>> Announcer: From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV brought to you by UiPath. >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are wrapping up day two of our coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had an amazing event talking with customers, partners, and users, and UiPath folks themselves. And who better to wrap up the show with than Daniel Dines the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome, Daniel, great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm becoming a regular at theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's good to see you again. >> You are, this is your fifth... >> Fifth time on theCUBE. >> Fifth time, yes. >> Fifth time, but as you said before we went live, first time since the IPO. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> UiPath has been a rocket ship for a very long time. I'm sure a tremendous amount of acceleration has occurred since the IPO. We can all see the numbers. You're a public company now, ARR of 726 million. You've got over 9,000 customers. We got the chance to speak with a few of them here today. We know how important the voice of the customer is to UiPath and how very symbiotic it is. But I want to talk about the culture of the company. How is that going? How is it being maintained especially since the big splashy IPO just about six months ago? >> Well, I always believe that in order to build a durable company, culture is maybe the most important thing. I think long lasting companies have very foundational culture. So we've built it, and we invested a lot in the last 5-6 years because in the beginning when it's just a bunch of people, they don't have a culture. It's maybe like a vibe of a group of friends. But then when you go and try to dial in your culture, I think it's important that you look at your roots and who are you? What defines you? So we ended up of this really core values, which is to be humble. To me, it's one of quintessential value of every human being. And all of us want to work with humble people much more inclined to listen, to change their mind. And then we say, you have to be humble, but you have to be bold in the same time. This rocket ship need a bold crew onboard. So you need to be fast because the fastest company will always win. And you need to be immersed because my theory with life and jobs is in whatever you do, you have to be immersed. I don't believe necessarily in life-work balance. I believe in life-work cycles, in life-work immersion. So when you are with family, you are immersed. When you work, you are immersed. That will bring the best of you and the best of productivity. So we try so much to keep our culture alive, to hire people that add to the culture, that nicely fit into the culture. And recently we took a veteran of UiPath and we appointed her as Chief Culture Officer. So I'm very happy of this move. So I think we are one of the few companies that really have a Chief Culture Officer reporting directly to the CEO. So we're really serious of building our culture along the way. And as I said yesterday in my keynote, I think our values are universal values. I think they have the value of the new way of working. All of us would like to work in a company, in an environment that fosters these values. >> I certainly think the events of the last 18 months have forced many more people to be humble and embrace humility. Because everybody on video conferencing, your dog walks in, your kids walk in, you're exposed. They have to be more humble because that's just how they were getting work done. I've seen and heard a lot of humility from your folks and a lot of bold statements from customers as well. We had the CIO of Coca-Cola on talking about how UiPath is fundamental in their transformation. I think that the fact that you are doing an event here in person, whereas as Dave was saying earlier this week, your competitors are on webcams is a great example of the boldness of this company and its culture. >> Well, thank you. I think that we've made a really good decision to do this event in person. Maybe on Zoom over the last 18 months, we kind of lost a bit how important is to connect with people. It's not only about the message, it's about the trust. And I think we are deeply embedded into the critical systems of our customers. They need to trust us. They need to work with the company that they look in their eyes and say, "Yes, we are here for you." And you cannot do it over Zoom. Even I really like Zoom and Eric Yuan is a friend of mine, but a combination I think, and going into this hybrid world, I think it's actually extremely beneficial for all of us. Meeting in person a few times a year, then continuing the relationship over Zoom in time, I think it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the fact that you were able to get so many customers here, I think that's, Lisa, why a lot of companies don't have physical events 'cause they can't get their customers here. You got 2000 customers here, customers and partners, but a lot of customers. I've spoken to dozens and they're easy to find. So I think that's one point I want the audience to know. You've always been on the culture train. And enduring companies, CEOs of great enduring companies, always come back to culture. So that's important. And of course, product. You said today, you're a product guy. That's when you get excited. You've changed the industry. And I think, I've never bought into the narrative about replacing jobs. I'd never been a fan of protecting the past from the future. It's inevitable, but I think the way you've changed the market, I wonder if you could comment is... You had legacy RPA tools that were expensive and cumbersome. And so people had to get the ROI and it took a long time. So that was an obvious way to get it is to reduce headcount. You came in and said, short money you can actually try it even a free version. You compressed that ROI and the light bulb went off, and so people then said, "Oh, wow, this isn't about replacing jobs, but making my life better." And you've always said that. And that's I think one way in which you've changed the market quite dramatically, and now you have a lot of people following that path. >> That was always kind of our biggest competitive advantage. We showed our customers and our partners, this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value and actually faster time to value translate into much higher return on investment. In a typical automation project, the license cost is maybe 5% of the project cost. So the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment. So this is why speaking about our roadmap, and we always start with this high level, how can we reduce the development time? So how can we reduce the friction? How can we expand the use cases? Because these are essential themes for us, always thinking customer first, customer value and that serves us pretty well really. We win a lot in all the contests where we go side by side with other competitors. It was a very simple strategy for us. Asking customers, "Just go and test it side-by-side and see," and they see. We implement the same process in halftime, half of resources involved. It's an easy math multiplied by a thousand processes and it's done. >> When theCUBE started Daniel in 2010. It was our first year. And so it coincided with big data movement. And we said at the time that the companies who can figure out how to apply big data are going to make a lot of money, more than the big data vendors. And I think in a way now the problem with big data was too complicated, right? There were only a few big internet giants who could figure out Hadoop and all that stuff. Automation, I think is even bigger in a way, 'cause it involves data. It involves AI, it's transformative. And so we're saying the same thing here. The companies that are applying automation, and we've seen a lot of them here, Coca-Cola, Merck, Applied Materials, on and on and on, are actually the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive, incumbents that don't have to invent AI necessarily or invent their own automation. But coming back to you 'cause I think your company can make a lot of money. You've set the TAM at 60 billion. I think it actually could be well over 100 billion, but we don't have to have that conversation here. It's just convergence of all these markets that guys like IDC and Gartner, they count in stove pipes. So anyway, big, no shortage of opportunity. My question to you is feels like you have the potential to build a next great software company and with the founder as the CEO, and there aren't a lot of them left. Michael Dell is not a software company, but his name is still, Larry Ellison is still there, Marc Benioff. How do you think about the endurance, the enduring UiPath? Are you envisioning building the next great software company, may take 20 years? >> People were asking me for a long time. Did you envision that you'd get here from the beginning? And I always tell them, no. Otherwise I would have been considered mad. (Lisa and Dave laughing) So you build the vision over time. I don't believe in people that start a small SaaS company and they say, "We are going to change the world." This is not how the world works. Really, you build and you understand the customer and you build more. But at some point I realized we change so much how people work, we get the best out of them. It's something major here. And if you look in history, we are in this trap that started with agriculture. This is the trap of manual, repetitive, low value tasks that we have to do. And it took the humanity of us. And I talked to Tom Montag about with this book "Sapiens". It's interesting and that book comes with the theory that our biggest quality is our ability to collaborate. Well, our technology gives people the ability to collaborate more. So, in this way, I think it's truly transformative. And yes, I believe now that we can build the next generation of software company. >> How do you like... That's the wrong question. How are you doing with the 90-day shot clock as Michael Dell calls it? It's a new world for you, right? You've never been a CEO of a public company, the street's getting to know you like, "Who is this guy?" I'll give you another cute story. There were three companies in the early CUBE days, Tableau, Splunk, and ServiceNow that had the kind of customer passion that you have. I think ServiceNow could be one of the next great software companies. Tableau now part of Salesforce. I think Splunk was under capitalized, but we see the same kind of passion here. So now you're the CEO of a public company, except the street's getting to know you a little bit. They're like, "Hmm, how do we read the guy?" All that stuff. That'll sort itself out. But so what's life like on the public markets? >> Well, I don't think anyone prepares you for the life of a public company. (Dave laughing) I thought it's going to be easier, but it's not, because we were used to deal with private investors and it's much easier because I think private investors have access to a lot more data. They look into your books. So they understand your business model. With public investors, they have access only to like a spreadsheet of numbers. So they need to figure out a business model, the trajectory from just a split. It's way more difficult. I've come to appreciate their job. It's much more difficult. So they have to get all the cues from how I dress, how do I say this word? They watch the FED announcements. What do they mean to say by this? And I and the shim we are first time in a job as a public company CEO, public company CFO. So of course it's a lot of learning for us and like in any learning environment, initial learning curve is tough, but you progress quite a lot. So I believe that over the next few quarters, we will be in the position to build trust with the street and they will understand better our business model, and they see that we are building everything for creating durable growth. >> It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. I know it's a cliche, but it really does apply here. >> You've certainly built a tremendous amount of trust within your 9,000 strong customer base. I think I was reading that your 70% of your revenue comes from existing customers. I think this is a great use case for how to do land and expand really well. So, the DNA I think is there at UiPath to be able to build that trust with the street. >> Yeah, absolutely. Our 9,000 plus customers, it's our wealth. This is our IP in a way. It's even better than in our pro. It's our customers. We have one of the best net retention rate in the industry of 144%. So that speaks volume. >> Lisa: It does. >> Automation for good. I know you've read some of the stuff I've written. I've covered you guys pretty extensively over the years. And that theme sounds like a lot of motherhood and apple pie, but one of the things that I wrote is that you look at the productivity decline and particularly in Western countries over the last two decades. Now I know with the pandemic and especially in 2021, productivity is going up for reasons that I think are understood, but the trend is clear. So when you think about big problems, climate change, diversity, income inequality, health of populations, overpopulation, on and on and on and on. You're not going to solve those problems by throwing labor at them. It has to be automation. So that to me is the tie to automation for good. And a lot of people might roll their eyes at it. But does that resonate with you? >> It totally resonates with me. Look at US. US population is not growing at the rates that we were used to. It's going to plateau at some point. It's just obvious. Like it plateaued in Japan, in Japan it's decreasing. US will see a decrease at some point. How do you increase the GDP? If your population is declining, productivity is declining. How do you increase GDP? Because the moment we stop increasing GDP, everything will collapse. The modern world is built on the idea of continuous economical growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops. We'll go back to our case and restart the engine. So, automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life. >> Which by the way is important because the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, that's how growth allows the people at the bottom to rise up to the middle and the middle to the top. So that's how you deal with that problem. You asked Tom Montag about crypto. So I have to ask you about crypto. What are your thoughts? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? Do you have any wisdom? >> I have to admit, I never really understood the use cases of crypto. Technology behind crypto, blockchain is fascinating technology, but crypto in itself, I was never a fan. Tom Montag today gave me one of the best explanation of the very same. Look, Daniel, from Americans perspective we have the dollars, and this is the global currency. Crypto doesn't have so much sense, but think about a country like Columbia or Venezuela, countries where there people don't have so much trust in their currency, and where different political system can seize your assets from you. You need to be able to be capable of putting them into something else that is outside government context. I believe this is a good use case but I still don't believe that crypto is that type of asset that you know will survive the test of time. I think it's really too much... To me the difference between gold and Bitcoin is that it's too... You cannot replicate gold whatever you... It's impossible, unless you are God you cannot create gold two, right? It's impossible, but you can create Bitcoin 2. And at some point the fashion will move from Bitcoin 2 to Bitcoin 3. So I don't think the value that you can build in one particular crypto currency right now will stay over time. But it's just me. I was the wrong so many times in my life. >> You've been busy. You haven't had time to study crypto. >> I agree, totally agree. (Lisa and Dave laughing) >> What's been some of the feedback from the customers that are here. We saw yesterday a standing room only keynote. I'm sure it was great for you to be on stage again actually interacting with your customers and your partners. What's been some of the feedback as we've seen really this shift from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform? >> Well, first of all, it was really great to be on stage. I don't know, I'm not a good presenter, really. But going there in front of people felt me with energy. Suddenly I felt a lot of comfort. So, I was capable of being myself with the people, which is really awesome. And the transition to a platform, from a product to a platform was really very well received by our customers because even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to them, what is the value of having an independent automation platform that is not tied to any big silos that application providers creates, we win and we win by default somehow. You've seen them now. So I think even the next evolution of semantic automation, this one is very well with our customers. >> Well, Daniel, it's been fantastic having you on. We have a good cadence here, and I hope we can continue it. On theCUBE, we love to identify early stage companies. Although as I wrote, you had a long, strange path to IPO because you took a long, long time and I think did it the right way to get product market fit. >> Absolutely. >> And that's not necessarily the way Silicon Valley works, double, double, triple, triple, and that you got product market fit, you got loyal customer base, and I think that's a key part of your success and you can see it and so congratulations, but many more years to come and we're really watching. >> Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys again. Thank you, that was awesome really. Great discussion. >> Exactly, good. Great to have you here in person and thanks for having us here in person as well. We look forward to FORWARD V. >> You will be invited forever. Thank you, guys, really. >> Forever, did you hear that? All right, for Daniel Dines and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV day two. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> ServiceNow is a company that investors love to love, but there's caution in the investor community right now is confusion about transitory inflation and higher interest rates looms. ServiceNow also suffers from a perfection syndrome of sorts. The company has seen that the slightest misstep can cause many freak outs from the investor community. So what it's done is it's architected a financial and communications model that allows it to beat expectations and raise its outlook on a consistent basis. Regardless, ServiceNow appears to be on track to vie for what its CEO Bill McDermott refers to as the next great enterprise software company. Wait, I thought Marc Benioff had his hands on that steering wheel. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll dig into one of the companies we began following almost 10 years ago and provide some thoughts on ServiceNow's March to 15 billion by 2026, which we think is a highly probable achievement. In 2020, despite the contraction in IT spending, SeviceNow outperformed both the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, but here's a view of 2021. And you can see while the stock has done well since it saw a softness in May and again in early June, and it bounced off that double bottom, it's performance is well below those other benchmarks. This is not a big surprise given the fact that this is a high growth stock and we all know that those names with high multiples get hurt in an inflationary environment, but still the gaps are notable. This is especially true given the performance of the company. It's not often that you see a company with four to $5 billion in revenue growing at a 30% clip, throwing off billions of dollars in free cash flow and increasing operating margins at 100 basis points a year and promising to do that over the next several years. In fact, I don't think we've ever seen that before. I remember years ago, when the trade press was criticizing SeviceNow for its lofty valuation, despite the fact that it was losing money, then CEO, Frank Slootman said to me, "Dave, we can be highly profitable tomorrow if we want it to be, but this is a marathon and we're planning to go big." So essentially Slootman was telling me that this company was going to be an ATM machine that prints money. And that seems to be how it's shaping up. I happened to be at SeviceNow headquarters in 2017, literally the first day on the job for John Donahoe, the CEO replaced Slootman, and I remember while I was there thinking Donahoe was certainly capable, but why the heck I said, would the board let Frank Slootman get away? You know what? It turned great for Slootman, he's at snowflake. Donahoe, I always felt was a consumer guy anyway, and not long for SeviceNow. And now you have this guy, new CEO, Bill McDermott at the helm. He's not a more qualified CEO for the company in my view. About two months ago, McDermott led a virtual investor day. We've had McDermott on theCUBE a couple of times back when he was CEO of SAP and this individual is very compelling. He's got JFK like looks and charisma, but more than that, he's passionate and convincing. And he obviously knows enterprise software. And with conviction, he laid the groundwork for how SeviceNow will get to $10 billion in revenue by 2024 on its way to 15 billion two years thereafter. And one of the big things McDermott's stressed was they're going to get there without any big M&A moves. And that's important because previously the door was left open for that possibility. And now the company is assuring investors that it can get there organically, even with slower growth. So this chart implies no big M&A, and you can see Slootman handed over the reigns at that year one tick on the horizontal axis. This was not a turnaround story. It was a rocket ship at the time. And look at the logos on this chart. This is a revenue view and SeviceNow is aiming to be the fastest to get to 10 billion in software industry history. SeviceNow is valuation just to sort of shift gears here for a minute blew by workdays years ago. Its sites are now set on SAP which is currently valued at 170 billion. And then there's Oracle and Salesforce. They're at around 250 billion and 225 billion in valuation respectively. And these lines back to revenue show the trajectory that these companies took to get to 10 billion. And you can see how SeviceNow plans to get there with those dotted lines. And this is why I call this a collision course with Salesforce, because I think Marc Benioff might say, "Hey, we are ready." Are the next great enterprise software company. We have no plans to give up that post, that mantle anytime soon. I want to share a clip from four years ago. something we've been saying for a long, long time. Roll the clip. >> As they say their goal now is to be four billion by 2020. It feels like, you know, when we first covered SeviceNow knowledge, we said, wow, this company reminds us a lot of the early days of Salesforce. They've got this platform you can develop on this platform, you know, call it paths or, you know, whatever you want to call it, but we at the time said, they're on a collision course with Salesforce. Now there's plenty of room for both of those companies in the marketplace. Salesforce obviously focused predominantly on Salesforce automation, SeviceNow really on workflow automation, but you can see those sort of two markets coming together. >> Now you may be thinking isn't Salesforce's revenue like 5X that of SeviceNow? And yes it is. But I would say a couple of things. One is that Salesforce has gotten to where it is with a lot of M&A, more than 60 acquisitions. At some high profile wants to like slack and Tableau as well as MuleSoft and Heroku back in the day and many others. So we'll see how far McDermott can get before he reverts to his inquisitive self that we saw at SAP. But the second thing I'll say is serviceNow positions itself as the platform of platforms. And the thing is it runs its own cloud. And when it does acquisitions, it replatforms the acquiree into the now platform so that it can drive integrations more seamlessly. That's fundamentally part of its value proposition, a big part of its value proposition. And that means it's somewhat limited on the acquisitions it can make, it has to be pretty selective. Otherwise it's got to do a heavy lift to get it the now platform. It's the power of the models, especially if customers can get to a single CMDB, that configuration database management system, which by the way, a lot of customers never get to that kind of skirt that, but remember SeviceNow is like the ERP for IT. So the more you can get to a single data model, the more effective you're going to be, especially in this data era where you got to put data at the core of your organization, something we've talked about a lot. And the third thing I'll mention the SeviceNow wants to use this platform to attack what it sees as a very large TAM as shown here. Now, a couple of things I want to point out. One is when SeviceNow IPO in 2012, a lot of the analysts said that they were way overvalued because they were in a market. It was help desk and writing tickets was a $2 billion business that was in decline and BMC remedy. Wasn't really that big of a base to attack. In 2013, the Wikibon team took a stab at sizing the TAM. I dug back into the old Wiki. We had well over 30 billion at the time and we expected the company to move deeper into IT and then beyond IT into lines of business and line of business management. Yeah, we felt we were being conservative. We thought the number could be as big as 100 billion, but we felt like putting that number out there, was too aggressive but, you know, it turns out from SeviceNow standpoint, it sees these new software opportunities coming together. And SeviceNow in a way they can double dip both in and beyond their current markets. What I mean by that is it can partner with, for instance, HCM vendors and then at the same time offer employee workflows. They can partner or even purchase RPA tools from specialists like UI path or