>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18, brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're in Bellevue, Washington, and pleased to welcome one of the many customers of Smartsheet to the program, we have the office of the CIO, Jeff Kelly from PayPal. Welcome Jeff, I've got a sandwich of Jeffs here. (laughing) Jeff sandwich, so Jeff, tell us a little bit. Everybody knows PayPal, I was doing some studying over the weekend. 244 million active users, I'm sure that grows by the minute, 200 markets globally served, and you're doing transactions in over 100 currencies. Everybody has been using this for a while now. It's a household term, even my mom knows PayPal, and she can use it. So, tell us about the office of the CIO at PayPal and your role. >> Sure, so my role, specifically I'm a program manager within that office, and my primary responsibility is to make sure that our environment is secure, that it's safe, that it's stable. That way, the other parts of the company, product, can focus on being more strategic. What that really involves is things like hardening our infrastructure, hardening the network, making sure that we can identify all of our assets accurately, so a number of things there just to keep the environment, like I said, stable and secure. >> And, the office of the CIO, I imagine, responsible for communicating regularly with the executive management team, needing to provide visibility? >> Exactly, I mean, our leadership, Brad Strock is the CIO, we work hand-in-hand with the other leaders of the company. But in addition to some of the things I just called out, the CIO, that office is actually responsible for a lot of the enterprise application, so it's basically the software that drives the company, so that's customer, that's our employee facing applications. >> So you're obviously a Smartsheet user which is why you're here and we're grateful for that. Tell us about the pre-Smartsheet era. How were you managing programs and projects? >> I think I've heard this story quite a bit here. So, between spreadsheets, Microsoft Project, Trello, a number of other tools, and we're still in a distributed model, but the good thing is that within the CIO we're able, at this point, in this particular area, right, to come in with a single tool, to serve as a single system of record, to really facilitate bringing the entire portfolio together. So yeah, I'd say before, very distributed, now, it's really consolidated into Smartsheet being our single system, which has really worked well. >> So they showed a video of your case-study during the keynote, and you had a real specific use case, it sounds like, for your initial Smartsheet deployment, which sounds like something that many of us struggle with each and every week, which is to roll up the data to report upstairs. So, I wonder if you can give a little bit of color on what did you have to roll up, what was the scale of effort, and why you decided, this just isn't really working very well-- >> Sure, absolutely, so we set off, around three years ago, we had a three-year program ahead of us, and I'd say at the end of year one, we realized, just, due to the magnitude, the number of people involved, the data involved, and the overall portfolio, we needed a tool to come in and really help us be able to effectively and quickly roll up that information, so that we could present and take that information to our C-suite each week. Yeah, just for effective decision-making, making sure that they're in-tune, they have a line of sight to what's critical, what's not, working on the right things, doing the right thing. So, we considered a number of tools. Again, Microsoft Project, what-not, we landed with Smartsheet, and it was really just word-of-mouth within the company. So we took a look at a handful of tools and really just tried to figure out what fit the bill for what we needed, and a couple of Smartsheet videos on YouTube, we kind of quickly came to the decision, hey, this is certainly a flexible tool, it's easy to ramp, if you know spreadsheets, you pretty much know this, if you're a project manager you know how to build a plan, quite easy. So the ramp time was very minimal. So we made a decision, watched a bunch of YouTube videos, probably spent a month doing that, myself and the team. With the tool being intuitive and those videos, we built a solution basically from the ground up. >> So this is without even having an enga-- this is PayPal, without even having an engagement with an account executive, you were able to find this, like you said, word of mouth, implement this on your own and really enable quite a bit of transformation within the executive team and what they need to see. >> Absolutely, I think, when we look back at the end of year one we made that decision, we realized, hey, we've got some high-price consultants in, and we're probably using half of their time at that point just in relating that data, so you're talking about some heavy dollars that are being spent there, just in administrative-type work. If we can cut that layer out, and go straight to the source, we're saving ourselves a ton, we can redirect those funds to other areas where we actually get some work done. >> So Jeff, how big was the initial deploy, in terms of the team size, because you said you didn't engage Smartsheet directly, you're watching some YouTube videos, and you did see enough there that you wanted to jump in. Did you jump all in from the beginning, did you do kind of a POC, how did you get started, what was kind of the scope? >> Yeah, kind of took a couple demos, straw-man that we