his customers, but also provides them a road map, in terms of, you know, how should they be adopting these cloud technologies. >> Jeff: Right. >> What are their leading-edge peers like the Twitters and the Airbnbs and the Pinterests of the world starting to do. Obviously, in a anonymized way, we don't want to be calling out any of our customers by name, but here is how you need to think about architecting your applications in the cloud. There is an opportunity, as we said, to, you know, break open from the chains of the past, redo this. We want to help our customer redo this well. >> I'd love to get your perspective, what are the, you know, and I think we're past the security and some of those kind of historic impediments, to you will, to public cloud adoption, but one of the ones that still comes up all the time is the rent versus buy, and you know I think it goes back to the tested roots of, yes, it's great to rent for awhile, but at some point in time, when you hit some scale-- >> Kalyan: Right. >> The business model flips and now it's more economical to buy and operate your own. But what we see in the slide that Werner showed today, there's plenty of customers, Netflix, of course always being the flagship, that are giant, and must have a giant AWS bill every month, who have chosen to still leverage them as their IT platform, and not flip the switch to a purchase. So you know, kind of either from the survey or anecdotally with your own customers, and you as a company, you know, what impacts that decision and do you have, like this review every couple of years, when those CFOs go, "Ah, we're paying these guys a lot of money," should we build our own stuff, but clearly you haven't gone that route. >> I mean, there are definitely enterprises who are still on-prem today, I think the last stat that I heard from Gartner is that 20% of enterprises have flipped over to public cloud infrastructure. 80% is still running things in the cloud, you know, within the data center, maybe a private cloud or maybe in the traditional old ways of running applications. But that tide is definitely turning. And what we see from many of our customers is that there are many reasons for customers or enterprises to now start adopting public cloud. Economics is obviously one, I mean, there is a big advantage of going from Capex to Opex, it obviously makes a lot of sense to do that. The second thing is that what we see is that it's not just about moving the application to the cloud, it's also having the right tooling around the application that can now allow you to manage that application, manage the performance of that application, the security of that application, the deployment of that application in the public cloud environment. And that has taken a while to mature, and I think we are already there, I mean, in an event like this, you can see so many companies come up with new, innovative ways of managing applications within the public cloud environment. And I think we are there now, I mean, the pendulum has swung, and we have enough technologies now to do this with a very high level of confidence. The third thing I would say, and you know, we keep hearing this from our customers again and again, and you know, I brought up Scripps as a great example, you know, we just did a public webinar with a company called Hootsuite, and, you know, they are a social media management platform company, and one of the comments from the Hootsuite VP of Operations was very telling, he said, "Look, I can do this, I can run my own stuff, but do I really want to do it, right? I am a social media company, I want to provide the best application to my customers. I'm not in the business of running a management technology, you know, on-prem or even, for that matter, you know, within the four walls of the company itself. What I want to do is focus on where I can deliver the best value to my customer, and that is by delivering a great social media application." >> Lisa: Exactly. >> "And I want to let the infrastructure game, the management game to the experts," right. >> Focusing on their core competencies to really drive more business. >> I mean I think we are definitely starting to see that, there are certain verticals that have adopted this, you know, wholeheartedly, retail is a good one, media is a good one, there are also cost pressures in those verticals that are forcing them to adopt this at a much faster pace. Financial is kicking and screaming, but they are also getting on board. >> But definitely from a thematic perspective, you talk about maturation, maturation of the services, maturation of the technologies, and maturation of the user. So we want to thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE, great to have you here. >> Thank you very much, I mean, it's been a great conversation with you guys, and it's a great event. >> Excellent, well for my co-host Jeff Frick, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching this on theCUBE live in San Francisco as the AWS Summit. Stick around, we'll be right back. (bouncy techno music)