automation anywhere. And it can go acquire a company which it did like Intel a bot and integrate what I would consider lighter-weight RPA into its platform. So it can manage workflows for best of breed and pick off functionality throughout the software stack. Now what's interesting in this chart is first, the size of the TAM that SeviceNow sees 175 billion, but also how it's now reorganizing its business around workflows, which you see in the left-hand side. This was done of course, to simplify the many, many, many things that you can buy from SeviceNow. But there's also speculation that SeviceNow is leveraging its orchestration and service catalog capabilities, which are meaningful from a revenue standpoint and using them to power these workflows because the way it was organized was both confusing and not as effective as it could be. Now, it's well known that SeviceNow has ITSM this comprises the biggest piece of its revenue pie, probably a couple billion. And it's adding to that with ITSM pro and ITSM enterprise going deeper, deeper into the ITSM space. And it's ITAM business is also doing well against the likes of Datadog and Elastic and Splunk and others and its acquisition of LightStep. It's going to push it further into this space, which is both crowded is morphing into observability as we've been reporting. What's unclear though is how well, for instance, HR and the CSM businesses are doing as sort of standalone businesses, you might remember they used to be standalone businesses with standalone GMs. They've sort of changed that up a little bit. So this is potentially not only a way to simplify, but also shuffle the deck chairs a bit and maybe prop up the non IT workflows, which then allows SeviceNow to show this chart, which essentially says to the street, see, we have this huge TAM and our TAM expansion strategy is working as the overall business is growing nicely yet the mix is shifting toward customer, employee and creator workflows. See how awesome our business is and see how smart we are. So this is possibly a way to hide some of the warts and accentuate the growth. Look, there's not a lot to criticize SeviceNow about, but they've been pretty good at featuring what some perceive as weaknesses. Like for instance, the way it marketed it's a multi-instance and turned that into an advantage as a better model. Even though the whole cloud world was going multitenant and within a ServiceNow you got to really plan new releases, which they drop every six months, although CJ decide. So he's SeviceNows head of products. He did say at the investor meeting, that event that they held last May, that they do certain releases now bi-monthly and even some bi-weekly. So, yeah, maybe a little bit of nitpicking here, but I always liked to question when such changes are made to the reporting structures to the street. And if workflows are the new black, so to speak, I wonder will SeviceNow start pricing by workflows versus what really has been a legacy of, you know, what's your ticket volume and how many agents need access to the model and we'll charge you accordingly? Now, I'm not a service pricing expert and they don't make it easy to figure out that pricing. So let's dig a little bit more on that and keep an eye on it. Now I want to turn to the customers survey data from ETR on ServiceNow. First, here's the latest update on IT spending from ETR, something that we've been tracking for quite some time. We've been consistently saying to expect this year a seven to 8% growth for 2021 IT spend off of last year's contraction. And the latest ETR survey data puts it right at 8%. So we really liked that number. You know, could even be higher push 10% this year. Now, let's look at the spending profile within the ETR dataset. Of the 1100 plus respondents to this quarter, there were 377 SeviceNow customers, and this chart shows the breakdown of net score or spending velocity among those respondents. Remember, net score is a measure of that spending momentum. What it does is it takes the lime green bar, which is adopting new, that says 11% of that 377 customers are adopting ServiceNow for the first time. It takes that lime green and it adds the forest green bar that's growth in spending of 6% or more this half relative to the first half. That's 43% of the customers that have been surveyed here. And then it subtracts out the reds, which is that pinkish is spending less, that's 3%, small number of spending less. And then the bright red is we're leaving the platform. That's a minuscule 1% of the respondents. And you can see the rest in that gray area is flat spending, which is ignored. And so what this does is it calculates out, you'd take the greens minus the reds. It calculates out to a net score 50% for SeviceNow, which is well above that magic 40% elevated mark that we'd like to see. It's rare for a company of this size, except for the hyperscalers. You see AWS and Microsoft and Google are up that high and oh, there's another great enterprise software company at the 45% net score level. Guess who that is, salesforce.com. But anyway, it's rare to see that large of a company have that much spending momentum in the ETR surveys. Now let's take a look at the time series data for ServiceNow. This chart shows the net score granularity over time. So you see the bars, that time series, the blue line is net score. And you can see that it was dragged down during last year's lockdown. As, even though SeviceNow did pretty well last year and it's now spiking back to pre-COVID levels, which is a very positive sign for the company. That red call-out that ETR makes it shows market share. That's an indicator of pervasiveness in the dataset. I'm not overlyconcern there that downturn. I don't think it's a meaningful indicator because ServiceNow revenue is skewed towards a big spender accounts and this is an account unit indicator, if you will not spending level metric. And okay, and here's another reason and why I'm not concerned about SeviceNow is a so-called market share number in the ETR dataset as ETR defines it. This is an X, Y Z view chart that we'd like to show here. We've got net score on the vertical axis and market share in the horizontal plane. This is focusing on enterprise software. So remember that 40% red line is the magic level, anything above that is really indicative of momentum. Oh look, there's Salesforce and ServiceNow on that little collision course that I talked about. Now, CEO McDermott, I would say as by the way, would his predecessors, look, we're a platform of platforms and we partner with other companies, we'll meet at the customer level and sure we'll integrate functions where we think it can add value to customers. But we also understand we have to work with the vendors that our customers are using. So it's all good, plenty of room for growth for all of us, which by the way is true. But I would say this, anyone who's ever been in the enterprise software industry knows that enterprise software execs and their salespeople believe that every dollar spent on software should go to them. And if it's a good market with momentum and growth, they believe they can either organically write software to deliver customer function and value, or they can acquire to fill gaps. So, well, what McDermott would say is true. The likes of Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, Infor, et cetera, they all want as big of a budget piece as possible in the enterprise software space. That's just the way it is. Now, we're going to close with some anecdotal comments from ETR insights, formerly called VENN, which is a round table discussion with CXOs. You can read the summaries when we post on Wikibon and SiliconANGLE but let me summarize. This first comment comes from an assistant VP in retail who says SeviceNow is a key part of their digital transformation. They moved off of BMC remedy two years ago for the global ticketing system. And this person is saying that while the platform is extremely powerful, you got to buy into specific modules to just get one feature that you want. You may not need a lot of the other features, so it starts to get expensive. The other thing this individual is saying is initially, it's a very services heavy project. And so I'll tell you, when you look at the SeviceNow ecosystem the big SIs, the big names, they have big appetites. They love to eat at the trough as I sometimes say, and they want big clients with big budgets. So if you're not one of those top 500 or 700 customers, the big name SIs, you know, they might not be for you. They're not going to pay attention to you. They're going after the big prizes. So what I would suggest is you call up someone like Jason Wojahn of third era, he's the CEO over there and he's got a lot of experience in this space or some more specialized SeviceNow consultancy like them because you're going to get better value for the money. And you're going to get short-term ROI faster with a long-term sustainable ROI as a measurable objective. And I think this last comment sums it up nice, let me to skip over the second one and go just jump to the third one. This basically says the platform is integrated. It's like a mesh. It's not a bunch of stovepipes and cul-de-sacs. Yes it's expensive, but people love it. And like the iPhone, it just works. And their feature pace is accelerating. So pretty strong testimonials, but I want to keep an eye on price transparency any possible backlash there and how the ecosystem evolves. It's something that we called out early on. It's an indicator and SeviceNow needs to continue to invest in that partner network is especially as it builds out its vertical industry practices and expands internationally. Okay, we'll leave it there for now. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes they're all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for breaking analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @DVellante or email me @david.vellantesiliconangle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> When a piece of digital art sells for $69.3 million, more than has ever been paid for works, by Gauguin or Salvador Dali, making it created the third most expensive living artists in the world. One can't help but take notice and ask, what is going on? The latest craze around NFTs may feel a bit bubblicious, but it's yet another sign, that the digital age is now fully upon us. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon's CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to take a look at some of the trends, that may be difficult for observers and investors to understand, but we think offer significant insights to the future and possibly some opportunities for young investors many of whom are fans of this program. And how the trends may relate to enterprise tech. Okay, so this guy Beeple is now the hottest artist on the planet. That's his Twitter profile. That picture on the inset. His name is Mike Winkelmann. He is actually a normal looking dude, but that's the picture he chose for his Twitter. This collage reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage. You may already know the story, but many of you may not. Back in 2005 a college kid from England named Alex Tew, T-E-W created The Million Dollar Homepage to fund his education. And his idea was to create a website with a million pixels, and sell ads at a dollar for each pixel. Guess how much money he raised. A million bucks, right? No, wrong. He raised $1,037,100. How so you ask? Well, he auctioned off the last 1000 pixels on eBay, which fetched an additional $38,000. Crazy, right? Well, maybe not. Pretty creative in a way, way early sign of things to come. Now, I'm not going to go deep into NFTs, and explain the justification behind them. There's a lot of material that's been published that can do justice to the topic better than I can. But here are the basics, NFTs stands for Non-Fungible Tokens. They are digital representations of assets that exist in a blockchain. Now, each token as a unique and immutable identifier, and it uses cryptography to ensure its authenticity. NFTs by the name, they're not fungible. So, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, which can be traded on a like-for-like basis, in other words, if you and I each own one bitcoin we know exactly how much each of our bitcoins is worth at any point of time. Non-Fungible Tokens each have their own unique values. So, they're not comparable on a like-to-like basis. But what's the point of this? Well, NFTs can be applied to any property, identities tweets, videos, we're seeing collectables, digital art, pretty much anything. And it's really. The use cases are unlimited. And NFTs can streamline transactions, and they can be bought and sold very efficiently without the need for a trusted third party involved. Now, the other benefit is the probability of fraud, is greatly reduced. So where do NFTs fit as an asset class? Well, they're definitely a new type of asset. And again, I'm not going to try to justify their existence, but I want to talk about the choices, that investors have in the market today. The other day, I was on a call with Jay Po. He is a VC and a Principal at a company called Stage 2 Capital. He's a former Bessemer VC and one of the sharper investors around. And he was talking about the choices that investors have and he gave a nice example that I want to share with you and try to apply here. Now, as an investor, you have alternatives, of course we're showing here a few with their year to date charts. Now, as an example, you can buy Amazon stock. Now, if you bought just about exactly a year ago you did really well, you probably saw around an 80% return or more. But if you want to jump in today, your mindset might be, hmm, well, okay. Amazon, they're going to be around for a long time, so it's kind of low risk and I like the stock, but you're probably going to get, well let's say, maybe a 10% annual return over the longterm, 15% or maybe less maybe single digits, but, maybe more than that but it's unlikely that any kind of reasonable timeframe within any reasonable timeframe you're going to get a 10X return. In order to get that type of return on invested capital, Amazon would have to become a $16 trillion valued company. So, you sit there, you asked yourself, what's the probability that Amazon goes out of business? Well, that's pretty low, right? And what are the chances it becomes a $16 trillion company over the next several years? Well, it's probably more likely that it continues to grow at that more stable rate that I talked about. Okay, now let's talk about Snowflake. Now, as you know, we've covered the company quite extensively. We watched this company grow from an early stage startup and then saw its valuation increase steadily as a private company, but you know, even early last year it was valued around $12 billion, I think in February, and as late as mid September right before the IPO news hit that Marc Benioff and Warren Buffett were going to put in $250 million each at the IPO or just after the IPO and it was projected that Snowflake's valuation could go over $20 billion at that point. And on day one after the IPO Snowflake, closed worth more than $50 billion, the stock opened at 120, but unless you knew a guy, you had to hold your nose and buy on day one. And you know, maybe got it at 240, maybe you got it at 250, you might have got it at higher and at the time you might recall, I said, You're likely going to get a better price than on day one, which is usually the case with most IPOs, stock today's around 230. But you look at Snowflake today and if you want to buy in, you look at it and say, Okay, well I like the company, it's probably still overvalued, but I can see the company's value growing substantially over the next several years, maybe doubling in the near to midterm [mumbles] hit more than a hundred billion dollar valuation back as recently as December, so that's certainly feasible. The company is not likely to flame out because it's highly valued, I have to probably be patient for a couple of years. But you know, let's say I liked the management, I liked the company, maybe the company gets into the $200 billion range over time and I can make a decent return, but to get a 10X return on Snowflake you have to get to a valuation of over a half a trillion. Now, to get there, if it gets there it's going to become one of the next great software companies of our time. And you know, frankly if it gets there I think it's going to go to a trillion. So, if that's what your bet is then you know, you would be happy with that of course. But what's the likelihood? As an investor you have to evaluate that, what's the probability? So, it's a lower risk investment in Snowflake but maybe more likely that Snowflake, you know, they run into competition or the market shifts, maybe they get into the $200 billion range, but it really has to transform the industry execute for you to get in to that 10 bagger territory. Okay, now let's look at a different asset that is cryptocurrency called Compound, way more risky. But Compound is a decentralized protocol that allows you to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies. Now, I'm not saying go out and buy compound but just as a thought exercise is it's got an asset here with a lower valuation, probably much higher upside, but much higher risk. But so for Compound to get to 10X return it's got to get to $20 billion valuation. Now, maybe compound isn't the right asset for your cup of tea, but there are many cryptos that have made it that far and if you do your research and your homework you could find a project that's much, much earlier stage that yes, is higher risk but has a much higher upside that you can participate in. So, this is how investors, all investors really look at their choices and make decisions. And the more sophisticated investors, they're going to use detailed metrics and analyze things like MOIC, Multiple on Invested Capital and IRR, which is Internal Rate of Return, do TAM analysis, Total Available Market. They're going to look at competition. They're going to look at detailed company models in ARR and Churn rates and so forth. But one of the things we really want to talk about today and we brought this up at the snowflake IPO is if you were Buffet or Benioff and you had to, you know, quarter of a dollars to put in you could get an almost guaranteed return with your late in the game, but pre IPO money or a look if you were Mike Speiser or one of the earlier VCs or even someone like Jeremy Burton who was part of the inside network you could get stock or options, much cheaper. You get a 5X, 10X, 50X or even North of a hundred X return like the early VCs who took a big risk. But chances are, you're not one of these in one of these categories. So how can you as a little guy participate in something big and you might remember at the time of the snowflake IPO we showed you this picture, who are these people, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Chris Dixon, this girl Sono. And of course Tim Berners-Lee, you know, that these are some of the folks that inspired me personally to pay attention to crypto. And I want to share the premise that caught my attention. It was this. Think about the early days of the internet. If you saw what Berners-Lee was working on or Linus Torvalds, in one to invest in the internet, you really couldn't. I mean, you couldn't invest in Linux or TCP/IP or HTTP. Suppose you could have invested in Cisco after its IPO that would have paid off pretty big time, for sure. You know, he could have waited for the Netscape IPO but the core infrastructure of the internet was fundamentally not directly a candidate for investment by you or really, you know, by anybody. And Satya Nadella said the other day we have reached maximum centralization. The main protocols of the internet were largely funded by the government and they've been co-opted by the giants. But with crypto, you actually can invest in core infrastructure technologies that are building out a decentralized internet, a new internet, you know call it web three Datto. It's a big part of the investment thesis behind what Carlson-wee is doing. And Andreessen Horowitz they have two crypto funds. They've raised more than $800 million to invest and you should read the firm's crypto investment thesis and maybe even take their crypto startup classes and some great content there. Now, one of the people that I haven't mentioned in this picture is Camila Russo. She's a journalist she's turned into hardcore crypto author is doing great job explaining the white hot defining space or decentralized finance. If you're just at read her work and educate yourself and learn more about the future and be happy perhaps you'll find some 10X or even hundred X opportunities. So look, there's so much innovation going around going on around blockchain and crypto. I mean, you could listen to Warren Buffet and Janet Yellen who implied this is all going to end badly. But while look, these individuals they're smart people. I don't think they would be my go-to source on understanding the potential of the technology and the future of what it could bring. Now, we've talked earlier at the, at the start here about NFTs. DeFi is one of the most interesting and disruptive trends to FinTech, names like Celsius, Nexo, BlockFi. BlockFi let's actually the average person participate in liquidity pools is actually quite interesting. Crypto is going mainstream Tesla, micro strategy putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. We have a 2017 Jamie diamond. He called Bitcoin a tulip bulb like fraud, yet just the other day JPM announced a structured investment vehicle to give its clients a basket of stocks that have exposure to crypto, PayPal allowing customers to buy, sell, and Hodl crypto. You can trade crypto on Robin Hood. Central banks are talking about launching digital currencies. I talked about the Fedcoin for a number of years and why not? Coinbase is doing an IPO will give it a value of over a hundred billion. Wow, that sounds frothy, but still big names like Mark Cuban and Jamaat palliate Patiala have been active in crypto for a while. Gronk is getting into NFTs. So it goes to have a little bit of that bubble feel to it. But look often when tech bubbles burst they shake out the pretenders but if there's real tech involved, some contenders emerge. So, and they often do so as dominant players. And I really believe that the innovation around crypto is going to be sustained. Now, there is a new web being built out. So if you want to participate, you got to do some research figure out things like how PolkaWorks, make a call on whether you think avalanche is an Ethereum killer dig in and find out about new projects and form a thesis. And you may, as a small player be able to find some big winners, but look you do have to be careful. There was a lot of fraud during the ICO. Craze is your risk. So understand the Tokenomics and maybe as importantly the Pump-a-nomics, because they certainly loom as dangers. This is not for the faint of heart but because I believe it involves real tech. I like it way better than Reddit stocks like GameStop for example, now not to diss Reddit. There's some good information on Reddit. If you're patient, you can find it. And there's lots of good information flowing on Discord. There's people flocking to Telegram as a hedge against big tech. Maybe there's all sounds crazy. And you know what, if you've grown up in a privileged household and you have a US Education you know, maybe it is nuts and a bit too risky for you. But if you're one of the many people who haven't been able to participate in these elite circles there are things going on, especially outside of the US that are democratizing investment opportunities. And I think that's pretty cool. You just got to be careful. So, this is a bit off topic from our typical focus and ETR survey analysis. So let's bring this back to the enterprise because there's a lot going on there as well with blockchain. Now let me first share some quotes on blockchain from a few ETR Venn Roundtables. First comment is from a CIO to diversified holdings company who says correctly, blockchain will hit the finance industry first but there are use cases in healthcare given the privacy and security concerns and logistics to ensure provenance and reduce fraud. And to that individual's point about finance. This is from the CTO of a major financial platform. We're really taking a look at payments. Yeah. Do you think traditional banks are going to lose control of the payment systems? Well, not without a fight, I guess, but look there's some real disruption possibilities here. And just last comment from a government CIO says, we're going to wait until the big platform players they get into their software. And so that is happening Oracle, IBM, VMware, Microsoft, AWS Cisco, they all have blockchain initiatives going on, now by the way, none of these tech companies wants to talk about crypto. They try to distance themselves from that topic which is understandable, I guess, but I'll tell you there's far more innovation going on in crypto than there is in enterprise tech companies at this point. But I predict that the crypto innovations will absolutely be seeping into enterprise tech players over time. But for now the cloud players, they want to support developers who are building out this new internet. The database is certainly a logical place to support a mutable transactions which allow people to do business one-on-one and have total confidence that the source hasn't been hacked or changed and infrastructure to support smart contracts. We've seen that. The use cases in the enterprise are endless asset tracking data access, food, tracking, maintenance, KYC or know your customer, there's applications in different industries, telecoms, oil and gas on and on and on. So look, think of NFTs as a signal crypto craziness is a signal. It's a signal as to how IT in other parts of companies and their data might be organized, managed and tracked and protected, and very importantly, valued. Look today. There's a lot of memes. Crypto kitties, art, of course money as well. Money is the killer app for blockchain, but in the future the underlying technology of blockchain and the many percolating innovations around it could become I think will become a fundamental component of a new digital economy. So get on board, do some research and learn for yourself. Okay, that's it for today. Remember all of these episodes they're available as podcasts, wherever you listen. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Please feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or tweet me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action and data science. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, be careful out there in crypto land. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with our leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE and the special IBM Brocade panel. I'm Lisa Martin. And I'm having a great opportunity here to sit down for the next 20 minutes with three gentlemen please welcome Brian Sherman a distinguished engineer from IBM, Brian, great to have you joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Matt key here. Flash systems SME from IBM, Matt, happy Friday. >> Happy Friday, Lisa. Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. And AIG Customer solution here from Brocade is here. AJ welcome. >> Thanks for having me along. >> AJ we're going to stick with you, IBM and Brocade have had a very long you said about 22 year strategic partnership. There's some new news. And in terms of the evolution of that talk to us about what's going on with with Brocade IBM and what is new in the storage industry? >> Yeah, so the the newest thing for us at the moment is that IBM just in mid-October launched our Gen seven platforms. So this is think about the stresses that are going on in the IT environments. This is our attempt to keep pace with with the performance levels that the IBM teams are now putting into their storage environments the All-Flash Data Centers and the new technologies around non-volatile memory express. So that's really, what's driving this along with the desire to say, "You know what people aren't allowed "to be in the data center." And so if they can't be in the data center then the fabrics actually have to be able to figure out what's going on and basically provide a lot of the automation pieces. So something we're referring to as the autonomous SAM. >> And we're going to dig into NBME of our fabrics in a second but I do want to AJ continue with you in terms of industries, financial services, healthcare airlines there's the biggest users, biggest need. >> Pretty much across the board. So if you look at the global 2000 as an example, something on the order of about 96, 97% of the global 2000 make use of fiber channel environments and in portions of their world generally tends to be a lot of the high end financial guys, a lot of the pharmaceutical guys, the automotive, the telcos, pretty much if the data matters, and it's something that's critical whether we talk about payment card information or healthcare environments, data that absolutely has to be retained, has to get there, has to perform then it's this combination that we're bringing together today around the new storage elements and the functionalities they have there. And then our ability in the fabric. So the concept of a 64 gig environment to help basically not be the bottleneck in the application demands, 'cause one thing I can promise you after 40 years in this industry is the software guys always figure out how to all the performance that the hardware guys put on the shelf, right? Every single time. >> Well there's gauntlet thrown down there. Matt, let's go to you. I want to get IBM's perspective on this. Again, as we said, a 22 year strategic partnership, as we look at things like not being able to get into the data center during these unprecedented times and also the need to be able to remove some of those bottlenecks how does IBM view this? >> Yeah, totally. It's certainly a case of raising the bar, right? So we have to as a vendor continue to evolve in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, cost density, escalating simplicity, because it's not just a case of not be able to touch the rates, but there's fewer people not being able to adjust the rates, right? It's a case where our operational density continues to have to evolve being able to raise the bar on the network and be able to still saturate those line rates and be able to provide that simply a cost efficiency that gets us to a utilization that raises the bar from our per capita ratio from not just talking about 200, 300 terabytes per admin but going beyond the petabyte scale per admin. And we can't do that unless people have access to the data. And we have to provide the resiliency. We have to provide the simplicity of presentation and automation from our side. And then this collaboration that we do with our network brother like Brocade here continued to stay out of the discussion when it comes to talking about networks and who threw the ball next. So we truly appreciate this Gen seven launch that they're doing we're happy to come in and fill that pipe on the flash side for them. >> Excellent and Brian as a distinguished engineer and let me get your perspectives on the evolution of the technology over this 22 year partnership. >> Thanks Lisa. It certainly has been a longstanding, a great relationship, great partnership all the way from inventing joint things, to developing, to testing and deploying to different technologies through the course of time. And it's been one of those that where we are today, like AJ had talked about being able to sustain what the applications require today in this always on time type of environment. And as Matt said, bringing together the density and operational simplicity to make that happen 'cause we have to make it easier from the storage side for operations to be able to manage this volume of data that we have coming out and our due diligence is to be able to serve the data up as fast as we can and as resilient as we can. >> And so sticking with you, Brian that simplicity is key because as we know as we get more and more advances in technology the IT environment is only becoming more complex. So really truly enabling organizations in any industry to simplify is absolute table stakes. >> Yeah, it definitely is. And that's core to what we're focused on and how do we make the storage environment simple. It's been one those through the years and historically, we've had entry-level us and the industry as a whole, is that an entry-level product mid range level products, high-end level products. And earlier this year, we said enough, enough of that it's one product portfolio. So it's the same software stack it's just, okay. Small, medium and large in terms of the appliances that get delivered. Again, building on what Matt said, from a density perspective where we can have a petabyte of uncompressed and data reduced storage in a two Enclosure. So it becomes from a overall administration perspective, again, one software stake, one automation stack, one way to do point in time copies, replication. So in focusing on how to make that as simple for the operations as we possibly can. >> I think we'd all take a little bit of that right now. Matt, let's go to you and then AJ view, let's talk a little bit more, dig into the IBM storage arrays. I mean, we're talking about advances in flash, we're talking about NBME as a forcing function for applications to change and evolve with the storage. Matt, give us your thoughts on that. >> We saw a monumental leap in where we take some simplicity pieces from how we deliver our arrays but also the technology within the arrays. About nine months ago, in February we launched into the latest generation of non technology and with that born the story of simplicity one of the pieces that we've been happily essentially negating of value prop is storage level tiering and be able to say, "Hey, well we still support the idea of going down "to near line SaaS and enterprise disc in different flavors "of solid state whether it's tier one short usage "the tier zero high performance, high usage, "all the way up to storage class memory." While we support those technologies and the automated tiering, this elegance of what we've done as latest generation technology that we launched nine months ago has been able to essentially homogenize the environments to we're able to deliver that petabyte per rack unit ratio that Brian was mentioning be able to deliver over into all tier zero solution that doesn't have to go through woes of software managed data reduction or any kind of software managed hearing just to be always fast, always essentially available from a 100% data availability guaranteed that we offer through a technology called hyper swap, but it's really kind of highlighting what we take in from that simplicity story, by going into that extra mile and meeting the market in technology refresh. I mean, if you say the words IBM over the Thanksgiving table, you're kind of thinking, how big blue, big mainframe, old iron stuff but it's very happy to say over in distributed systems that we are in fact leading this pack by multiple months not just the fact that, "Hey, we announced sooner." But actually coming to delivering on-prem the actual solution itself nine, 10 months prior to anybody else and when that gets us into new density flavors gets us into new efficiency offerings. Not just talk about, "Hey, I can do this petabyte scale "a couple of rack units but with the likes of Brocade." That actually equates to a terabyte per second and a floor tile, what's that do for your analytics story? And the fact that we're now leveraging NBME to undercut the value prop of spinning disc in your HBC analytics environments by five X, that's huge. So now let's take near line SaaS off the table for anything that's actually per data of an angle of value to us. So in simplicity elements, what we're doing now will be able to make our own flash we've been deriving from the tech memory systems acquisition eight years ago and then integrating that into some essentially industry proven software solutions that we do with the bird flies. That appliance form factor has been absolutely monumental for us in the distributed systems. >> And thanks for giving us a topic to discuss at our socially distant Thanksgiving table. We'll talk about IBM. I know now I have great, great conversation. AJ over to you lot of advances here also in such a dynamic times, I want to get Brocade's perspective on how you're taking advantage of these latest technologies with IBM and also from a customer's perspective, what are they feeling and really being able to embrace and utilize that simplicity that Matt talked about. >> So there's a couple of things that fall into that to be honest, one of which is that similar to what you heard Brian described across the IBM portfolio for storage in our SaaS infrastructure. It's a single operating system up and down the line. So from the most entry-level platform we have to the largest platform we have it's a single software up and down. It's a single management environment up and down and it's also intended to be extremely reliable and extremely performance because here's part of the challenge when Matt's talking about multiple petabytes in a two U rack height, but the conversation you want to flip on its head there a little bit is "Okay exactly how many virtual machines "and how many applications are you going to be driving "out of that?" Because it's going to be thousands like between six and 10,000 potentially out of that, right? So imagine then if you have some sort of little hiccup in the connectivity to the data store for 6,000 to 10,000 applications, that's not the kind of thing that people get forgiving about. When we're all home like this. When your healthcare, when your finance, when your entertainment, when everything is coming to you across the network and remotely in this version and it's all application driven, the one thing that you want to make sure of is that network doesn't hiccup because humans have a lot of really good characteristics. Patience would not be one of those. And so you want to make sure that everything is in fact in play and running. And that's as one of the things that we work very hard with our friends at IBM to make sure of is that the kinds of analytics that Matt was just describing are things that you can readily get done. Speed is the new currency of business is a phrase you hear from... A quote you hear from Marc Benioff at Salesforce, right. And he's right if you can get data out of intelligence out of the data you've been collecting, that's really cool. But one of the other sort of flip sides on the people not being able to be in the data center and then to Matt's point, not as many people around either is how are humans fast enough when you look... Honestly when you look at the performance of the platforms, these folks are putting up how is human response time going to be good enough? And we all sort of have this headset of a network operations center where you've got a couple dozen people in a half lit room staring at massive screens on the thing to pop. Okay, if the first time a red light pops the human begins the investigation at what point is that going to be good enough? And so our argument for the autonomy piece of of what we're doing in the fabrics is you can't wait on the humans. You need to augment it. I get that people still want to be in charge and that's good. Humans are still smarter than the Silicon. We're not as repeatable, but we're still so far smarter about it. And so we needed to be able to do that measurement. We need to be able to figure out what normal looks like. We need to be able to highlight to the storage platform and to the application admins, when things go sideways because the demand from the applications isn't going to slow down. The demands from your environment whether you want to think about take the next steps with not just your home entertainment home entertainment systems but learning augmented reality, right. Virtual reality environments for kids, right? How do you make them feel like they're part and parcel of the classroom, for as long as we have to continue living a modified world and perhaps past it, right? If you can take a grade school from your local area and give them a virtual walkthrough of the loop where everybody's got a perfect view and it all looks incredibly real to them those are cool things, right? Those are cool applications, right? If you can figure out a new vaccine faster, right. Not a bad thing, right. If we can model better, not a bad thing. So we need to enable those things we need to not be the bottleneck, which is you get Matt and Brian over an adult beverage at some point and ask them about the cycle time for the Silicon they're playing with. We've never had Moore's law applied to external storage before never in the history of external storage. Has that been true until now. And so their cycle times, Matt, right? >> Yeah you struck a nerve there AJ, cause it's pretty simple for us to follow the linear increase in capacity and computational horsepower, right. We just ride the X86 bandwagon, ride the Silicon bandwagon. But what we have to do in order to maintain But what we have to do in order to maintain the simplicity story is followed more important one is the resiliency factor, right? 'Cause as we increased the capacity as we increased the essentially the amount of data responsible for each admin we have to literally log rhythmically increase the resiliency of these boxes because we're going to talk about petabyte scale systems and hosting them really 10,000 virtual machines in the two U form factor. I need to be able to accommodate that to make sure things don't blip. I need resilient networks, right. Have redundancy and access. I need to have protection schemes at every single layer of the stack. And so we're quite happy to be able to provide that as we leapfrog the industry and go in literally situations that are three times the competitive density that we you see out there and other distributed systems that are still bound by the commercial offerings, then, hey we also have to own that risk from a vendor side we have to make these things is actually rate six protection scheme equivalent from a drive standpoint and act back from controllers everywhere. Be able to supply the performance and consistency of that service throughout even the bad situations. >> And to that point, one of the things that you talked about, that's interesting to me that I'd kind of like you to highlight is your recovery times, because bad things will happen. And so you guys do something very, very different about that. That's critical to a lot of my customers because they know that Murphy will show up one day. So, I mean 'cause it happens, so then what. >> Well, speaking of that, then what Brian I want to go over to you. You mentioned Matt mentioned resiliency. And if we think of the situation that we're in in 2020 many companies are used to DR and BC plans for natural disasters, pandemics. So as we look at the shift and then the the volume of ransomware, that's going up one ransomware attack every 11 seconds this year, right now. How Brian what's that change that businesses need to make from from cyber security to cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, it's a good point in, and I try to hammer that home with our clients that, you're used to having your business continuity disaster recovery this whole cyber resiliency thing is a completely separate practice that we have to set up and think about and go through the same thought process that you did for your DR What are you going to do? What are you going to pretest? How are you going to test it? How are you going to detect whether or not you've got ransomware? So I spent a lot of time with our clients on that theme of you have to think about and build your cyber resiliency plan 'cause it's going to happen. It's not like a DR plan where it's a pure insurance policy and went and like you said, every 11 seconds there's an event that takes place. It's going to be a win not then. Yeah and then we have to work with our customers to put in a place for cyber resiliency and then we spent a lot of discussion on, okay what does that mean for my critical applications, from a restore time of backup and mutability. What do we need for those types of services, right? In terms of quick restore, which are my tier zero applications that I need to get back as fast as possible, what other ones can I they'll stick out on tape or virtual tape in and do things like that. So again, there's a wide range of technology that we have available in the in the portfolio for helping our clients from cyber resiliency. And then we try to distinguish that cyber resiliency versus cyber security. So how do we help to keep every, everybody out from a cybersecurity view? And then what can we do from the cyber resiliency, from a storage perspective to help them once once it gets to us, that's a bad thing. So how can we help? How help our folks recover? Well, and that's the point that you're making Brian is that now it's not a matter of, could this happen to us? It's going to, how much can we tolerate? But ultimately we have to be able to recover. We can't restore that data and one of those things when you talk about ransomware and things, we go to that people as the weakest link insecurity AJ talked about that, there's the people. Yeah there's probably quite a bit of lack of patients going on right now. But as we look as I want to go back over to you to kind of look at, from a data center perspective and these storage solutions, being able to utilize things to help the people, AI and Machine Learning. You talked about AR VR. Talk to me a little bit more about that as you see, say in the next 12 months or so as moving forward, these trends these new solutions that are simplified. >> Yeah, so a couple of things around that one of which is iteration of technology the storage platforms the Silicon they're making use of Matt I think you told me 14 months is the roughly the Silicon cycle that you guys are seeing, right? So performance levels are going to continue to go up the speeds. The speeds are going to continue to go up. The scale is going to is going to continue to shift. And one of the things that does for a lot of the application owners is it lets them think broader. It lets them think bigger. And I wish I could tell you that I knew what the next big application was going to be but then we'd be having a conversation about which Island in the Pacific I was going to be retiring too. But they're going to come and they're going to consume this performance because if you look at the applications that you're dealing with in your everyday life, right. They continue to get broader. The scope of them continues to scale out, right. There's things that we do. I saw I think it was an MIT development recently where they're talking about being able to and they were originally doing it for Alzheimer's and dementia, but they're talking about being able to use the microphones in your smartphone to listen to the way you cough and use that as a predictor for people who have COVID that are not symptomatic yet. So asymptomatic COVID people, right? So when we start talking about where this, where this kind of technology can go and where it can lead us, right. There's sort of this unending possibility for it. But what that on, in part is that the infrastructure has to be extremely sound, right? The foundation has to be there. We have to have the resilience, the reliability and one of the points that Brian was just making is extremely key. We talk about disaster tolerance business continuous, so business continuance is how do you recover? Cyber resilience is the same conversation, right? So you have the protection side of it. Here's my defenses. Now what happens when they actually get in. And let's be honest, right? Humans are frequently that weak link, right. For a variety of behaviors that the humans that humans have. And so when that happens, where's the software in the storage that tells you, "Hey, wait there's an odd traffic behavior here "where data is being copied "at rates and to locations that that are not normal." And so that's part of when we talk about what we're doing in our side of the automation is how do you know what normal looks like? And once you know what normal looks like you can figure out where the outliers are. And that's one of the things that people use a lot for trying to determine whether or not ransomware is going on is, "Hey, this is a traffic pattern, that's new. "This is a traffic pattern. "That's different." Are they doing this because they're copying the dataset from here to here and encrypting it as they go, right? 'Cause that's one of the challenges you got to, you got to watch for. So I think you're going to see a lot of advancement in the application space. And not just the MIT stuff, which is great. The fact that people are actually able to or I may have misspoken, maybe Johns Hopkins. And I apologize to the Johns Hopkins folks that kind of scenario, right. There's no knowing what they can make use of here in terms of the data sets, right. Because we're gathering so much data, the internet of things is an overused phrase but the sheer volume of data that's being generated outside of the data center, but manipulated analyzed and stored internally. 'Cause you got to have it someplace secure. Right and that's one of the things that we look at from our side is we've got to be that as close to unbreakable as we can be. And then when things do break able to figure out exactly what happened as rapidly as possible and then the recovery cycle as well. >> Excellent and I want to finish with you. We just have a few seconds left, but as AJ was talking about this massive evolution and applications, for example when we talk about simplicity and we talk about resiliency and being able to recover when something happens, how did these new technologies that we've been unpacking today? How did these help the admin folks deal with all of the dynamics that are happening today? >> Yeah so I think the biggest the drop, the mic thing we can say right now is that we're delivering 100% tier zero in Vme without data reduction value props on top of it at a cost that undercuts off-prem S3 storage. So if you look at what you can do from an off-prem solution for air gap and from cyber resiliency you can put your data somewhere else. And it's going to take whatever long time to transfer that data back on prem, to read get back to your recover point. But when you work at economics that we're doing right now in the distributed systems, hey, you're DR side, your copies of data do not have to wait for that. Off-prem bandwidth to restore. You can actually literally restore it in place. And you couple that with all of the the technology on the software side that integrates with it I get incremental point in time. Recovery is either it's on the primary side of DRS side, wherever, but the fact that we get to approach this thing from a cost value then by all means I can naturally absorb a lot of the cyber resiliency value in that too. And because it's all getting all the same orchestrated capabilities, regardless of the big, small, medium, all that stuff, it's the same skillsets. And so I don't need to really learn new platforms or new solutions to providing cyber resiliency. It's just part of my day-to-day activity because fundamentally all of us have to wear that cyber resiliency hat. But as, as our job, as a vendor is to make that simple make it cost elegance, and be able to provide a essentially a homogenous solutions overall. So, hey, as your business grows, your risk gets averted on your recovery means also get the thwarted essentially by your incumbent solutions and architecture. So it's pretty cool stuff that we're doing, right. >> It is pretty cool. And I'd say a lot of folks would say, that's the Nirvana but I think the message that the three of you have given in the last 20 minutes or so is that IBM and Brocade together. This is a reality. You guys are a cornucopia of knowledge. Brian, Matt, AJ, thank you so much for joining me on this panel I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you again Lisa. >> My pleasure. From my guests I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this IBM Brocade panel on theCUBE.