just put together on the fly, shared with some of our key stakeholders, you know, "Does this look right? Does it feel right? Are you seeing the information that you think we need?". And the fact that we were able to come up with that so quickly just sold itself, and so yeah vetted it, socialized it a little bit, but it was a pretty easy sell from that point. It was just building it out, and I'd say right from the get go we had already had about 14 programs as part of this portfolio in place at that point in time, so each program having between, I'd say between five and 15 projects within that, so the number of players was quite large, probably about 150 direct players in the program, probably a couple hundred more indirect that want line-of-sight to what we're doing. >> So line-of-sight accountability, how was that embraced by those teams? And we talk a lot about digital transformation, Jeff, at every event, and how cultural transformation is a necessity for that. How have you been able to leverage this tool to kind of evolve that culture within the office of the CIO? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think, with us being able to cut out that middle-man, when I say middle-man I'm talking PowerPoint slides. If we can get away from that, because a number of things happen there, but predominantly, I mean, you can finger of a PowerPoint slide and all of a sudden, 100 turns to 200 or 1000, something like that, so, hey, if we can just go straight to our system of a record, I mean, each project within this portfolio should have a project plan, they should have a risk and issues tracker, so we really decided, here's the baseline for what we need to have in terms of our data model. If we can have that, then we can produce the dashboards that just read directly from those systems of record, from an accountability perspective, right? That means, there's no tweaking a PowerPoint slide, right, you're reading directly from the project plan, so it is what it is. But, it's reality, and that's what we need to deal with, and we ultimately step in front of the C-suite, right? You need to have, here's where we are, and it needs to be an accurate and timely reflection. I mean, that's another thing, is that timeliness, I mean, this is real-time data that we're talking, so, if something changes 10 minutes before, it's there on the dashboard, we're ready to talk to it. >> Yeah, I don't think there's enough talk about the timeliness, because it is connected directly to the database. It's not something that somebody's reporting on, and so often you get these multiple layers of people extracting data, transcribing it, putting it in to whatever reporting tool they want and just, it just gets further and further from the truth with each passing minute and each passing iteration. >> Absolutely, and we've talked about speed so much here, and so that's obviously a critical factor in decision making, especially, so we want to make sure we have the latest and greatest there. >> So just curious of your experience from a project manager point of view. You're a professional project manager. I'm sure you know all of the big heavy-lifting tools. When you see something like this, which is more of a no-code, kind of low-code, kind of cross platform integration, what type of skills does that open up within the teams, within the data sources, within the ability to do something a lot less, I want to say more nimble, you know, less heavy, than kind of a traditional project management-- >> Sure, I think minimal's a great word to describe it there, because it really, it really is a tool that just is, that you can build from, more of like a grass-roots effort, as opposed to a enterprise, kind of top-down. I'm sure it works well in that use case as well, but, for us, it was something that was able to kind of fill needs that were distributed across the portfolio. Once you start building it up, filling in those gaps, then you realize, hey, we've got kind of an end-to-end tool here that really works well. >> And I'm just curious, interest as other people have engaged with your output, in the organization, in terms of, "Hey, Jeff, can you give us, can you share the PowerPoint links with us?". (mumbling) YouTube links. >> Yeah, I joke because it feels like at this point I'm doing about one demo a week to somebody else in the company, which is a great thing, leveraging best practices, and sharing that information, so, there's certainly a growing user-base within PayPal, of Smartsheet, so I try to keep up with the other teams that are using it so that we are taking our best practices from one another, that we're sharing, and then I think ENGAGE is really helping me connect to those other PayPal users, believe it or not, it's like, there's probably a bit more here than I have back home, so this is great. >> One of the things that was funny that popped up during the keynote this morning, Jeff, was a couple of customer quotes. These were anonymous, but this, what you were saying, kind of, Jeff, it sounds like, and you probably wouldn't say this about yourself so I'll say it for you, is that, this one woman who was a user of Smartsheet in her organization said that Smartsheet made her queen of the world. Sounds like there's some status elevation. But, I'm curious, so you started, you found this organically, yourself, this technology, as Jeff was saying, this is built for business users. You didn't have to have, even though you're in the office of the CIO, you didn't have to have IT's involvement here. But here you are one of the evangelists now for Smartsheet out there, even. Tell