. >>Okay, welcome back. This is live in Las Vegas. This is the end of day one. This is our wrap up segment of the cube at Splunk conference dot conference 2013. I'm John furrier with Dave Alante, my cohost and Jeff Kelly making an appearance in this segment has been scouring for stories, talking to all the folks, talking to the CEO, talking to all the people on the team, customers scouring the web. Guys, welcome to the wrap up. Thank you John. John guys, I gotta I gotta say I'm really impressed with what Splunk's done here. Um, and with post IPO you kind of see what people are made of when they have to do transitional things day. We know we do and I've seen companies pivot, turn on a dime. You guys certainly have helped companies, you know, get into that, into the, into the thermal growth and um, but here a companies succeeding, um, they hit a rocket ship growth. >>They go public. A lot of challenges could be distraction, but certainly, uh, my impression is no distraction here. Splunk certainly is hitting cruising altitude only getting better and stronger. Certainly the customer acquisition numbers as strong and their partner ecosystem is great. Their keynote and fan based or customers are loyal. All in all, Dave, I've got to say, you know Splunk's looking really good. Yeah, John. I mean I think you see a lot of different models. This is too broad models. I guess in the, in the it business one is the safe bet. It's, it's IBM, it's, it's HP, it's, it's EMC, it's Oracle, it's Cisco. I mean you're going to do business with those companies because you know they're going to deliver a product and they're going to stand behind it and they're going to service you and then you got the 10 X value proposition companies, that's companies like Tableau service now Workday, Splunk, these are the companies that are really transforming their irreverence. >>Steve Cohen said disruptive, they're disruptive so they got a little mojo going and I'm gone. But at the same time, customers are willing to take a chance because the value proposition is so compelling and so transformative to their business and they can't get that from their traditional it suppliers despite what the traditional it suppliers are telling them. So I love that kind of mojo at a, at a, at an event like this. Jeff Kelly, I want to go to you for a second. Let's talk about what you're finding us. Show us who you are on the, on the, uh, we had a crowd chat today w you know, preparing them for Hadoop world and big data in New York city. A quick programming note. Um, we, the Q will be in New York city for strata conference. Had duper world covering that in con in concert to the big data New York city event going on as well that week. >>Um, but you're out, you did a chat this morning about big data with Hadoop ecosystem. A lot of had doopy we had cloud era MRR Dhalla on, they have a relationship also with Hortonworks. Um, what did you find out there? What stories did you dig in? What observations did you find? Well, very much like a, the last show we were at a Tableau's customer conference. It's a really excited, uh, customer base here. These, these customers, uh, you know, are, are clapping and cheering during the keynote. It's something you don't necessarily see more than excited. They're giddy, right? I mean, right. They're there, they're getting yapping, they're hooting or hollering, right. And, and there's really a sense of community around the, around the customer base. They love to trade stories. They love to trade best practices. The hackathon, last night I was at, uh, you know, just rooms filled off the, off the corridors here at the, uh, the cosmopolitan. >>They were there till 11 o'clock at night. They were in there, you know, they had, uh, some, some, some, some TV going at, I saw a rerun of Alf playing on the big screen for some reason. I guess that's a popular with the group here. But anyways, these guys were up there all night. You know, they're coding the drinking beers, they're having a good time. Uh, they really enjoy this. You didn't, it's not something you see at eight. At one of the, a larger events, some of the mega vendors we see. Um, you know, the other thing, you know, Mike coming into this Splunk I think was really early on, uh, recognizing the, the value that providing applications that allow you to really manipulate and understand data. Really they saw the value of that very early. Obviously that's, they base their whole premise of their organization on that. >>Oh, they have re, you know, kind of written this wave, uh, of big data, all things big data. And they're one of the few companies out there that are actually selling and providing applications that allow people and make sense of, um, in this case, machine generated data, but they're expanding to other data types. Um, the key for them I think going forward is to continue innovating. You know, they've kinda got that lead, uh, I think because they were the, one of the first out of the gate to recognize the value in this. They gotta keep innovating. And I think you saw with the announcements today, clearly they are, uh, the cloud, uh, option that they unveiled today was very popular. Um, and it's going to help them, especially against some of the more nimble startups. It's funny, it's, Splunk is now kind of a kind of a big established company in a sense in this large, in this big data world, there