>>from Las >>Vegas. It's the cues covering quality security Conference 2019 by quality. Hey, welcome back already, Jefe Rick here with the Cube were in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at the Kuala Security Conference. It's the 19th year they've been doing this. It's our first year here, and we're excited to be here. And it's great to have a veteran who's been in this space for so long to give a little bit more of historical perspective as to what happened in the past. Where we are now, what can we look forward to in the future? So coming right off its keynote is Felipe Quarto, the chairman and CEO of Qualities felt great. See, >>Thank you. Same. Same same for me. >>Absolutely. So you touched on so many great topics in your conversation about kind of the shifts of of modern computing, from the mainframe to the mini. We've heard it over and over and over. But the key message was really about architecture. If you don't have the right architecture, you can't have the right solution. How is the evolution of architects of architectures impacted your ability to deliver security solutions for your clients >>So no That's a very good question. And in fact, you know what happened is that we started in 1999 with the vision that we could use exactly like Salesforce. They'll come this nascent Internet technologies and apply that to security. And s and Marc Benioff applied that essentially changing the way serum was essentially used and deployed in enterprises and with a fantastic success as we know. So for us, the I can't say today that 19 years later the vision was right. It took a significant longer because the security people are not really, uh, warm at the idea of Senate Lee, uh, having the data interview which was in place that they could not control. And the i t people, they didn't really like a toll. The fact that certainly they were not in control anymore of the infrastructure. So whether a lot of resistance, I wever, we always I always believe, absolutely believe that the cloud will be the architecture to go back. A lot of people make the confusion That was part of the confusion that for people it was a cloud, that kind of magical things someplace would you don't know where and when I was trying to explain, and I've been saying that so many times that well, you need to look at the club like a computer that can architecture which distribute the computing power for more efficiently than the previous one, which was Clyde Server, which was distributing the computing power for better then, of course, the mainframes and minicomputers. And so if you look at their architecture's so the mainframe were essentially big data centers in in Fort Knox, like setting private lines of communication to damn terminal. And of course, security was not really an issue then, because it's a gritty was building by the IBM said company simply with the minicomputer, which then was, instead of just providing the computing power to the large, very large company could afford it. Now 70 the minicomputer through the advance and say, My conductor technology could reduce the food frank. And then I'll bring the company power to the labs and to the departments. And that was then the new era of the dish, your equipment, the primes, that General et cetera, Uh, and then conservative. So what client service did again? If you look at the architecture, different architectures now, incidently servers LAN or the Internet network and the PC, and that was now allowing to distribute the computing power to the people in the company. And so, but then you needed to so everybody. Nobody paid attention to security because then you were inside of the enterprise. So it starts inside the wars of the castle if you prefer. So nobody paid attention to that. It was more complex because now you have multiple actors instead of having one IBM or one desert equipped. But its center said, You have the people manufacturing the servers. The software that that obeys the PC is an unannounced excellently there was the complexity increased significantly, but nobody paid attention to security because it was not needed. Until suddenly we realized that viruses could come in through the front door being installed innocent. You were absolutely, absolutely compromised. And of course, that's the era of the anti VARS, which came in and then because of the need to communicate more more. Now, Senator, you could not stay only in your castle. You need to go and communicate your customers to your suppliers, et cetera, et cetera. And now you were starting to up and up your your castle to the word and a low now so that the bad guy could come in and start to steal your information. And that's what the new era of the far wall. Now you make sure that those who come in But of course, that was a bit naive because there were so many other doors and windows that people could come in, you know, create tunnels and these and over that transfer, insure your custard. Because the day I was becoming more, more rich and more more important, more value. So whatever this value, of course, the bad guys are coming in to try to sell it. And that was that new era off a win. Each of attention to security. The problem is being is because you have so many different actors. There was nothing really central there. Now. I just suddenly had Maura and more solutions, and now absolutely like 800 vendors. Boarding on security and boating on anything is shortly at the end of the day because you put more more weight, and then you also increasing complexity in all these different solutions. Didn't they need to talk together? So you have a better context, but they weren't designed to talk together. So now you need to put other system where they could communicate that information. So you complicated, complicated, complicated the solution. And that's the problem of today. So now cloud computing comes in and again. If you look at the architecture of cloud computing, it's again Data centers, which not today, have become, thanks to the technology, having infinite, almost company power and storage capabilities. And like the previous data center, there are much more fracture because you just once gave and they become essentially a bit easier to secure. And by the way, it's your fewer vendors now doing that. And then, of course, the access can be controlled better on then. Of course, the second component is that the land and the one it's now the Internet and the Internet, of course, eyes the Web communications extremely cheap, and it brings you in every place on the planet and soon in Morse. Why no so and so now. The issue today is that still the Internet needs to be secure, and today how are you going to secure the Internet? Which is very important thing today because you see today that you can spoof your image, you can spoof your website. You could attack the Deanna's who? Yes, there's a lot of things that the bad guy still do in fact, themselves that ever is the Internet, of course, to access everywhere, so they take advantage of it. So now this is obviously, you know, I created the trustworthy movement many years ago to try to really address that. Unfortunately, qualities was too small, and it was not really our place. Today there's all the Google, the Facebook, the big guys which contract their business, depend on the Internet. Now need to do that and I upload will be been criticised very much so. Google was the 1st 1 to essentially have a big initiative. I was trying to Bush SSL, which everybody understands secret encryption, if you prefer and to everybody. So they did a fantastic job, really push it. So now today's society is becoming like okay, it's a said. You want to have this a settle on your communication, but that's not enough. And now they're pushing and some people criticize them, and I absolutely applaud them to say we need to change the Internet protocols which were created at the time when security you were transferring information from universities. And so for these was a hay days, you know, if everything was fine, there's no bad guys. No, The heebie day is if you like arranging that everybody was free, Everybody was up in fantastic. Okay. And now, of course, today, these poor cold this to be a graded, which is a lot of work. But today I really believe that if you put Google Amazon Facebook altogether and they can fix these internet for records so we could forget about the spoofing and we forget about all these fishing and all this thing this is there responsibility. So and then you have now on the other side, you have now a very intelligent devices from in a very simple sensors and, you know, too sophisticated devices the phone, et cetera, and Maura and more Maur devices interconnected and for people to understand what is being so This is the new environment. And whether we always believe is that if you adopt an architecture which is exactly which fits which is similar, then we could instead of bolting security in, we can also have the build security in voting signal on. We could be in security in. And we have been very proud of the work that went down with my car itself, which we announce, in fact, reluctantly recently, very recently, that, in fact, our agent technologies now it's banned erred in Microsoft. So we have been security with Microsoft in So from a security perspective today, if you go to the Microsoft as your security center, you click on a link, and now you have the view. If you're in tar, is your environment courtesy of record? It's agent. You click on a second link, and now you have the view of your secret cameras. First year, crazy of the same qualities agent. And then you click on the third inning with us. Nothing to do with quite it's It's old Mike ourself you create your playbook and Yuri mediates The security in this environment has become quickly, quick, nothing to in store, nothing to update, and the only thing you bring. All your policies saying I don't want to have this kind of machine exposed on the Internet on what this is what I want and you can continuously owed it essentially in real time, right? So, as you can see, totally different than putting boxes and boxes and so many things. And then I think for you, so very big game changer. So the analogy that I want you that I give to people it's so people understand that paradigm shift. It's already happening in the way we secure our homes. You put sensors everywhere, your cameras of detection, approximately detection. Essentially, when somebody tried to enter your home all that day, that's continuously pumped up into an incident response system. And then from your phone again across the Internet, you can change the temperature of your rooms. You can do it. You can see the person who knocks on the door. You can see its face. You can open the door, close the door, the garage door. You can do all of that remotely and automatically. And then, if there's a burglar, then in your house, who's raking immediately that the incidence response system called the cops or the farmer shirt? If good far. And that's the new paradigm. So security has to follow that product, and then you have interesting of the problem today that we see with all the current security systems incidents Original system developed for a positive force. Positive and negative are the enemy reedy off security? Because if you have forced positive, you cannot automate the response because then you're going to try to respond to something that is that true? So you are. You could create a lot of damage. And the example. I give you that today in the if you leave your dog in your house and if you don't have the ability the dog would bark would move, and then the senses will say intruder alert. So that's become the force. Pretty. So how do you eliminate that? By having more context, you can eliminate automatically again this false positives, like now you, I think a fingerprint of fuel dog and of his voice. And now the camera and this and the sensors on the voice can pick up and say, Oh, this is my dog. So then, of course, you eliminate that forces right now, if if another dog managed to return your home through a window which was open or whatever for so what do we know? A window was open, but you know you can't necessarily fix it on the dog weapons, then you will know it. Sze, not yours. So that's what securities avoiding such a huge sea of change which is happening because of all that injured that end today Companies today after leverages nuclear technology which are coming, there's so much new to college. What people understand is where's that technology coming from? How come silently we have doctors cybernetics a ll these solutions today which are available at almost no cost because it's all open source So what happened is that which is unlike the enterprise software which were Maur the oracle, et cetera, the manufacturer of that software today is in fact the cloud bubbly club Sanders, the Amazon, the Google, the Facebook, the macro self which shouldn't be needed to have to develop new technology so they could scale at the size of the planet. And that very shrewdly realized that if I keep the technology for me, I'm essentially going to imprison. The technology is not going to evolve. And then I need other technologies that I'm not developing. So they realize that they totally changed that open source movement, which in the early days of happens offers more controlled by people who had more purity. If you prefer no commercial interests, it was all for the good, off the civilization and humankind. And they say they're licensing Modern was very complex or the simplified all of that. And then Nelson and you had all this technology coming at you extremely fast. And we have leverage that technology, which was not existing in the early days when when such was not come started with the eunuchs, the lamb, pork or what's called leaks. Apache mice Fewer than Petri limiting Announcer Tiel This technology, like elasticsearch, was coming. We index today now back and three trillion points or less excerpts, clusters, and we return information in 100 minutes seconds and then on the calf campus, which is again something that open source way Baker Now today, five million messages a day and on and on and on. So the word is changing. And of course, if that's what it's called now, the dish transformation now enterprises to be essentially a joy to reach out to the customers better and Maur, they need to embrace the cloud as well, >>right? I >>do retool their entire right infrastructure, and it's such A. It's a huge sea of change, and that's what we see even the market of security just to finish now, evolving in a totally different ways than the way it has Bean, which in the positive market of security was essentially the market for the enterprise. And I'm bringing you might my board, my board, towns, traditions that you have to go in installed and make work. And then you had the the anti virus, essentially for all the consumers and so forth. So today, when we see the marketplace, which is fragmenting in four different segments, which is one is the large enterprise which are going to essentially constantly data start moving to the transformation. Leveraging absolutely develops, which isn't becoming the new buyer. And, of course, so they could improve their I t. For to reach out to more customers and more effectively than the current providers. As I mentioned earlier, which are building security in the knife, you use them. You don't have to worry about infrastructure about how many servers you need, amenities. It's all done for you and something about security. The third market is going to be in an emergence of a new generation of managed Grannie service providers which are going to take all these companies. We don't have enough resources. Okay, Don't worry. I'm going to help you, you know, duel that digital transformation and help you build the security. And then there's a totally new market of all these devices, including the phone, et cetera, which connects and that you essentially I want to all these i, o t and I ot devices that are or now connected, which, of course, present security risk. So I need to also secure them. But you also need to be able to also not only check their health to make sure that okay, because you cannot send people read anymore. So you tournament simply on security. If you find that that phone is compromised, you need to make to be able to make immediate decisions about Should I kill that phone? Destroyed everything in it. Should I Now don't let that phone connect any more to my networks. What should I do? Should I, by the way, detected that they've done with the application which another loud Because what we see is more and more companies are giving tablets to their users and in doing so now, today's the company property so they could say, OK, you use these tablets and you're not allowed to do that so you could check all of that and then automatically. But that again requires full visibility in what you are. And that's why just to finish, we make a big decision about the few three months ago that were We build the ability for any company on the planet to automatically build their targetable itis it eventually, which nobody knows what they have. That old networking environment. You don't know what connects to have the view of the known and the unknown totally free of charge across on premise and pawned crowd continues Web obligations or to united devices to come. So now that's the cornerstone of securities with that totally free. So and then, of course, you have all these additional solutions, and we're being very scalable up in platform where we can take data, a passel data as well. So we really need to be and want to be good citizen here because security at the end of it, it's almost like we used to say, like the doctors, you have to have that kind of feeble court oath that you can do no arms. So if you keep if you try to take the data that you have, keep it with you, that's all.