us about that engagement, pun intended, that you got with Smartsheet to be able to start, maybe, pay a thumb isn't organically, do you have a sales account exec now, if so are you having conversations with them, are you helping to influence new features and things? >> Sure, I think our admin for Smartsheet at PayPal got tired of me giving them calls, so he said, "Hey, you do know Terren Finstra's your rep, right?". So I reached out to Terren, at this point we've conversed quite a bit and she's brought a number of other kind of ideas and forward thinking to the table that we're considering for next steps, what we can do, but the engagement has been great. They've been very responsive, helped us out when we kind of hit a rock in the road and we need some help, so yeah it's been a great relationship. >> Any way to quantify the benefits, one of the things I was reading on the smartsheet website the other day was some pretty big stats on how they're helping companies save time, which in different ways translates to saving dollars. I think I read the average user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours per year, that's a lot of time, and the average organization will save over 60,000 hours a year. What's the impact been on the weekly roll-ups that you're able to do, any way to sort of quantify how much that speed has improved? >> Yeah, I mean, if I go back to kind of the original business case, say we're spending probably half the time of two very high-price consultants doing this, I'd say it's way up there, and we were able to save, I'm sure, a couple hundred thousand dollars at least, at the minimum. So, that in itself was a big win. If we look today, kind of where we are and the time that we're able to save using the tool, given the fact that there is that middle layer's just really not there, we don't spend a lot of time on producing content at all. Instead, we can take that time and we can focus it on, okay, where are our trouble areas, where do we need to double down, where do we need to help in making sure that we're actually getting material work done in the areas that we should be rather than just administrative content-- >> Big productivity gains, well Jeff, thank you so much for joining Jeff Frick and I on the cube and sharing what you guys are doing with Smartsheet in the office of the CIO at PayPal. >> Glad to be here, thank you so much. >> Alright, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Jeff and Jeff, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube live from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018, stick around. This Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> From the palace of fine arts in San Francisco it's the Cube. Covering AT&T Spark, now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event and it's all about 5G. 5G is this huge revolution and I haven't got a definitive number but it's something on the order of hundred X, improvement of speed and data throughput. There's a lot of excitement but one of the things that is less talked about here but it was actually up on the keynote was really the roll of opensource and AT&T talked a lot about opensource and how important it is and really redefining the company around the speed of software development versus the speed of hardware development and that's a big piece of it. We're excited to have somebody who knows all about opensource our next guest he's Jeff McCaffer. He's the Director of Opensource Progress Officer at Microsoft, did I get that right Jeff? >> No, well it said Opensource Programs Officer. >> Programs Officer. >> Yep. >> So you do all about opensource. >> Yeah. >> Well first off, welcome. >> Thank you very much Jeff, it's good to be here. >> So Microsoft, you know, no one would have ever thought, I mean, you know, I'm probably dating myself. 15 years ago with that Microsoft would be a big component of opensource but in fact they're a huge proponent of opensource. >> Absolutely, even just not so long ago you know, it was not the foremost in everybody's mind that Microsoft would be doing opensource. But now it's a core part of our company. It's a core part of how we work and our engagement with the rest of the industries. So it's really growing and it's continuing to grow. >> So how did it kind of get there and what are some of the real key components that you have to worry about in your role to managing, you know, participating in all these various communities all over the place. >> Yeah, well I mean it's been a long road but it's really the way software's happening today, you mention in the intro about the dispute of software versus hardware and software's just going so fast and you know, you can aspire to be world class but when everybody else starts there with opensource, you know it's really hard to start from zero get to there. So we're really happy to be you know, using opensource and contributing. One of the real challenges we've had going forward is the scale like simply we've got literally millions of uses of opensource across all of our products and services. And managing that, keeping track of it, engaging with those, all those communities and everything is a real big challenge. So we've been building paulo season tools and changing the culture to understand that you know, you need to engage, push fixes back, all those sorts of things. And then when we look at our releasing our software, we have thousands of opensource repositories on GitHub, thousands of developers at Microsoft working on GitHub repositories, our own and others in the community. So it's just managing all of