are companies like om Bogley and Sumo logic who are coming at Splunk doing similar things, but doing it from a cloud perspective, well sponsored down. >>Got an answer for that. Why would I want to ask you guys about that? Because you know, John, Jeremy Burton, we, you know, made, we were there when cloud met big data and so people have been putting those two together. But you take a company like Splunk and a couple of like Tableau, not big cloud plays. What about that cloud meets big data? Is that, is that a misconception on the industry's part or not? Or is it a fundamental requirement that cloud meets big data? I think it's a fundamental requirement as you know, we were, you know, close to EMC when they put that together and we had the first cloud mobile social editorial. You guys had the first real research around those three pillars. Um, and big data just became a, came out of social and cloud and since the cloud era, you know, pun intended with Cloudera, the company, um, but you know, Dave, we saw this from day one. >>This is a fundamental economic wealth creating inflection point, meaning new companies, new brands going to emerge that are going to change the game and this is where all the chips are on the table and you're seeing the incumbent vendors like EMC changed their game and go cloud meets big data and go in there. And EMC, I give Ian, Jeremy Burton a lot of credit. He saw the work we were doing. He saw the marketplace, he came fresh into EMC and said cloud and big data. Those are the two pillars. He bet the ranch on that and the beds coming home. Jeremy is making more money than any, even not a CMO anymore. He's the executive vice president doing great just on the stock options. He made a good bet that's playing out who's also a great executive with some product shops. Absolutely. Table stakes in my opinion. >>Um, that the application market is going to be enabled by that. So, Jeff, Kelly, so I've got to ask you, there are forces that you mentioned you've got open source. Uh, you've got some new players that are or have seen the opportunity that Splunk has created, the, they're going to have to Splunk. So, so what's your prediction here? I mean, you've got, you've got a public company now, they've got more resources. They're clearly a leader in the, in the business, but you got other companies coming after him. Not only start us, you know, we were at, um, we were at HP, uh, the, the Vertica user group, they were talking about, you know, their Splunk killer. Uh, you hear it all the time. Oh, we can do that. We can do that. What does that all mean for Splunk? Well, the good news for Splunk is they're, they're, they're ahead of everybody in this game because they've been doing this for longer. >>Uh, you know, they, they, they have a, a more generally accepted among the customers, uh, you know, a better application for VMware, for instance. So they're actually ahead of a lot of these other vendors, VMware itself trying to claim Oh yeah, it'd be where it says, well now we've got a tool for monitoring that's just as good as Splunk. Well, you know, if you talk to some of the people using the Splunk app for VM ware, they'll disagree with that. So bottom line is, you know, this is a little bit simplified, but people really like the Splunk user interface in the application. It's very easy to use and that's something that you can't necessarily replicate. So, you know, it'll take, it'll take some time for some of these players to catch up. But you know, back to the point John was making this whole idea of cloud and big data and you're asking, you know, is that really, is that really the, the, the two mega trends here? >>And I think absolutely when we start talking about, uh, industrial internet, internet of things, whatever term you wanna use, we're, we're years away from that really being a, a reality I think in terms of it's an interconnected world, but clearly the two key enabling technologies are going to be big data, making sense of all those connected devices and cloud being able to connect them in a way that that makes sense. Um, where you can't do that in an on premise situation if you've got isolated data centers. Now the other thing, this company who started in 2005, it's yet another Silicon Valley success story. John, I mean it's just Silicon Valley is just running the table. What's your take on the Valley action going on here? I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to do well and, and um, and rule the road here and on IPOs and success. >>Silicon Valley is the ecosystem that drives a lot of wellness to wall street of startups. However, there are, there are a lot of successes outside of Silicon Valley. This is just another string of, of successes. Um, but Dave, this is an absolute poster child in my opinion, of a venture that could have gone the wrong way. I mean, Splunk was not a shining star when it got funded. It took two visionary venture capitalists, Nick and David Hornick, Nick from, uh, he'd know the ignition and uh, David Hornik from August capital made the bet. They bet on technical founders, they bet on the right product guys. It was in small tools and it was at the time it was, wasn't the trendy thing. This is pre