>>from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering quality security conference 2019. You >>bike, Wallace. Hey, Welcome back. You're ready. Geoffrey here with the Cube were in Las >>Vegas at the Kuala Security Conference here at the Bellagio. 19 years they've been doing this conference star first time here, But we've got a real veteran. Has been here for 16 years who can really add some depth and perspective for happy to welcome submit to car. He's a president and chief product officer for cause like >>to see you. Thank you, >>Jeff. Thanks for having me. >>Pleasure. So just, uh, don't lorry before getting ready for this. Um, this day, listening to the earnings call. And you got a really nice shout out in the nights in the Last Rings call and your promotion just to let everybody know what submits got underneath his plate. R and D. Q A ops, product marketing and customer support and adding worldwide field sales ops. You're busy, guy. >>Yeah, you know. But the good thing is, >>no matter who you are, you only have 24 hours in the >>day. That's true. Just as Leo. But I am curious because you've been here for a >>while, you've seen a lot of technology, you know, kind of waves. And yet here you guys still are. You've got an architecture that's built to take advantage of things like open source to take advantage of things. My cloud is you kind of take a breath between customer meetings and running from panel the panel and you think about kind of the journey. You know what? What kind of strikes you that you know, that you guys are still here, Still successful, Still have a founding CEO. It's >>your position. Yeah, It's actually very interesting >>being here for 16 years. Started a software engineer. And, you know, I've been doing a lot of stuff doing a product management now, engineering and all of that. And I think one thing that's really part of the DNA for us and which is really helped us keep growing, is being innovative continuously, right, because five years ago, nobody would have said container technology docker eso, as new security knew in for sexual pattern times have come about. We've just been on our toes and making sure that we are addressing all these different newer areas. And so the key is not so much about what new technology is going to come, because two years from now there was something that we don't even know about right now. What's key is that we build a platform that we keep adding additional capabilities that continue to quickly and nimbly be able to address customer's needs. From that perspective. >>Yeah, we just had Laureano. She talked quite a bit about your kind of customer engagement model being different than the traditional ones, really trying to build a long lasting relationship and to collect that data from the customers to know what their prairies are all about. >>Yeah, >>and, you know, it's because we've been subscription based since day one. You know, this is the not we're not incentivized to go and try to sell our customers big fact, multimillion dollar deals. Then we don't disappear like enterprise sales usually does on perpetual licenses. So we have to earn our keep, and we want to make sure customers are we understand their needs so that they actually buy and purchase only what they are going to use so we can go back and they can grow more. We show the value. Uh, so that's a very different model on, you know, at the end of the day, that is a model of the cloud. So everybody who was in this consumption based model has to ensure that they are every year, going back and showing the value and earning their subscription back. So in that sense, security. Not a lot of vendors have done that for a long time. We've been the ones since the beginning to kind of follow this model, and it's worked very well for us. It's a great model. Customers were happy as we had more solutions. We showed the value, and it's very easy for them to upgrade and get additional value of quality at a very reasonable of you. No cost to them. >>It's interesting. Feli talked about an early conversation that he had with Marc Benioff details Horse and and I would argue that it was really sales force. That kind of cracked the code in terms of enterprising, being comfortable with a cloud based system and, you know, kind of past the security and the trust in this in that, so to make that gamble on the cloud so early, very, very fortunate and for two days. Thea Other thing I think that does not get enough play which you just touched on is a subscription business model forces you to deliver every month they're paying every month you gotta deliver Your mother is a very different relationship than a once a year. You know, not even once year to go get that big lump sum to get the renewal cause you're in bed with them. Every single say absolutely. Yeah, >>so that's really a very interesting model. >>So as you look forward, I know you're just given Ah, talk on, you know, kind of starting to look at the next big wave of trends. How do you get out ahead of it? What are you thinking about? What keeps you up at night would be excited about. >>So the very cool part about that about my job is that I also heard engineering and product Fork Wallace and Security. So we're living that digital transformation that our customers are going through as well. So we have a massive black farm. We have, like, three trillion data points. Every index, we have one million rights per second on Cassandra Clusters. So we are dealing with the same infrastructure innovation that our customers are doing and so died is helping us also learn how the secular own platform what our customers are thinking. Because as they are moving into Dev ops, we have already moved into that. We have learned our lessons, so we relate to what they're going through. And that's really the next big thing is hard to be enabled. Security tools to really be built into the develops stool chain so that we eliminate a lot of the issues upfront before they ever even become an issue. And, you know, my talk this morning was about started with the notion of t t R, which is the time to remediate, and the best time to the mediator is the time of zero, right? If you don't ever let the issue get into your production environment, you never have to worry about fixing it. And that's really the next big thing for us is how do we create a platform that helps customer not the look at security in multiple silos, but to have a single platform where they can go all the way from develops to production to remediation to response all orchestrated to the same platform, >>right? It's pretty interesting, because that was, uh, Richard Clarke. Keynote the author. You know, we used to always break cos down into two buckets. You know, either those that had that have been breached and those that have been breached just don't know about it yet. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, he introduced his third concept, which is those that got breached but actually got on it. Remediated it. Maybe not the time, zero, but in a way that it did not become a big issue. Because, let's face it, you're going to get breached at some level. It's How do you keep it from becoming a big, big nightmare? >>Exactly. And that is really the only measure off effectiveness off your security, right? It's not about how many people you have, how many dollars you spend on security, how big your security team is. Harmony renders you have How quickly can you get in there, find and fix any issue that comes up? That's that. That's the living matter. If you can't do that with no people and no, uh, you know, re sources that are being put to it with automation, then that's great. If you do that with 50 people, that's great. We just need to be able to get to that point. And today, off course with hybrid infrastructure, we are realizing quickly, throwing more people that the problem is not really solving the problem. We just cannot keep going. We need to leverage that seem scalable technology that has been used in the digital transformation to provide that similar stuff from a security perspective through the customers as well, >>right? And even if you even if you wanted to hire the people, there aren't enough people, >>and that's another just our people, right? So the other >>thing that you must be really excited about is on the artificial intelligence of machine learning site and a lot of buzz in the press. Talk about robots and machines and this type of stuff. But, as you know, is we know where that robber really hits. The road is applied a I and bring in the power of that technology to specific problems. Complete game changer, I would assume for which you guys could do looking forward. >>Yeah. I mean, uh, you can really only >>have good machine learning and gold. Aye aye, if you really have a massive historic data that you can really mind to find out trends and understand how patterns have evolved, right, so only cloud based solutions can actually do that because they have a large amount of customer telemetry that they can understand and do that. So from that sense, Wallace Black form is absolutely suited for that. But having said that again, all of these have there specific application. So there's vendors were coming out and claiming that machine learning's going to solve world hunger and everything's gonna be great just because your machine learning but no machine learning and the prediction that comes with that on the privatization is one element off your tool kit. You still have to do your devil options still have to fix things. You still have to do a lot of things. But then how do you predict out of all the chaos, how can you try to focus on some things that may become a real problem, which are not now? So that's really the exciting part is to be able to bring that as an additional tool kit for the customer in their arsenal to be ableto respond to threats much faster and better than they have in the past, >>right? It is a cloud based platform. You guys are sitting in the catbird seat for that. What about on the other side? The on the ed side, Another kind of new thing that's coming rapidly. Edges are are messy. They don't have nice, pristine data. Center your environments. There's connectivity, problems, power problems, all types of issues as you look at kind of edge and an I A. T more generally, you know, increasing the threat surface dramatically. How do you How do you kind of think about that? How do you approach it to make it not necessarily a problem, but really an opportunity for follows? >>I mean, that's Ah, that's a great question because there is no magic pill for that, right? It's like you just have to be able to leverage continuous telemetry collection and the collection to be able to see these devices CDs, patterns on. So that's works really well for us because that to be able to do that right in a global organization to almost every organization is global. Global organization has multiple infrastructure, multiple people in different locations, multiple offices. And, uh, if you look at the eye ot architecture, it is about sensors that are pushing down the one common platform which controls them and which updates them and all of that. That's the platform that Wallace's build since the beginning is multiple of these different sensors that are continuously collecting later, pushing it back into our platform. And that's the only way you can get the visibility across your global infrastructure. So in many ways, we are well suited to do that. And which is the big reason why we gave out of a global ideas and then 20 product for free for customers, because we truly believe that that's the first step for them to start to get secure. And because we have the architecture and the platform and become significantly easier for us to be able to give them that gave every day, which is truly wide and not just say I have visibly in my cloudy here. But then container visibly, somewhere there and I ot visibly somewhere else, we bring all of that together in one place. >>All right, Spencer, I know you've got Thio run off >>to your next commitment. We >>could we could keep going, but I think we have to leave it there again. Congrats on your promotion >>and thank you. All right. He submit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cuba Think >>Wallace Security conference in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

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

from the Salesforce tower in downtown San Francisco it's the cube covering Accenture tech vision 2019 brought to you by Silicon angle media hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in downtown San Francisco 33rd floor salesforce tower the brand new just open ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning of the Accenture innovation hub and we're here for a very special event it's the Accenture technology vision presentation 2019 they put together four or five trends that we should look at and we're really excited to have our next guest he's an author behind this document he's Michael builts the managing director of Accenture technology vision Michael great to see you again I appreciate you having me back it's a license pace last year was at a little venue but this is this is quite impressive it's hard to beat the tower you get the views and the tech all right so let's jump into it so you've been doing this for a couple years now what jumped out that was special about 2019 I mean I think what's different about 2019 is that everybody realizes that companies are really becoming those digital companies and so people are actually starting to ask about what's next and I think this is really the first time that we've seen not just companies introspectively trying to figure out how to change themselves but really looking for that next step to figure out how they change the way people work the way people live and even people realizing that the things that they're doing are really having an effect on society as a whole I'm sure there's gonna be some CEOs that are gonna say Michael we're already there or looking at the next chapter we're barely getting started it seems like this thing has just got started but already we're kind of seeing second order third order of magnitude changes in how this digital transformation is evolving and I think that's really a result of how effective it's been is that the reason everybody's so interested the reason either excited and honestly even the reason why you see out cries when things go wrong is because we're changing rapidly but it really is having big impacts on you know just about every aspect of our life right so there's a there's a whole lot of meat in this report people can go on you can download it and spend some time reading it but I want to pick one of the topics set that we and that's really this kind of hyper personalization moving to a very different way you know talked about marketing to one and this and that but it was kind of marketing talk before now I can actually do it it is and and I think one reason we're seeing that happen is that we're not the only ones as companies going through this digital transformation you know all of our customers all of our workforce they're going through that digital transformation too and every time you're using an uber every time you're using social media to interact you know with your family and your friends in the world around you every time you invite a smart refrigerator or a piece into your home is that suddenly what's happening is people are cobbling together their own technology identities and these identities are ones that we're really starting to see become powerful ways for how they connect and how they work with businesses in ways they really never done before so we could go for hours and hours but we only have 10 minutes but one of the great topics you talked about earlier today everyone has their own reality and I know I think that first time anyone saw that was maybe in a Facebook feed when I realize wait your Facebook feed doesn't have the same stuff as my Facebook feed and now it's gotten way beyond your Facebook feed and to have these real hyper personalized experiences all along the way no I think that's right and what we're seeing is that we're really shifting from this idea of personalization that says how do I get you into a better category to individualization where it says no no no I'm actually deciding things for you you know I'll give you an example you know Healdsburg excuse me heidelberg hospital in germany is actually working on using digital twins for people so it's essentially a digital representative of an individual and in their case they're using it for things like pacemakers you know everybody's heart is different where a doctor's gonna want to plate those electrical you know probes on there in order to make sure you get the best benefit out of that pacemaker is gonna be different for every person and so instead of having generalized optimized rules actually create the digital twinning to figure out what's gonna be optimized for the actual person that we're doing this so that's really interesting right because we've been hearing about digital twins forever probably GE more than ever in terms of people I've talked to you in terms of create a digital twin for a jet engine you can run all kinds of tests you can but they do it for a person that's pretty interesting so they doing that like on a per patient basis for that for that one visit or are they really kind of taking a more longitudinal look at that these people in terms of managing their health care over time well I think right now they're just taking their first steps and so they're finding key points that says like a particular pacemaker surgery you know we see companies you know like food manufacturers that are trying to figure out whether your genetics is going to dispose you to certain tastes or certain flavors or even certain you know certain health benefits for it but we're still in that first step and I think what's so exciting about it is that you see the benefit that says yeah absolutely having a pacemaker that's built to be it's gonna work and it's gonna be a real benefit to somebody's life but that's just the tip of the iceberg you know we start to ask the question that says what happens when every company can do this what happens when every aspect of my life eventually could be you know catered just to me and that's when we really start thinking about the fact that we're we're headed as a society is towards these personalized realities right right which which begs a really big condition right which is trust it is right so I'm giving you all this data and all you might telling you that I'm going to the store and and what I'm surfing on my phone but now you you know you know a lot more about me and in fact you have a digital twin of me and yet we read everyday that everybody gets hacked their data breaches I think someone here said that the the time from a breach to discovery has gone from 250 days 250 days or something like that so high you know however the company's managed to the trust issue because it's a it's a tough it's a tough environment out there it really is a tough environment but I I think it's one that companies are starting to recognize it's gonna be part of the way they really differential themselves you know is that on one hand you've got the security piece of it that says you just want to make sure that the bad actors in the world the people who really are actively trying to do you harm aren't getting that and that's part of it you know and the reality is is the investments that we're seeing in security are raising every year but I think the harder question that people are starting to deal with is that they're being passed and they're asking their consumers to trust them in very different ways and they have before you know you look at somebody like an auto manufacturer that says they've spent you know the last 40 years making sure that we trust that their cars are reliable you know that's you're gonna be safe inside them and that you're gonna be able to drive these for a certain amount of time or maybe for an extended period you know over the lifespan of that vehicle but now we're pushing people into a comfort zone they're not quite there yet for that says well what happens when that car does know where you are at any point in time right it knows how many passengers there it can infer based off of what parking lot you're in what you're doing there and I think that companies are just now starting to recognize that not it's not new we have healthcare companies and we have financial services that have done this forever but it's new to an auto manufacturer that says that's a new type of trust they have to build and we're just now seeing companies realizing that they're gonna go on a new journey to create that relationship the consumers to build up that trust right the other thing you touched on a little bit earlier today was was kind of a changing responsibility set right and it used to be you know we learned in business school you just optimized to to get max shareholder value and right in and oh yeah you should probably take care of your customers and oh yeah we should I take care of our employees too I really you talked about it going really another step really being evolved in the community you know being a much more kind of active participant and outside kind of the direct sphere of the theater in which you play well I think we have to you know because we've spent and I think a lot of companies have spent so many years just building products you know to do things a little bit better but their deals doing the things that we're doing today you know that that mode that they have is that I have a specific role and yes I'm responsible for mm-hmm you know a good quality product but everything else is something that's out of your purview but what we're talking about now is having that amount of information about you means that I now have to have responsibility to protect that information and even how I share it with with my partners suddenly if I'm actually going to be effective in changing the longevity for how people live or how cities are designed is that it's no longer just about whether that roadwork it's whether or not the city was going to be designed correctly and benefits everybody and what we're I think we're getting to that point that people are realizing that the bigger the opportunity is is the bigger the responsibility is that goes with it and the friction and even some of the negative press that we're seeing happen right now you know in the marketplace is because people hadn't realize they saw the bigger opportunity but they hadn't quite realized that that responsibility is gonna be the way that it's gonna be effectively implemented right well what if you have an opinion because you know there's kind of a whole leadership thing and John talked earlier today when they kick off the center that he wants to help your clients be the disrupter not to disrupt D but what happened is you can t get these accidental no accidental people in tremendous power because of the success of their platforms Mark Zuckerberg to pick one Marc Benioff you know who built this building Jeff Bezos so they didn't necessarily start on that path to put in place these huge social engines that have these big impacts but they're kind of there they are but when you look at any of those examples is that what you realize is that they may not have realized the impact that they were gonna have as a society as a whole but there are opportunities they were chasing were huge is that when you look at the early pieces of Facebook is that they were realizing very early on that they were trying to change the way that people fundamentally communicate and how they create relationships over digital media they knew how big that opportunity was and I think that as we've seen them go through it and we're seeing the hardships that they're having now is that other people are they're not blind to it anymore they know that when you have that amount of opportunity there's automatically going to be ripple effects into everything right and I think what we're about to see is this next generation is not going to be able to get off the hook as easily because it's they can't claim ignorance because we all know these things are hot right so exciting times great great for for you congratulations for getting the report out I'm sure it was nice to hit print on that thing close never go to hit print you know but as we all know is the you know tomorrow is a new day and something else is gonna change and then you know we'll be back here again next year right alright well Michael thanks again for taking a few minutes good luck tonight on the on the presentation always great to catch up since your innovation hub brand-new downtown San Francisco the sales force our thanks for watching we'll see you next time

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we're live at NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay, in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the day is Stu Miniman. We're welcoming back two distinguished alumni to theCUBE, we've got Anthony Lye SVP and GM of the Cloud BU at NetApp. Hey, Anthony, welcome back. >> Hello, thank you very much. >> Fresh from the keynote stage. And we've also got a Tad Brockway, the head of product Azure Storage, Media and Edge at Microsoft, Tad, welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So guys, this is day one, keynote this morning, it was standing room only, 5,000 plus people here, Jean English was on your CMO of NetApp and said, most ever customers and partners under one roof at NetApp. So that's exciting. Let's talk about partnerships. NetApp has been around 26 years and the slide of partners and sponsors this morning was like a NASCAR slide. Tell us Anthony, about what you guys are doing, and how you're evolving your relationship with Microsoft? >> Oh, I mean, I think of all the relationships, Microsoft is unique. Tad and I have worked together now for over a year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And it's an engineering relationship. There is absolutely no doubt about it. We are doing things in Azure that nobody else has ever done. I think we sort of bring 26 years of NetApp experience to the infinite possibilities that Azure brings to its customers. It's transformation based on, very reliable infrastructure. So you get all the forward looking values of Azure, complemented by the 26 years of NetApp. >> Yeah, it's a great way to-- >> So a year ago, at this very event, NetApp Insight 2017, you announced some exciting things. One of them being Azure NetApp files. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Tell us about, a year later, where you are with that? I know McKesson, big brand in healthcare, they're going to be on stage tomorrow, give us a little bit of perspective about what that announcement has transformed into, one year in? >> Well, let me give you my perspective and then Tad, you should obviously give the view of Microsoft. For NetApp, it's given our customers confidence and confidence in their choice of public Cloud, that they now feel that Azure has distinct advantage in that it can land workloads that today currently run on NetApp. And they have the confidence that Microsoft has selected NetApp, that Microsoft will sell the service, Microsoft will support the service, Microsoft will build the service. I think we've also done something quite unique in the way the service is delivered. We could have just thrown up storage and said to customers, "You manage it." But I think together, we wanted to try and provide almost like dial tone, we just wanted storage to be there, and we wanted to give people performance guarantee. So they felt very comfortable picking a particular performance level with a particular workload. And that's not been done before. So, we're seeing fantastic results from customers, we have a backlog that's growing by the day, and customers who have been onboarded onto the system, have rave things to say about it. You'll hear from one of those customers tomorrow on stage with Tad and I. But Tad, how would you characterize the year? >> Yeah, sure. So, a lot of engineering effort, and that's the thing that makes this, customers don't care about how something is implemented, they care about the value that they get out of it. But it's because we've put so much effort into this across our companies, from an engineering standpoint, that there's nothing like this in the industry today. As we roll this out into Azure regions around the world, it is going to be a highly differentiated offering. And that's because fundamentally, what we're doing is, we're bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers, and we're wiring NetApp ONTAP directly into Azure. So we've worked together on the design for some advanced networking capability, all the way down to the switch level, where we have very low latency, very high throughput from the Azure Public Cloud, all of the infrastructure, all of the customers VMs, directly into ONTAP, very low latency, very high bandwidth. So all of the performance characteristics of ONTAP on-prem, and then bringing that into the Public Cloud. So you get really a no compromise transformation for your existing apps and you get the ability to provision that app volumes in a way that is fundamentally unique, it fits with the whole Cloud paradigm of being able to pay for your resources as you go, the democratization of IT so that individual business units can go provision volumes. So it really is Cloud paradigm plus all of the performance capabilities of ONTAP. >> I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. When I think about Microsoft and NetApp, you both have really, it's called today Hybrid Multi Cloud. But Microsoft it's been given a lot of credit that it's got a strong Hybrid strategy. When I think back, I mean, Microsoft's always had storage as part of the Stack. If today, and Azure Stack, you've got Storage Spaces Direct, you've got a Cloud first strategy. So I want to be able to do the same thing in public Azure as when I'm building solutions, put it in the environment, can you help connect, where does that this ONTAP solution fit in there? Because, some people would say, "Well, come on Microsoft, "wouldn't you just build this with your own solutions?" Why do you turn to NetApp? >> So, it's true, I guess, the spirit, I think the spirit of what you're asking is, it's an observation that what brings our companies together is an appreciation for enterprise customers being able to do things on their terms. That involves customers taking existing IT workloads and then transforming them over to the cloud, as opposed to zeroing everything out and starting over, that's just not realistic. So, it's the strategy for Microsoft and the strategy for NetApp, and then our partnership together to meet customers where they are, help them evolve. So scenarios like Hybrid, they fit very nicely within that and Microsoft's portfolio with Azure Stack and some of the other things that we're doing there with Data Box, and so on. These are edge investments that are intended to extend the reach of Cloud into customer environments. And then to make it really easy for customers to take their existing assets, and then take advantage of the Cloud. That fits with the whole model of what we're doing with ONTAP as well. >> Anthony, we would love to hear your piece because there's NetApp pieces that are going into the Cloud but we see Microsoft, the Cloud is the starting point, we start in the public Cloud, and then that pushes out to the edge. >> Yeah, I think, I would make two points, I think, just to reinforce what Tad said, that there's just a technology that sits behind the file system that you cannot underestimate the importance of what Dave Hitz really started. I mean, ONTAP does things that no other file system can do. It manages the data in a very particular way, it allows us to run NFS and SMB protocols on the same volume for certain use cases. It has almost linear performance throughput characteristics. And we've been able to take that file system and then build intellectual property for certain workloads. So, NetApp is really the most commonly deployed platform for SAP. We are probably still the biggest platform for Oracle Database deployment, for MySQL deployment. So I think there's a technology, I think there is a sort of a history and legacy in Linux and open source based workloads, that we have an understanding of that adds to Microsoft. Now, the second point I would say is, I personally agree very much with Tad, but I think what you're going to see is IT will be redefined by Cloud. What I mean by that is, the Cloud will essentially establish the baseline and then push itself and it's sort of it's own access control lists, security models, those will end up getting pushed back to IT. So I think you're going to see a Cloud defined IT business as opposed to an IT defined Cloud. >> Yeah, I buy that. >> And I think there's just so much elegance and simplicity and scalability in Azure. Now, they had 25 years of watching everybody else make a mess of legacy IT, and now Azure is such a pure environment that it can extend, I think, and provide tons of value outside of Azure. >> So you guys mentioned, I think, Anthony, you mentioned when we kicked off, that this is really kind of an engineering partnership, when if we look at the history that both NetApp and Microsoft, have massive install basis of customers, customers that didn't start out in the digital era, obviously, customers that are born in that too. I'm curious, you mentioned about IT, from a joint selling standpoint, where are these conversations initiating? Are you talking with the IT folks? Are you going to the business folks who are having a more business outcomes led conversation? So Anthony, I will start with you? >> Well, so I would say, my favorite line about Cloud was, actually a line Marc Benioff quoted which was, what Clouds do is they democratize innovation. And if you think about that for a second, the environments that we grew up in, the big companies had a material advantage in their use of technology. The small companies couldn't afford to do it. You look at Azure now, and any single person on the planet can consume Azure. They don't need permission, in many cases, and ideas that would never get through the business case, can now be started on Azure. And there are so many great ideas and concepts that needed that sort of easy onboarding and services that, machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's a handful of companies that could buy that stuff themselves. Azure gives you access to all of that. So I think what's happening is that democratization has sort of infused more buyers. So what used to be a fairly linear process through the CIO has now been fractured. A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line of business people are funding project work sometimes without IT's knowledge. So for us, we wanted to make sure that we could allow traditional customers to extend to Azure, traditional customers to migrate to Azure, but we wanted to build a service that would appeal to the new Cloud buyer. To the application developer, to the data scientist. And I think we've done a very good job doing that. >> Yeah, no, I agree. I think, it's the combination of empowering folks to go do things to increase productivity at the individual business unit level, but then do that with technology that has taken decades of thousands of engineers to develop. This combination, there really is nothing like it in the industry, it's really unique. >> At lunch, I was talking to a couple of users here, and they were a little bit nervous, a little bit excited, going to go through some sort of Cloud certification. Cloud is an opportunity for a lot of people to scale up on new skill sets. I'm sure there's new certification. Can you talk a little bit about how you're helping customers move towards the future? >> Yeah, I think we've sort of, in many ways made, ONTAP, very much a relevant service in Azure and what we hope that means is for all of the people that have been very loyal to NetApp and to ONTAP that their skill set now translates into the Cloud compensations. One of the things we'll say, on stage tomorrow is, Microsoft and NetApp have worked together to create a certification that blends the best of what ONTAP can do for workloads, strategy and design with the wealth of services that Azure has. It's awesome to be onstage with Tad, we provide a critical service, but Microsoft has how many services now, in Azure? >> Tad: Oh, Gosh, hundreds. >> Hundreds and hundreds of services. And as a developer, I feel, you're like a kid in a candy store when you're in Azure, you can switch on almost anything and find services that will do incredible things that you could never get from IT. You could just never get those services. What Microsoft has is a scale so vast, I mean, how many data centers will you be at, by the end of the year? >> Well, we're in 54 regions today, and then each region has multiple data centers. >> Anthony: Hundreds. >> So anyway, we're all over the planet. >> So guys, we're out of time, but just really quickly, so we've seen this evolution, you guys have lived this evolution in the last year. The public preview is out for-- >> Azure NetApp files. >> Azure NetApp files, any Sneak Peek you can give us into what some of your customers are going to be saying tomorrow about the business outcomes like, reducing costs, or speed of transactions, that are going to be here tomorrow? >> You should get Brad up here from McKesson because he's awesome. Brad's been on point for it and I think, you'll hear from a customer tomorrow that they plan to bring the biggest enterprise workloads to Azure. I mean, I think when he names the applications, they are non-trivial applications that couldn't move, but now with Azure Netapp files can. I think he's also going to say that as well as benchmarking very well at the big workloads, we actually benchmark very well on the cost curve. That we can migrate workloads and give very good cost, I think characteristics as well as performance. So we've tried to give people that two dimensional flexibility. >> Well, that's going to be something not to miss. So if you're here at NetApp Insight, check it out, if you're not, watch it on their live stream. Tad, Anthony, thanks so much for joining-- >> Thank you, very much. >> Stu and me and sharing with us the momentum and the vision that you're now seeing manifest. We appreciate your time. >> Perfect, thank you. >> From Stu Miniman and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live from Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2018, stick around we'll be back after a short break.