that as being a really big challenge. >> Right and it's interesting cause the opensource projects themselves, we've seen at time and time again. You know, they fork and they go a lot of different directions. There's sometimes disagreement about direction. >> Sure. >> And prioritization, so you've got a kind of manage that within the opensource thread but as well as within, you know, where those products play a role in your products. >> Right, right and we've taken a sort of federated model in the company, we're very diverse as you know right and so my team sort of helps put guidelines in place for for project teams to run and then those project teams run their own program. How they engage with opensource, however they want to and sort of at the level they want to that matches their business requirements. So it ranges everywhere from people who are fully opensource to folks who are just you know, using a little bit of stuff here and there within their products. >> Right, what if you could speak a little to opensource and the role that it plays in employee happiness, employee retention cause you know, there's so much goodness and you see it at these shows. >> Absolutely. >> Where there's particular contributors that you know, they're rock stars in their community. They've made super important contributions. >> Yeah. >> They've managed the community and I always think back, if you're the person managing that person back at the office you know, how much time do they put into their opensource effort? >> Sure. >> How much time do they put in their company efforts? How much of their time is really the company software that's built on top of that opensource. >> Yeah. >> And how do you manage that because it is a really important piece for a lot of people's personas. >> Absolutely. >> And their self values. >> Yeah, well and there's been a lot of research that says also that high performing teams, one of the traits of high performing teams is engaging in opensource. And at the personal level like individuals, there's kind of a different set of possibilities there, you know, either you're engaging in opensource for part of your product work, right, so that's sponsored by the company. Or you might be doing some things on the side or some tangential range in between there, right? >> Right. >> And sort of all of those you need to drive to the appropriate level, the folks who are working on it day to day for their, for the company. There's some really interesting dynamics that can get setup. Super exciting for the team, sometimes it can get a little waylaid maybe but you know, you want to keep them, keep them on task. But then also the, the folks who are doing it of their own volition, like on their own time and that sort of thing. That also brings back a bunch of energy and everything into the workplace. New technologies that they'll discover in their area and they'll bring back the energy and the excitement about engaging back to the regular team. >> Right. >> So there's lots of possibilities there. >> So what brings you here, what brings you to AT&T Spark today? >> Well they invited me to speak on a panel earlier today about opensource and the future of opensource and so I had a, there were a couple of other people from Linux Foundation and from AT&T. So we had a good conversation on stage. >> Yeah it's pretty interesting how, pretty much all these projects you know, eventually get put in to the Linux Foundation. That they, you know, they've just kind of become this defacto steward for a wide variety of opensource projects. >> Yeah, well there's a number of different foundations, Linux Foundation's certainly one of the better known ones, the Eclipse Foundation, Apache. >> Right, Apache yeah, right. >> Been around lots of times doing lots of good things. So there's a ton of amazing projects out there in all of these foundations. And it's just super exciting to see them all be engaging like in this sort of cohesive right, and with a good governance model. >> Right. >> Yep. >> So I'll give you the last word, one of my favorite lines always that's opensource is opensource is free like a puppy. >> Yes, it's totally free like a puppy. >> So, you know, you're living in that world, what is one of the things about opensource that most people miss, one of the really positive attributes that most people just don't see. And then what's one of the big, you know kind of biggest, kind of ongoing challenges, that's just part of operating in this opensource world? >> Well I mean, I phrase it in challenges and opportunities, right, there are obviously lots of challenges, like I was saying with scale and managing security. And the culture change that goes around collaboration and that sort of thing. The opportunities, I think are boundless really, I mean there's, one of the most gratifying things that you can see as an opensource project, is people take your technology and use it in ways you never imagined. Right, so there's, we can think of that as our products too and we take our products and they've got opensource APIs. They've got opensource frameworks and such. And people take them and do amazing things with them that we never imagined possible. And that just, that part is really exciting and invigorating. >> Yeah, alright Jeff well thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Sure. >> Congrats on all your work and I guess we'll see you in Orlando in a month or so. >> Okay, possibly. >> Alright, he's Jeff, I'm Jeff, we're all Jeffs here and we're at the Palace of Fine Arts at AT&T Spark, thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat music)