big data. This is log files. They saw a problem, they saw a good team. Now this thing could've gone off the rails, right? >>If you look at today's market, this is what I worry about all this startup environment is that all the different funding dynamics, all of this crowd sourcing this, that you've got to have good investors. This is a great example of great investors back in their guys back on their team because this thing could have been off the rails in the fourth year. Okay. Product strategy, debate, board room dynamics, people not paying attention, uh, asleep at the switch as we say. And this is, this is an example of a company done right. They hit the growth curve, big data swooped in, they had a great product, happy customers and incrementally move the ball down the field. And finally, you know, scored the big long ball with the touchdown with big data. And I think, you know, it's classic. These are football analogies, you know, first down, first down, first down, and then big data comes down. >>They throw the ball in the end zone, touchdown home run. There it is. That's the IPO. That's the success story. There's a fine line between. Good and great here. Isn't there though? I mean, like you say, I mean who even Steven Cohen was saying, uh, uh, uh, not, not Steve Sorkin, sorry. Steven. I was saying that he didn't, could've never predicted, you know, where they'd be today, the IPO, et cetera. So there is a fine line. You could go, well, this is the thing, this is my point. If you look at Splunk, right? Dave, they could have, no one was buying their stuff initially. Right, and so except for some tech geeks, no one was kind of get it, but the recession hit and people weren't spending in 2008 that was a big surge and you saw the spending and Splunk became a great solution because for very little cash you can come in and create business value. >>That was a really, really important moment in the company's history, David, and what's also happened is they believed in their own product. You heard from the people here culture, they're Everett, they're disruptive, they use their own product and they focused on the customer. Those two things, good timing still is, you know, comes to people who are prepared. I mean it's not an, I mean, it's not enough to just have a big market. It's not enough to just have a lot of capital behind you. You need other ingredients obviously to succeed. I'm afraid the younger generation doesn't understand the startup world is you can't just magically put pixie desk and get the home run. You got some times really be in a good position as they say in basketball and be ready for the rebound off the rim. In this case it log file tool with good technology moves into the big data world and hello, they're got an enterprise customers. >>Part of, I think part of it is, look, you've got to admit, part of it is luck and timing. You've got to have that on your side. But they've also got a really good product and they're smart enough when that, when those opportunities present themselves to take them. I think they are. Again, timing is fantastic for them right now. We've been talking about the, uh, the year of the big data application and we're really still waiting for that. They are in a really good position right now to really take advantage of all the interest in, you know, SQL on Hadoop, interactive analytics on Hootsuite. Well guess what, they've got a product and hunk a cute name, but a good product that allows you to get right in there as a business user and start analyzing, searching data using a circular base. I gotta tell you it's a very good looking product and people are looking for this. >>People are like, well, how am I going to get all that value product? I'm going to get all that value out of Hadoop sense bugs in answer hunk. You got the naming convention, interesting names, but nevertheless they've got a, they've got a play right now in an area that's got a lot of interest and they've got, they've got the track record in the log data to actually show they've got, they know how to, they know what they're doing. I don't remember Mike Olson to cloud Hadoop worlds ago, announced the the application tsunami. That kind of never came the way they said. We said the analytics was a killer app. In the meantime, as the market kind of catches up, we still haven't seen that application framework, but yet still analytics is the killer app, right? It's definitely the killer app. I think. Well, the analytics for the masses is the, is the killer app and that's the Holy grail that everybody's going after. >>And I'm not, I'm not declaring Splunk is there. I don't think Splunk is there. I don't think anybody's there yet. You talk to a Tableau customers, you talk to Splunk customers, they're not there yet, but they're closer than the BI crowd ever was. They're certainly closer than the traditional BI players. And they, and then that's because they don't have that legacy architecture to deal with. But there's also a cultural issue. It's not just the technology of the products, it's getting business users to understand how to look at data and look at it as, as an asset and something that you can actually drive. Timing's right for that. Absolutely. So I want