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West event at the Thirsty Bear. It's Salesforce Dreamforce downtown San Francisco. Marc Benioff, he said it, 171,000 people. I don't know where they all fit. Please don't bring your car, but we're here, Thirsty Bear is a place to hang. There's no lines at the bar, no lines at the food, this a the place to be. So we're happy to be here. Have our next guest from Conga. We've got Sawyer Martin, he's the Director of Product Management from Conga. >> Sayer Martin. >> Sayer, I'm sorry. Sayer good to see you. Also Mason White, the Director of Product Strategy. Mason great to see you. >> Nice to meet you Jeff. >> Absolutely. So Sayer, you came in on an acquisition we're looking at almost exactly six months ago. >> That's right. >> Orchestrate. So what is Orchestrate, and how's it been so far? >> Yeah, it's been really good. So Orchestrate started as really a wealth management tool for process orchestration, so inside of Salesforce. So managing end to end processes for wealth management firms inside of Salesforce. That's the combination of human and automated work that are happening, tasks being generated-- >> So I was going to say, what type of tasks and stuff? What is it? >> So tasks to tell someone, so a tasks in Salesforce is essentially an instruction to have someone do something. >> Right, but I'm curious because you said very specifically it was for financial management. >> Yeah, so financial management, there's moving money, generating investment policies statements for clients, all kinds of different things that you might do, review meetings for clients. >> And how did you pick that vertical to get started? >> Well we came out up, so the company was actually spun out of a wealth management firm, and that wealth management firm was on Salesforce, couldn't find a way to automate their business basically. Wanted to take those processes that they were living everyday or that were in someone's head and put it down in a system that they could then use to train people as they grew. And so it was born out of that wealth management firm, and knowing that industry we thought, as a small company, let's establish a beachhead in that market and then move elsewhere. The tool's built generically so it applies to any industry really, but we knew that industry the best. So that we focused there. >> So did you spin out of, oh no you were, you spin out of the wealth management company or did those people who founded it left and figured if these guys need it there's probably few more that do as well. >> Yep, so it was the former. Spun out of the wealth management firm, and then took it as this independent entity, not doing wealth management at all, but doing technology exclusively. >> Right, and doing process flow and task management and those types of things. >> That's right. >> Alright, so Mason how does this fit in your portfolio strategy? >> That's a great question, and actually Sayer and I met at Dreamforce '17 last year. In terms of Orchestrate what we've done is really, certainly we are keeping the existing customer base, but we're bringing that type of work flow capability into other areas of Conga. So as you look at the Conga suite of products, that work flow and approval processes is really something that is vital for things like contract life cycle management. Who needs to be involved in reviewing and approving a contract depends greatly on the size of the contract, the level of complexity, the types of changes that are being asked for. So we're in the process of bringing Orchestrate capabilities into various of our product lines. First one we're showing to customers is how we've brought it into Conga contracts through Salesforce, and we'll be bringing it into other elements really through a suite type of play. We're calling it a platform internally, and as we mature that it will become available to other members of The Conga Product Suite. >> Right, so you guys have this interesting collection of products that I assume all started as silos, but they've all got this kind of interplay between the process flow, with the contracts, the document creation, the contract kind of management, they're all very very, you know, kind of different tranches of the same tree. >> Yeah very much so. In fact I'd throw in our recent acquisition of Counselytics with the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities related to contract analysis. There's a fairly consistent thesis in a lot of our recent, whether it's been product launches or product acquisitions around building out capabilities related to contract life cycle management. It's not the only place where those things come into play, but it's certainly the one that is exciting people as we go to market. >> Right, right, so Sayer you've been with him for six months now, how's been the absorption? >> It's been really good. We didn't fully understand when we were acquired that, sort of what the plan was, and we didn't get a lot of direction when we first came aboard, but we knew that contract life cycle management is a powerful piece of the business. It's a growing piece and it's one that's is increasingly important to customers. And so we looked at that from a process perspective, and we've really been focused on finding the gaps there and taking what was as you said, a silo, going from the contract management piece, generating the documents, doing the negotiations, and ultimately signing the documents, and tying it all together with the process engine we'd already built. >> Right, so is Orchestrate's go to market today still as a single product, or are you just getting completely embedded in the other ones? >> I think to Mason's point it becomes obvious to use more than one Conga product. When you buy one at least one other one will make sense for you, and Orchestrate included. >> Right, because Orchestrate is kind of like AI And I'm sure where and how you guys are going to apply AI in all these various applications. And I don't want to buy a bucket of AI, I want all of my applications to work better, work faster, auto-fill, auto-select, you know, take more and more of those manual steps out of the process. >> That's right, augment the human mind in many ways. Right? Come in at those points in the process where it can add value or give you insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had. >> Right, right. So Mason I'm just curious from a product strategy point of view, you've guys have made a lot of acquisitions, got some new money in the war chest, and you know, a really solid team of senior execs that have worked together a lot. The band is back together is a big theme that I've seen all day today. So when you are looking at kind of buy versus build decisions what are some of the things you're thinking about as you kind of continue to build out this suite of kind of cross-functional capability? >> We're always looking at things whether in buy, build, or license. So there are things that as we're looking at them right now, and I'm not going to mention them, the decision is between buy, build, or license in certain types of capabilities. Really depends on what's the maturity of the technology out there, is it something that we need that others have right now and they've got strong, could be a strong OEM business model, or could be something that is a rapidly growing area that we need to get in on. Own it and tune it for our needs specifically. >> Right, well great story and I'm sure you're going to see that Orchestrate stuff all over the place. >> That's what we hope! >> That's what we're working towards. >> Alright, so Sayer, Mason, thanks for taking a few minutes to tell your story, and inviting us here to Conga Connect West. >> Great, thanks Jeff. >> It's nice to talk to you Jeff, thanks. >> Oh my pleasure. Alright, you're watching theCUBE, like I said we're at Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018 brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Thirsty Bear at Salesforce Dreamforce, 170,000 people, we're in a small side of it put on by Conga, it's called Conga Connect West, think they had 3000 people last year. if you can see behind us the Thirsty Bear is packed to the gills, they're here for three days with free food, free drink, theCUBE and some entertainment. But as you know, we like to get the smartest people we can, get the knowledge from them and we're really excited to have a super smart person from 451, she's Sheryl Kingstone, the VP of Research for Customer Experience and Commerce at 451 Sheryl, great to see you. >> Nice to see you, too and thanks for inviting me. >> Oh absolutely, so you've been coming to this thing you said for a number of years. Every time I come to Dreamforce, it's like oh my goodness, how can it get any bigger? >> So, I can think back to the year 2000 when I did roadshows with Salesforce and we couldn't even get 40 people in the room. >> Oh my goodness. >> And now we have what, 170,000? >> That was kind of the dark, the dark and... >> That was when we were convincing people >> The dark days. >> That SaaS was the way to go and everyone was like wait, what? >> Right. >> Saas? >> When ASP was not Average Selling Price >> Oh god. >> But Application Service Provider. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Very good. So let's jump into it. So now it's 2018, time flies. Digital transformation is all the rage and I know you do a lot of work on digital transformation. So where do people get started, what is digital transformation? >> Yeah, yeah >> So how do you help people kind of, you know, I got to do it, the boss wants me to do it, my competitors are doing it. >> Yeah >> Where do they go? >> And here's the thing, you could say digital transformation has been pretty much evolving for two decades, it really is leveraging software. But what's really changed is digital transformation is more than just an IT strategy, right? So digital transformation is a business strategy. It's a culture, it's understanding how to leverage these new, more modern technologies so that we're reducing customer friction points, or empowering employees, or helping our partners sell more. So it's really more of an overarching strategy instead of independent, I'm going to go out and get software A versus software B. >> Right, and there's so many components of it, in not only the technology piece, but as we always see at shows, also the people and the process. The technology by itself is just another tool. >> Yeah, and we've been also talking in decades about people, process and technology, and one of the things I've said for a long time is what's missing in that, is the overlying or underlying data element of it. And that's another thing that's changed, is what are we doing to harness the power of the data that we get through these digital transformation processes that were undertaken? >> Right. >> And data's absolutely critical. >> But data by itself's just data, right? And to turn it in for information you got to have context. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right data to the right person at the right time make the right decision. >> Yeah, but I've said all along, it's not about he who holds the right data, most data, it's really who has the right data. >> Right. >> So absolutely. >> Right. So as you look at some of the significant kind of glacial shifts in terms of infrastructure, in terms of CPU, in speed of CPUs compared again to 2000, you know, compared to the data that we have, the storage economics, and obviously Cloud. Now, finally, it seems like we're getting to the tipping point, where you've got enough horsepower, you've got enough storage, you Compute, and networking that you can start to implement some of these things that were just a pipe dream when you couldn't get 40 people, >> Yeah, well, >> In a room. >> So Compute has definitely changed and it's one of the things that's changed with respect to machine learning. The storage, because if you really think about intelligence, it's all about making sure you have all of that data. So yes, absolutely, that's changed. But one of the things that we really have to understand, and at 451 we just launched a lot of research around Foresight, right, and it's so about, hindsight is 20/20 and Foresight is 451, right? So it is all about looking more forward. >> Right, right. >> And one of the things that we talk about is just that. What are we doing with invisible infrastructure? Because no one really cares about what the infrastructure it is today, it's what's the intelligence that's coming out of it? So our four themes are around invisible infrastructure, pervasive intelligence, contextual experiences and then the ability to deal with the risk. So those four themes come together to create Foresight, and we actually launched that this week at our own conference, HCTS. >> I used to joke, we used to operate on a sample of historic data, right? Take a little bit of something that already happened. As opposed to now, you actually have the opportunity to get all the data and you have the opportunity to get it in real-time and have that feed your decision making processes. >> Well, what's really changed is we're no longer working from just operational data, we're bringing a lot more of that behavioral data that has to be streamed in real-time, and that's the architectural changes that have shift. >> Right. >> And the other thing you have to do with the infrastructure changes, if you're really making a decision, you have to make that decision on the edge. (announcements in background) >> So I think Marc Benioff is going to start speaking. >> Yeah, that's what we're going to have to adjust, to cut this off. >> So Sheryl, it's great to catch up and we'll see you next time. >> Not a problem, thank you. >> Marc Benioff's coming on. Thanks for watching theCube. (announcements in background) (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018, brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Salesforce Dreamforce, they're saying it's 170,000 people. Take public transit, do not bring your car, do not take Uber, grab a line, grab a BART, whatever you need. So we're excited to have a practitioner. We love to get customers on, we love to talk to people that are out here actually using all these tools, and our next guest, we're excited to have Becky Bastien. She's a senior force.com developer for BD, which is Becton Dicksinson-- >> Dickinson. >> Becky, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, what type of products do you work on? >> So, I mean primarily we're a Salesforce.com platform, right? And we have a lot of add-ons with Conga, DocuSign, you name it, we're doing it. Apttus CLM, and we also use Oracle CPQ. Anything that connects to the Salesforce.com platform, you can imagine we probably use it. >> And you've been developing on Salesforce for a number of years, looking at your LinkedIn history, so you've got a lot of experience with the platform. Just a little bit of perspective, how this conference has changed, how Salesforce is a platform from just a pure play kind of Salesforce management system, which is what it started at CRM, to what kind of it is today? >> Yeah, I mean the conference has changed astronomically obviously over the years. What you said, it was 170 thousand, right? It's crazy. >> That's crazy. >> Logistically, it's a little tough to get around but it's so much fun and there's so much that you can learn here. It's just increased over the years. The content has gotten better, there's more focused areas, which I really like. I'm a developer at heart so I really focus on that. But as far as the platform itself, it's really grown. You can do anything with it. At BD, we even have done things that are completely custom, like our entire implementation team for one of our business units runs out of Salesforce.com as a project management application. We don't just use it for sales, right? >> Right. >> Or marketing, even. We use it across the board for implementation and now we're getting into the service aspect as well. >> Right, we're here at the Conga event and we talked before we turned the cameras on, you're using the Conga tool set in kind of a unique and slightly different way than some of the applications we've heard. I wonder if you could share some of the applications that you use and how you use them? >> Sure, so one of our primary uses of Conga is actually generating documents that are customer facing, that really educate our clients, our end clients and then also helps us with some of the data that we're gathering for our product development. But what we do is we go out to the client's site and we're actually sometimes in an operating room, or at a catheter injection or a blood draw, multiple things that we actually gather data on via another application called Fulcrum. We pull all that data back into Salesforce and then we use Conga to generate the documents that are customer facing. With that, it really empowers our business as well because they have full control over that Conga document, so they can make the changes that they need to, without involving IT, and we just kind of hook it all up in the back end for them. >> Right, right. It's really a new kind of world in terms of the opportunity to go gather data on your products, whether it's connected via an application or different things, as opposed to back in the old day, you made it, you shipped it, you sent it out through your distributor and you had no idea how end users are using it, how the doctors are using it in this case. >> Yeah. >> But now, you've got this opportunity to do more of a closed loop feedback, back into the product development. >> Yeah and it's not only a product development, but we're actually educating the hospitals on, are you using the product to what we actually manufactured it for? Are you using it for something entirely different? Are you using it the wrong way? It's actually an education tool back to our end customer and saying, "Hey, this is where you can improve "operating procedures," basically. >> Another hot topic that we hear about all the time, we go to all these conferences, is bots. You talked about, you guys are doing something interesting with bots, again, leveraging the Conga application probably not necessarily the way that's it's, I didn't see Bots on their product sheet. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about that application? >> Yeah, We have a bot where our sales reps can basically enter some information into an Excel spreadsheet. It's for a quick quote for a customer, and the bot will crawl that spreadsheet and feed it back into SAP. What we've found is that our sales reps are having a hard time getting the right customer number, getting the right contact information and things like that, where the Bot would fail if they didn't have the right information. What we've done with Conga is we generate that Excel spreadsheet from Salesforce.com so the sales rep is on an opportunity, and they generate the bot, they generate the spreadsheet, they fill out the rest of the information and then it gets sent along its way and it creates the order and SAP eventually. It's really cutting out some human error. >> Right, so does the Bot fill in the missing data? Or it just flags that you've got some incomplete stuff you have to fill in? >> Yeah so, we're passing it as much as we can for the rep. They're having to manually enter some things like what product, what quantity, and things like that, and then the bot crawls it and throws it into SAP. It's just an easier way for a rep when they're sitting out on-site with a client. They can actually put it in an Excel spreadsheet, which they love. >> Right. Of course we're trying to get 'em away from Excel spreadsheets anyway, but let's go ahead and automate some of it for them so it cuts out that error. >> It's a really interesting story because it's often a battle to get the sales people to work in Salesforce. >> Yeah. >> As opposed to report in Salesforce. >> Right. >> You're really kind of bridging that gap, letting 'em work in Excel, which isn't necessarily their preferred solution but if that's what they're doing and then integrating that back into the automated system. >> It's hard to change that behavior, for sure. >> Yes it is. >> But yeah, by giving them the bot, we're actually making them go into Salesforce. It gets them more comfortable with it and a way to drive user adoption. >> Right and I'm sure you can see a future where AI is going to enable more and more automation of all the little bits and pieces of that process going forward. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, too, what we talked about with gathering all that data, that's one of the things with Einstein that we're really interested in, especially at Dreamforce this year, is learning more about Einstein and what we can do on the platform with all the data that we have gathered. >> Right, right. The other thing you mentioned before we turn on the cameras, it's again, kind of a new technology, is voice. Obviously with the proliferation of Alexa and Google Home and OK Siri, and all these things, voice is going to be an increasingly important way that people interact with applications. As you look forward, down the road, what are some of the opportunities you see there, where you can start to integrate more potential voice control into the applications? >> I think it kind of goes back to our sales reps, again. Where they're on on-site. If they can talk into their phone really quickly and say, "Update this opportunity amount." I mean, that's great. It gets them, again, into Salesforce, it's going to drive that user adoption. I saw a session on it earlier today and I thought it was pretty cool. I think they'll be excited about that. We're also implementing field service for Lightning. We have our actual texts that get dispatched out on-site, so I can really see them using that on the mobile experience as well. >> The dispatch is going out through Lightning and then the management of the service call is also happening inside of Lightning? >> Yeah, we're implementing Service Cloud right now. The next phase will be implementing field service for Lightning. We're now dispatching out of SAP, but we're looking to move it entirely to Salesforce. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> Okay, if Marc Benioff came in and sat down, there was a guy that looked just like his brother here earlier, what would you ask him? What kind of magic wand you've been developing in this thing for a number of years, would you say, Marc, love it, love it, but could you just give me a little of this and and a little of that? >> I'd say, show me the road map and no safe harbor, tell me it's actually going to happen. No, I think mobile is where we're always really trying to figure out where Salesforce is going, and I think they've really improved. But I offline capability is something that has struggled with Salesforce. We have to rely on other apps that write back into Salesforce. >> Right. >> It'd be nice to eliminate those other offline applications and just use Salesforce.com for that offline power train. Because a lot of times we're at the hospital, and there's no wifi, there's no connection. >> Right, right. >> So we have to have that offline capability. >> Still kind of the soft underbelly of cloud-based things but 5G is coming, we were just at the AT&T show and we'll have 5G 10x the speed, 100x the speed. >> Bring it on, yeah. >> So good stuff. Alright, Becky, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Absolutely. >> And keep coding away. >> Thank you. >> Alright. >> She's Becky, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, downtown San Francisco, come on by. (upbeat techno music)

(electric upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE along with Dave Vallante I'm John Walls as we wrap up our coverage here at Inforum 18, Washington D.C. Nations capital. Again just saying which we are between Capital Hill and the White House here. And just on top of the show floor Dave had a chance to check out the goings on down. So good feeling here. Good vibe on the floor. Good feeling on the Keynote stage. I know tomorrow, good lineup as well but just your thoughts as we wind up here on day one. Well I think Charles Phillips is an awesome host. I mean first of all he looks great up there. He's tall. He's thin. He's got has this awesome suit on. I mean the guy is just dressed impeccably. Add to that his mind. I mean he's a very clear thinker, a clear strategist. He's able to articulate the value, the strategy that Infor has and has had for quite some time and the value that it brings to customers. So I really like listening to him. He's not a hype machine. Unlike, you know, so many in this industry who are incredibly successful, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff you know others you know love to hype what they do. Charles throws a little, few little jokes in there but very low key as we heard this morning. And it seems to be working. I mean as a private company they can write their own narrative. Alright if this were a public company people would be hammering them on the debt. They'd be knocking them on the top-line growth. Cause the Income Statement, you know, from a growth stand point is not exploding but the SAS pieces of the business are. So but you know Wall street, they would be picking at this scabs. So as a private company, they're not subject to the 90-day shot clock. And so as a result they can write their own narrative which I think is incredibly important for this company right now because they have a large installed base of customers that they're trying to move to their new platform. Move, migrate you know, those are scary words for customers. And so the competition, this is why. Why is Oracle coming at Infor so much? Two reasons there may be others. But number one. Infor is hurting Oracle. They're taking share away and Oracle you know, think that they should have 100% market share. Same with SAP. The second is that it sees an opportunity to fight back you know the best, the best defense is a good offense. And so they're trying to go after those customers that Infor's trying to woe to their new platform. And any time you moving it's an opportunity. You know we saw this with big acquisitions like Dell and EMC. You know EMC took their eye off the ball, others came in allowed a company like NetApp to come back. So you see that certainly HP, when it was splitting up, got distracted so you see that and so now what's key about sessions like this, events like this, is it allows Infor to stay relevant. To put a relevance story in front of its customers. So what is that story? It's got a platform. It's got a full stack. It's investing in R and D. It's innovating with technologies like AI. It's building organic innovation. And it's bringing in inorganic through acquisition. Things like Birst for modern BI and injecting that throughout its application portfolio. It's got a full-suite. It was interesting somebody said we had to make a bet, do we go full-suite >> Or best-of-breed. >> Or do we go best-of-breed. >> Right. >> I would argue by going micro-vertical they can claim both. It's very hard to be both best-of-breed and both full-suite. I mean I would agree if you just want to do one thing, you're probably going to do that one thing better than anybody else. And so I'll grant you that. But I think that the balancing act is how do you stay like best-of-breed or near best-of-breed with that full-suite? And I think Infor's found the answer with micro-verticals. And bringing in technologies like AI. Was very impressed with all the robotic process automation talk this morning. That's going to be a huge business it's already. I mean it's growing like crazy. So if I'm an Infor customer and I'm an old Legacy customer I'm thinking: "Wow these guys are really making "some interesting investments." "Yeah I got to spend, "and I got to maybe migrate "but if I don't I'm going to get digitally transformed "by somebody else." And they didn't actually put a lot of scare tactics in there but maybe that's something they should, might want to add in, is some examples of customers that are, that have been left behind. But maybe that's bromide in the industry today. But I think that, that relevance message came through load and strong and I think it's critical for this company. >> I think interesting just to start with the Keynotes, and then we heard it throughout the various guest that we had here on the program today was that it's a compony that really knows who it is. At least that's the feeling I get. Knows where it's going. So it inspires a lot of confidence, right. He does, Charles does. The company does. And they're just kind, they're just real comfortable in their own skin for one. And two, they're committed to other principles outside of business. I'm talking about the diversity and inclusion. That's just not flab, that's really who they are. That's their DNA. I think there's an appealing aspect there too. >> Yeah and so. And then we heard a lot, you know, the Coke industries investment, two and a half billion. I said two billion earlier it's two and a half billion. That money didn't show up in the Balance Sheet, okay. So again. You get to write your own narrative as a private company. So there's still three hundred and thirty-eight million on the Balance Sheet you know, still quite a bit of debts. So again, Wall Street would be picking at that but doesn't even come up, at this event. Customers aren't really asking those questions. They want to see a company that's viable. This company is clearly viable. They have thrown off a lot of cash that's why private equity and organizations like Coke Industries are interested in them. Because it's cashflow positive, they see a lot of, you know, financial upside for this company. So that's kind if cool. They other things is Hook & Loop the Design firm that Infor bought you know, several years ago we heard how that's evolving and becoming a fundamental part of, not just design but product development. I think that's pretty impressive. Many companies are doing that now. These guys got in first and so they're a little bit ahead of the game. I think they're, they're innovating in a way that I think has ripple effects for customers. I mean the customer experience. You hear a lot about diversity at this company, I mean this is not to me lip service. >> Right. >> You know Charles is really serious about this stuff. And he's got the platform to do it and he's investing in it. And so, you know, you see a lot of substantive examples. And I think that will pay off. It will pay dividends. The Four Horsemen now have been sort of evolving. There's a succession planning with the Four Horsemen, right. Because Stephan and Duncan have, have moved on. You know they've left the company or at least they're not front and center anymore. They're LinkedIn still says they're working with Infor so they're somehow affiliated. But they don't have operating roles. It's clear. But Charles and Pam still do. And so you're seeing an evolution there. We're going to ask the head of HR tomorrow about that. We heard from, you know Martine, back to the diversity. Corey Tollefson talking retail. You know again, Micro industry. You know, we know, he didn't mention it, but you know guys like Macy's, Safeway, these are decent sized customers of Infor. We're seeing the partner ecosystem grow. We had Capgemini on today. Grant Thornton is out there. You know Deloitte and others that. >> Accenture is out here I think. >> Accenture's out here, yeah. So that's, that's important. Again I think, I think Coke Industries helped nudge some people in there. "Like Hey, we just made a big investment." "We're a big client of yours." >> Didn't hurt. >> "You're going to pay attention." (laughing) >> "And find some opportunities." Probably said: "Look it's got to be subsidize, "It's got to be a win-win but we want you to look in earnest." And I think others have. I've heard that there's been multi-million dollar deals that these guys have have catalyzed. Kevin Curry from Public Sector, a critical space for Infor, he has almost a thousand customers here and Amazon has a huge presence in Public Sector and they're drafting off of that. And then of course we ended with Raul from AWS which was fun interview. AWS is obviously winning in so many different fronts. Big partnerships with guys like VMware. Obviously number one in Cloud, others I guess if you add up all the revenue are number one. But really Amazon's number one in cloud. >> That's right. >> We know they're tops. Because they're in a. For their serve market, which is infrastructure as a service, they're by far the leader and they started the whole thing. Tomorrow we got Charles Phillips coming on. We got Pam Murphy the two, what I consider founders of Infor. They weren't right, but they were the founders of, the new co-founders of the new Infor if you will. And some customers coming on. So really excited to be here. >> Big day, look forward to it. >> Yeah. >> And we, unfortunately I can't share this with you at home but Venus Williams on the Keynote stage tomorrow. Looking forward to that. Talking about the human potential. Shackles going to be here. Had a last minute cancellation so they've Venus Williams in and talk about really thematically, very consistent to her life story with what Infor is talking about here this week. And we're glad to have the opportunity to be here with you throughout the week, and the show. So that's it for day one here at Inforum 18. From Dave Vallante, I'm John Walls, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE and we'll see you back here tomorrow from Washington D.C. (electric upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering Inforum D.C. 2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well, back here on theCUBE, we are at Inforum '18. We're in Washington, D.C. here in the Walter Washington Convention Center. Not far from the White House. It's about a mile that way, and Capitol Hill's about a mile that way, I think. I know we're right in here, but I know we are smack dab in the middle of it. Dave Vellante and John Walls and Kevin Curry, who's the SVP of the global public sector at Infor. Good to have you with us. Good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here. Thanks for your time. >> So public sector, you're in the heart of it here, and you were telling us before we went on the air that you've got more than 700 clients here at the show this week? >> We do, we do. It's the best attendance we've had yet for Inforum, and I joined about six and a half years ago. And we built this business pretty much from the ground up. So it's been a great experience, and now we're starting to get a lot of adoption within the government, across the government, from federal to state to locals. >> What's the process been like, especially across those three, because I assume they're all different? You know, local, state, federal, everybody has different pain points and there's different tolerances. >> They do, they do. I mean, there's different micro-verticals within each of those statements. As an example, if you look at local governments, it could be anything from transit agencies to K-12 schools, to public works, to police, to fire. They all have all different requirements. State's the same thing, whether it's Department of Transportation or Department of Health and Human Services. And then when you get the federal side of it, then it's from the intelligence community to Department of Defense, healthcare within Defense, like the VA and DoD and Defense agencies as well. So it's a pretty wide swatch of use cases and business cases that you need to be able to sell to. >> Charles said something interesting in the keynote today. I want to ask you about it. He said, "We made a strategic decision to go to the cloud. "We didn't want to compete with Google "and Amazon and Microsoft for CloudScale. "That didn't make any sense for us." And he said, "When we were an on-prem software vendor, "we weren't managing servers for our customers." Now what struck me there is if you look back at the software company back in the day, they really didn't care about the server, right? It was just sort of infrastructure. It was kind of irrelevant to them. The cloud feels different. It seems like a more strategic relationship with Amazon. You know, we talk about Teresa Carlson and what a force she is in the government. AWS in the GovCloud has been a huge force. They had a giant lead. So have you been able to draft off that or is it just another sort of infrastructure platform? >> No, they're a major strategic partnership there with AWS and NN4. At the company level, and especially for me, with the government, they've made the right investments at the right time, I mean, and they actually have cloud environments that are very specific to different segments of the government and to different geographies. So as an example, in the federal government they have an intelligence cloud called C2S, which we work with them on. There's a very large procurement out right now for the Department of Defense called Jedi, which Amazon's going after, as well as the other larger cloud providers, so we're obviously riding that horse with AWS. And also for local governments, and they've done all of the compliancy for the government, whether it be FedRAMP, whether it be CJIS for those departments that are worried about the justice type of requirements. And as you get outside of the U.S., they're putting clouds and we're a global company as well, putting clouds in all the right places. They have a G-Cloud offering in the U.K. and as we talked about earlier when we sat down, they're opening a cloud in the Middle East right now too, in Bahrain that I think traces on oil over there as we speak. >> Right, right. The first Middle East country to claim cloud first. But it just seems like there's a strategic advantage there. And even with the other cloud suppliers. I mean, you know, Google's got its niche, big niche, you know, Microsoft, with its software state, but it seems like Amazon, they talk about that flywheel effect, brings certain technologies that, you know, when you talk to Soma, you guys have been able to take advantage of. It just feels a lot different than the old traditional server manufacturer. Oh, it's a Unix box and there's no difference between vendor A, B and C. >> Absolutely correct. And for us, we've taken advantage of the tools that Amazon has and obviously, we're doing all the compliancy on our applications and they've got whole the infrastructure piece of it, so the two work very well together. >> And that has allowed you to focus on your knitting, if you will. >> Yes. >> The things that you do best, which is a micro-verticals, suite across the application portfolio, bringing AI to the equation, automation, we heard a lot about robotic process automation, which is probably a hot topic in the government. >> Yes. I mean, Charles famously, he may have had a quote. I'm sure you heard it. It's friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Great quote. >> You know, that's not a business we're in. We're a software company. >> Right. >> So the public sector, obviously a different animal than the private sector. Very different needs, different constituents, you got tax payers, you got all that. When you bring the technology into the public sector, what does that do for it or how does that have to be, I don't know, re-conformed or adapted? And ultimately, what's the payoff, right? What's the return on that investment? >> So it was actually pretty shocking how quickly the government has adopted and moved towards the cloud. Typically, they're laggards. Everything happens in the commercial market and then government's a little bit of a late adopter, right? But we're seeing them very quickly go to the cloud and there's a lot of reasons for that. One being, you have an aging workforce. Okay, so the baby boomers are all retiring so a lot of that intellectual knowledge is going out the door. Two, is there's some economies of scale to be realized by doing that because once you're in the cloud, I mean, it's up to the vendor who's maintaining it to maintain that for you. So, you know, the people behind the scenes, they have to do it. You know, when you upgrade your software to go from one release to the other, it's automatically done for you. I mean, so there's real cost savings to be had, you know, from a care and feeding perspective there as well. Also a lot of the, on the ERP side of the things, a lot of the systems that are out in the marketplace today that governments have bought, like the Oracles or the SAPs, a lot of these systems are at end-of-life and the companies are no longer supporting them. So it's a re-implementation for them. You know, and so now they're looking, okay, if we have to re-implement and we have to look at our new options, we're going to do it in a cloud. >> So when you've been around as long as I have, Kevin, >> Right. >> you've seen the pendulum swing. You don't have to agree so vehemently. (laughing) But from mainframe to client server and so you're back to the cloud, and now with IoT, it seems like the pendulum is swinging back to a distributed environment. So help us understand where IoT fits to the cloud and even your on-prem business. >> Okay, so like I say, cloud is a pretty broad topic, okay? We have multiple applications that would run in that environment. So when I look at IoT, I think of things like our asset management platform. We have a very strong enterprise asset management platform that runs in the cloud or runs on-prem. And if you think about infrastructure as an example, which government has a lot of, okay. Think about the ability to have sensors on different pieces of equipment and being able to read that information. Think about using drone technology, okay, to be able to do physical inspections under bridges, so you're not having people having to climb around underneath there. I mean, so being able to do live feeds of data and be able to streamline the way you do business and have that automatically captured within an application. So yes, that is one area where we see it. I mean, I think you're going to see more and more of robotics and artificial intelligence and all the things come into play. I think you heard a lot about that here and it's here. I mean, they were things we saw in movies before but now the technology's here today. >> Well, the other thing we heard this morning that Charles has always talked a lot about the data. You guys always talked about your data lake. I like to think of it as a data ocean. You think about all the data out of GT Nexus and, you know, your customers that are providing data to inform. The data model starts to really expand and you guys have seemed to really take advantage of that. Talk about the data, the importance of data, the importance of securing data to the government. >> Well, think about that. I mean, there's islands of information that governments have that if they were able to consolidate that data and put some intelligence into it, be able to make business decisions versus, you know, one system sitting over here, one system sitting over here and none of them ever communicating or talking to each other. You know, the ability to, You could do from anything from, just think about crime statistics, okay? The ability to deploy resources where the crime is and then as it moves, be able to further deploy resources. You know, New York, years ago, did things like that with CompStat when they were cleaning up Times Square and so forth. But just think of that as a concept, realtime being able to manage data. >> So you've got, here at the show, we were talking about earlier, 700 and some odd clients, 725. You've got the federal forum for the first time. Why now? And what are you getting out of that or what do you hope to get out of that at the end of the week? >> So the whole executive team and our board of directors have made significant investments in this marketplace because they understand that government is a very large beast, if you will, and there's a lot of opportunity for deployment of our solutions and there's a real need to solve problems for constituents here as well. So they've made very significant investments in things for security like FedRAMP, compliancy. You know, some companies are doing it on some of their solutions. We're doing it across the board on all the products that we take to the government marketplace. So we're invested in it. You've probably heard today, Charles talked about the fact that we're going to have a federal cloud suite, which we are. So that means federal financials, okay? Actually being able to solve all the problems for the federal government and comply to all their needs and all the things that are part of mandated accounting for the federal government. They made all the right investments and human capital management would be another area. If you think about, we've got an application called Talent Science. The ability to hire the right people for the right job and retain those people. Just think about, ICE is a good example. You heard that they have to hire thousands of people to deploy on the borders, right? How do you quickly ramp and hire these right people if you don't have the right tools to do it? >> You were quoted in TIME magazine, Marc Benioff's new publication, about America's crumbling infrastructure. What role do you see technology playing generally and specifically in for software and helping with that problem? >> So we do a lot today around infrastructure. As an example, we have a very strong presence in transit agencies here in the U.S. New York City runs us, amounts to about a trillion dollars worth of assets there. So