to wrap up and ask you guys some follow up questions at the close, the segment out, first impressions of day one and what are you looking for for day two? Jeff, we'll start with you. >>I am first impressions. You know, like I said, very excited, uh, base of customers here and you know, 18,000, 1800, excuse me. Plus customers, 18,000. That'll be a few years. But, uh, nevertheless a good showing here. Uh, I think tomorrow, you know, on the cube, we're going to look for certainly some more customer stories. Um, you know, it's always interesting to hear from customers because they are on the front lines. They're using the product every day. So I expect to see a lot more of that. Um, and really tomorrow I think is going to be a lot about, a lot about uh, these customers networking with one another and I'm hoping to get out there. Let's add on the question to, uh, to you then, then to Dave. Same thing. What's the challenges for Splunk as well? I think the challenge for me is from, from my perspective is to continue and make the, make the cloud play real, continuing to invest in that, uh, and that product and that approach. >>Um, as we met, as I mentioned a minute ago, I think cloud and big data are critical to really leveraging industrial internet, the internet of things. And if Splunk wants to be a key player there, they've got to really fill out that portfolio of cloud based capabilities. I know you said David, go first. Sorry for me. For me, John, we heard from the executives today, very strong story. We heard very solid product lineup. It's very clear in talking to customers that there's, there's passion here, there's real traction. Um, it's substantive. To me. The big thing is ecosystem. I feel as though the ecosystem here at Splunk is, is, is good, but I feel like it's not been as deliberate as it can be. I think Splunk has a ways to go there. I think that is one of the leverage points that this company really has to focus on. >>Because like today we talked about earlier, 45% of Splunk sales goes through the channel. I think it's gotta be way, way, way higher than that. Now they're making great progress, but I think that they've got to have a goal of getting to 70% and that comes through the ecosystem. It's gonna take some time. It's going to take some investment. That's really where, to me, the big upside is for this company and my impression is I'm very impressed with Splunk. I'm very impressed with the ecosystem. I'm impressed by the rabid fan base of their customers who are proud of the private name getting exemplifies my point about startups having a great product focus products will win. Again, you know, the four P's of marketing, they teach you in marketing one Oh one one of those products. Um, but the challenge is, Dave, I would, I would agree with you. >>The ecosystem is a challenge. Good news is they have a great turnout here. Um, you're not, there's no lightweights out there, all heavyweights in terms of what they're doing with tech and their value proposition. So, you know, gray star for the ecosystem. So I think it's looking good off the tee to use the golf analogy, um, landing in the fairway. So, so that's one. My big, my big thing on the challenges for Splunk and that I'm watching is the cloud. I think moving to the cloud is not as easy as it appears, although that's the value proposition. So to move the DNA of the company with the pressure to drive revenue, luckily the market's kind of moving to them right now. So it might be a, a rising tide floats all boats. Moving to the cloud is very, very difficult. And I think that's gonna be a key challenge. >>We're going to keep watching them look at what SAP has challenged the cloud. They've had multiple restarts and misfires. Now they've seen them get their groove back with HANA. I think this could be a big challenge for Splunk and we're going to, I'm going to watch their cloud and that's going to be my focus then tomorrow. I would agree with that. I would just say on the ecosystem point, um, I, I think they would actually, I think they do have more work to do Dave, but I think they're in a really good position because some of the Hudu players, for instance, knees, Splunk, I think more than Splunk means to them right now. Okay. We're going to close down what the government is closing down right now. So, you know, that's, uh, that's, uh, we'll be back tomorrow because we work for free open source content, um, programming node. >>Next weekday we're gonna talk about big data and internet of things. I'll be interviewing the CEO of GE. Um, I'm really proud of you, John, for, uh, being selected out of the zillion people that they could choose. They chose you to, to host this panel. Yeah, that's fantastic. It might be my last, but we'll see. Moving some Q mojo to the GE event, industrial internet next week in Chicago. Minds and machines, another player to watch. Guys. Great day and great wrap up here. And that's day one. Wrap in the books tomorrow here when we go to the party tonight, find out what's going on here at, at, uh, inside the cube, inside a Splunk conference. Dot conference. 2013. I'm John furrier with Dave Alante and Jeff Kelly Wiki bond with back tomorrow. Goodnight. And, and join us tomorrow.