anything moving in, out or around the city, so subways, buses, trains, tunnels, bridges, Metro-North, Long Island Rail Road. L.A. runs us, San Francisco runs us, Chicago runs us, Dallas runs us and many others. So we're managing all of that infrastructure. So you hear a lot about infrastructure bills coming out of the federal government. And they're right. I mean, a lot of these tunnel, a lot of these bridges and tunnels and even roadways were built back during World War II, right? And they're aged, you know, they are starting to crumble and there's going to be a lot of money spent to do that and when it comes to rebuilding those types of things, there's a lot of assets that are going to need to be managed, you know, to do that. So we think there's a real opportunity for software such as what we bring to the marketplace to help with that process. >> How about talent retention? I mean, obviously, as administrations come and go, you know, people move, but there's been a lot of brain drain. I mean, take the Patent Office, people in commercial industry stealing some of the best and brightest out of government. Can software play a role in helping better retain, train, you know, evolve growth paths and careers? >> Yes. I guess, in a couple different ways. I mean, number one, I think the applications of today versus the applications of yesterday have changed so much. I mean, you look at, you know, the applications you have on your mobile phone. The ability to have that look and feel, I mean, our kids today are going to go into the workforce and they won't settle for anything less. They're going to want to have that look and feel. They're going to want to have those intuitive type of applications that help them do their job. And that's the kind of offering we're bringing to the marketplace. Then from just actually bringing the right people and we have an application called Talent Science, as an example, where actually there's multiple different areas of your personality that it can determine and map it back to your top performers in your company. And determine the right people for the right job where they'll fit into that environment and then they would thrive hopefully. And it should increase retention on the staff. In government, we've actually sold it to Department of Health and Human Services for hiring case workers. Okay? Or to police departments for hiring of law enforcement. So there's a real opportunity to take those types of applications and do some pretty creative things. >> What's, I hate to say, the pain side of it. But dealing with the government obviously contracts is an issue, right? And a challenge sometimes maybe for you. I'm curious, in a quickly evolving space such as yours, how do you help them keep up with you and their regulatory oversight and whatever mandated restrictions they have? All those things, you know, that come with government. It just doesn't square up with what you do. >> It is, it's a very, again, to your point, it's a different, it's a different industry with different requirements. And everything here is very open and above board. It's open procurements. Everything is competitively bid. There are contractual vehicles that you competitively bid for that'll allow you to be able to do business a lot easier in the future. I mean, in the feds you have things like the GSA 70 Schedule. U.K., you have something called the G-Cloud contract. A lot of states have vehicles where you can bid for it, so all states and local can buy off of those contracts without having to go to a competitive offering. So there's ways that the business can get done without having to go through a lot. >> Every hoop and every, yeah, right. >> The major pain process. But then there's also competitive RFPs, which, you know, well, they'll put a bid out, it'll be very detailed. You have to answer 3,000 requirements. And then after that you'll end up going into an orals and a demo process and, you know, nine months later, they're going to pick a winner. (laughs lightly) Then you go through, but then you have to go through a very painful contract negotiation process. >> That's the process I was talking about. (laughing) Exactly what I was talking about, right. >> Right. >> Yeah, yeah. Well, Kevin, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. >> It's my pleasure. >> And it sounds impressive, right, with the turnout you had, so I'm sure you're very, very pleased with the response you've had here on the show for so far. >> I am and I thank you for your time and >> You bet. >> have a good show. >> Look forward to seeing you down the road. Alright, sir, thank you. Back with more here live on theCUBE. We're at Inforum '18 and we are in Washington, D.C. >> I'm quite sure they got me pinned up back here, but I can't-- (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up three big days of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante and Jeffrick. It has been such fun co-hosting with you both. It's always a ghast to be with you so three days, what have we learned? We've learned we're making the world of work work better for people. Beyond that what do you think? >> New branding you know there which I think underscores ServiceNow's desire to get into the C-Suite. Become a strategic partner. Some of the things we heard this week, platform of platforms. The next great enterprise software company is what they aspire to, just from a financial standpoint. This company literally wants to be a hundred billion dollar valuation company. I think they got a reasonable shot at doing that. They're well on their way to four billion dollars in revenue. It's hard to be a software company and hit a billion. You know the number of companies who get there ar very limited and they are the latest. We're also seeing many products, one platform and platforms in this day and age beat products. Cloud has been a huge tailwind for ServiceNow. We've seen the SaaSification of industries and now we're seeing significant execution on the original vision at penetration into deeply into these accounts. And I got to say when you come to events like this and talk to customers. There's amazing enthusiasm as much of if not more than any show that we do. I mean I really got, what's your take? >> We go to so many shows and it's not hard to figure out the health of a show. Right you walk around the floor, what's the energy, how many people are there? What's the ecosystem I mean, even now as I look around we're at the very end of the third day and there is action at most of the booths still. So it's a super healthy ecosystem. I think it grew another 4,000 people from this year of the year of year growth. So it's clearly on the rise. SaaS is a big thing, I think it's really interesting play and the kind of simple workflow. Not as much conversation really about the no code and the low code that we've heard in the past. Maybe they're past that but certainly a lot of conversation about the vertical stack applications that they're building and I think at the end of the day. We talked about this before, it's competition for your screen. You know what is it that you work in everyday. Right if you use, I don't care what application. SalesForce or any SaaS application which we all have a lot of on our desktop today. If you use it as a reporting tool it's a pain. It's double entry, it's not good. But what is the tool that you execute your business on everyday? And that's really a smart strategy for them to go after that. The other thing that I just think is ripe and we talked about a little bit. I don't know if they're down playing it because they're not where they want to be at or they're just downplaying it but the opportunity for machine learning and artificial intelligence to more efficiently impact workflows with the data from the workflow is a huge opportunity. So what was a bunch of workflows and approvals and this and that should all get, most of it should just get knocked out via AI over a short period of time. So I think they're in a good spot and then the other thing which we hear over and over. You know Frank Slootman IT our homies I still love that line. But as has been repeated IT is everywhere so what a great way to get into HR. To get into legal, to get into facilities management, to get into these other things. Where like hey this is a really cool efficient little tool can I build a nice app for my business? So seemed to be executing on that strategy. >> Yeah CJ just said IT will always be at our core. Rebecca the keynote was interesting. It got mixed reviews and I think part of that is they're struggling we heard tat from some of our guests. There's a hybrid audience now. You got the IT homies, you got the DevOps crowd and then you got the business leaders and so the keynote on day one was really reaching an audience. Largely outside of the core audience. You know I think day two and day three were much more geared toward that direct hit. Now I guess that's not a bad thing. >> No and I think that I mean as you noted it's a hybrid audience so you're trying to reach and touch and inspire and motivate a lot of different partners, customers, analysts. People who are looking at your business in a critical way. The first day John Donahoe it struck me as very sort of aspirational. Really talking about what is our purpose, what do we do as an organization. What are our values, what problems are we trying to solve here and I think that that laying out there in the way that he did was effective because it really did bring it back to, here's what we're about. >> Yeah the other thing I learned is succession has been very successful. Frank Slootman stepped down last year as CEO. He's maintained his chairman title, he's now stepped down as chairman. Fred kind of you know went away for a little while. Fred's back now as chairman. John Donahoe came in. People don't really put much emphasis on this but Fred Luddy was the chief product officer. Dan McGee was the COO, CJ Desai took over for both of them. He said on the CUBE. You know you texted me, you got big shoes to fill. He said I kept that just to remind me and he seems to have just picked up right where those guys left off. You know Pat Casey I think is understated and vital to the culture of this company. You know Jeff you see that, he's like a mini Fred you know and I think that's critical to maintain that cultural foundation. >> But as we said you know going the way that Pat talked about kind of just bifurcation in the keynote and the audiences in the building and out of the building. Which I've never heard before kind of an interesting way to cut it. The people that are here are their very passionate community and they're all here and they're adding 4,000 every single year. The people that are outside of the building maybe don't know as much about it and really maybe that aspirational kind of messaging touched them a little bit more cause they're not into the nitty gritty. It's really interesting too just cause this week is such a busy week in technology. The competition for attention, eyeballs and time. I was struck this morning going through some of our older stuff where Fred would always say. You know I'm so thankful that people will take the time to spend it with us this week. And when people had choices to go to Google IO, Microsoft build, of course we're at Nutanix next, Red Hat Summit I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other ones. >> Busy week. >> The fact that people are here for three days of conference again they're still here is a pretty good statement in terms of the commitment of their community. >> Now the other thing I want to mention is four years ago Jeff was I think might have been five years ago. We said on the CUBE this company's on a collision course with SalesForce and you can really start to see it take shape. Of the customer service management piece. We know that SalesForce really isn't designed for CSM. Customer Service Management. But he talked about it so they are on a collision course there. They've hired a bunch of people from SalesForce. SalesForce is not going to rollover you know they're going to fight hard for that hard, Oracle's going to fight hard for that. So software companies believe that they should get their fair share of the spend. As long as that spend is a 100%. That's the mentality of a software company. Especially those run by Marc Benioff and Larry Ellis and so it's going to be really interesting to see how these guys evolve. They're going to start bumping into people. This guy's got pretty sharp elbows though. >> Yeah and I think the customer relation is very different. We were at PagerDuty Summit last right talked to Nick Meta who just got nominated for entrepreneur of the year I think for Ink from GainSight and he really talked about what does a customer management verses opportunity management. Once you have the customer and you've managed that sale and you've made that sale. That's really were SalesForce has strived in and that's we use it for in our own company but once you're in the customer. Like say you're in IBM or you're in Boeing. How do you actually manage your relationship in Boeing cause it's not Boeing and your sales person. There's many many many relationships, there's many many many activities, there's somewhere you're winning, somewhere you're losing. Somewhere you're new, somewhere you're old and so the opportunity there is way beyond simply managing you know a lead to an opportunity to a closed sale. That' just the very beginning of a process and actually having a relationship with the customer. >> The other thing is so you can, one of the measurements of progress in 2013 this company 95% of its business was in IT. Their core ITSM, change management, help desk etc. Today that number's down to about two thirds so a third of the business is outside of IT. We're talking about multi-hundreds of millions of dollars. So ITOM, HR, the security practice. They're taking these applications and they're becoming multi-hundred million dollar businesses. You know some of them aren't there yet but they're you know north of 50, 75 we're taking about hundreds of customers. Higher average price, average contract values. You know they don't broadcast that here but you know you look at peel back the numbers and you can see just tremendous financial story. The renewal rates are really really high. You know in the mid 90s, high 90s which is unheard of and so I think this company is going to be the next great enterprise software company and their focus on the user experience I think is important because if you think about the great enterprise software companies. SalesForce, Oracle, SAP, maybe put IBM in there because they sort of acquired their way to it. But those three, they're not the greatest user experiences in the world. They're working on the UI but they're, you know Oracle, we use Oracle. It's clunky, it's powerful. >> They're solving such different problems. Right when those companies came up they were solving a very different problem. Oracle on their relational database side. Very different problem. You know ARP was so revolutionary when SAP came out and I still just think it's so funny that we get these massive gains of efficiency. We had it in the ARP days and now we're getting it again. So they're coming at it from a very different angle. That they're fortunate that there are more modern architecture, there are more modern UI. You know unfortunately if you're legacy you're kind of stuck in your historical. >> In your old ways right? >> Paradigm. >> So the go to market gets more complicated as they start selling to all these other divisions. You're seeing overlay, sales forces you know it's going to be interesting. IBM just consolidated it's big six shows into one. You wonder what's going to happen with this. Are they going to have to create you know mini Knowledges for all these different lines of business. We'll see how that evolves. You think with the one platform maybe they keep it all together. I hope they don't lose that core. You think of VM world, rigt there's still a core technical audience and I think that brings a lot of the energy and credibility to a show like this. >> They still do have some little regional shows and there's a couple different kind of series that they're getting out because as we know. Once you get, well just different right. AWS reinvents over $40,000 last year. Oracle runs it I don't even know what Oracle runs. A 65,000, 75,000. SalesForce hundred thousand but they kind of cheat. They give away lot of tickets but it is hard to keep that community together. You know we've had a number of people come up to us while we're off air to say hi, that we've had on before. The company's growing, things are changing, new leadership so to maintain that culture I think that's why Pat is so important and the key is that connection to the past and that connection to Fred. That kind of carried forward. >> The other thing we have to mention is the ecosystem when we first started covering ServiceNow Knowledge it was you know fruition partners, cloud Sherpas I mean it. Who are these guys and now you see the acquisitions, it's EY is here, Deloitte is here, Accenture is here. >> Got Fruition. >> PWC you see Unisys is here. I mean big name companies, Capgemini, KPMG with big install bases. Strong relationships it's why you see the sales guys at ServiceNow bellying up to these companies because they know it's going to drive more business for them. So pretty impressive story I mean it's hard to be critical of these guys, your price is too high. Okay I mean alright. But the value's there so people are lining up so. >> Yeah I mean it's a smoking hot company as you said. What do they needed to do next? What do you need to see from them next? >> Well I mean the thing is they laid out the roadmap. You know they announced twice a year at different cities wit each a letter of the alphabet. They got to execute on that. I mean this is one of those companies that's theirs to lose. It really is, they got the energy. They got to retain the talent, attract new talent, the street's certainly buying their story. Their free cash flow is growing faster than their revenue which is really impressive. They're extremely well run company. Their CFO is a rockstar stud behind the scenes. I mean they got studs in development, they got a great CEO they got a great CFO. Really strong chief product officer, really strong general managers who've got incredible depth in expertise. I mean it's theirs to lose, I mean they really just have to keep executing on that roadmap keeping their customer focus and you know hoping that there's not some external factor that blows everything up. >> Yeah good point, good point. What about the messaging? We've heard as you said, it's new branding so it's making the world of work work better, there's this focus on the user experience. The idea that the CIO is no longer just so myopic in his or her portfolio. Really has to think much more broadly about the business. A real business leader, I mean is this. Are you hearing this at other conferences too? Is it jiving with the other? >> You know everyone talks about the new way to work, the new to work, the new way to work and the consumers they sort of IT and you know all the millennials that want to operate everything on their phone. That's all fine and dandy. Again at the end of the day, where do people work? Because again you're competing everyone has, excuse me many many applications unfortunately that we have to run to get our day job done and so if you can be the one that people use as the primary way that they get work done. That's the goal... >> Rebecca: That's where the money is. >> That's the end game right. >> Well I owe that so the messaging to me is interesting because IT practitioners as a community are some of the most under appreciated. You know overworked and they're only here from the business when things go bad. For decades we've seen this the thing that struck me at ServiceNow Knowledge 13 when we first came here was wow. These IT people ar pumped. You know you walk around a show the IT like this, they're kind of dragging their feet, heads down and the ServiceNow customers are excited. They're leading innovation in their companies. They're developing new applications on these platforms. It's a persona that I think is being reborn and it sound exciting to see. >> It's funny you bring up the old chest because before it was a lot about just letting IT excuse me, do their work with a little bit more creativity. Better tools, build their own store, build an IT services Amazon likened store. We're not hearing any of that anymore. >> Do more with less, squeeze, squeeze. >> If we're part of delivering value as we've talked about with the banking application and link from MoonsStar you know now these people are intimately involved with the forward facing edge of the company. So it's not talking about we'll have a cool service store. I remember like 2014 that was like a big theme. We're not hearing that anymore, we've moved way beyond that in terms of being a strategic partner in the business. Which we here over and over but these are you know people that header now the strategic partner for the business. >> Okay customers have to make bets and they're making bets on ServiceNow. They've obviously made a bunch of bets on Oracle. Increasingly they're making bets on Amazon. You know we're seeing that a lot. They've made big bets on VM ware, obviously big bets on SAP so CIOs they go to shows like this to make sure that they made the right bet and they're not missing some blind spots. To talk to their peers but you can see that their laying the chips on the table. I guess pun intended, I mean they're paying off. >> That's great, that's a great note to end on I think. So again a pleasure co-hosting with both of you. It's been a lot of fun, it's been a lot of hard work but a lot of fun too. >> Thank you Rebecca and so the CUBE season Jeff. I got to shout out to you and the team. I mean you guys, it's like so busy right now. >> I thought you were going to ask if we were going next. I was going to say oh my god. >> Next week I know I'm in Chicago at VMON. >> Right we have VMON, DON, we've got a couple of on the grounds. SAP Sapphire is coming up. >> Dave: Pure Accelerate. >> Pure Accelerate, OpenStack, we're going back to Vancouver. Haven't been there for a while. Informatica World, back down here in Las Vegas Pure Storage, San Francisco... >> We got the MIT's CTO conference coming up. We got Google Next. >> Women Transforming Technology. Just keep an eye on the website upcoming. We can't give it all straight but... >> The CUBE.net, SiliconAngle.com, WikiBon.com, bunch of free content.- you heard it here first. >> There you go. >> For Rebecca Knight and Jeffrick and Dave Vellante this has been the CUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We will see you next time. >> Thanks everybody, bye bye.