hello everyone welcome to the cube conversations here in our studio in Palo Alto California I'm John Faria co-host of the cube co-founder Sylvania media special guest today inside the cube in Palo Alto Steve Lucas the new CEO of Marketo formerly of sa P industry veteran a lot of experience in the enterprise space now the chief executive officer at Marquette Oh welcome to this cube conversation great to see you yeah great to see you again so Marketo has been on our radar spent on everyone's radar it's been one of the hottest marketing companies that have come out of this generation of SAS what I call SATs cloud offerings and certainly as burn burn in the field in terms of reputation in terms of quality high customer scale a lot of other companies have been bought out you see Oracle doing a lot of stuff you got Salesforce the SAS business is booming oh yeah and you have a rocket ship that you're now the CEO now for two months first question what's it like here now compare a CPA yeah Marketo what's it what's happening well it's I mean s if he's a fantastic company and loved it it's the the the kind of metaphor I've used is it you know with sa P it's it's a bigger it's a bigger vehicle you're driving a bus and you can carry a lot of people with you takes a little bit longer to make a u-turn Marketo is a Formula One car I mean this thing is just in and out of traffic and it's it's unbelievably nimble so it's it's been a big kind of shift culturally but absolutely love it for the folks that are watching you might not know but Steve was in the HANA analytics president of that division with ASAP which was a real interesting transformation because Hana and and and s ap was a traditional big enterprise software company yeah but had to move very quickly Hana was basically built before Hadoop was even conceived and it was built before the big cloud explosion but kind of well built for the cloud so you have to kind of move quickly oh yeah from scratch into the cloud oh yeah with sa Pease resources yeah so compare construct contrast butBut your expense from sa p what is Marquette O's prospects I mean what's going on there I mean I'll see you got a formula speedboat but the big aircraft carriers are thrown pretty big wake they are how are you gonna maneuver yeah yeah well it's it's a fascinating environment right now because you know going from us if he I'd say that my experience they're kind of highly tuned me or prepared me for what I'm doing in Marketo si P had to move nimbly at the time really nimbly you're entering a market where you've got oracle microsoft at a database level they're the incumbents they own massive share how does si penetrate that but we were successful at the time at sa p and i loved that experience coming into Marketo really i mean it's a couple things one is you got to out-innovate the competition this is not rest on your laurels and wait for the release a year and a half from now that doesn't happen so this is about moving quickly but the second thing it's about I believe is it's all about putting the customer at the center of your strategy they have to drive everything I've talked to more marketers more CMOS in the last two months than I have in my last 20 years putting them the center is all about that Marketo their heritage was marketing solutions built by marketers for market what are the people saying you made with a lot of those CMOS more in the past since the past two months what are they saying what's on their agenda what do they care about what's important to them brand revenue and impact they want to know how do I Drive my brand how do I drive revenue and how do I show that impact to my CEO the board whomever it may be but the thing that scares marketers right now the most is what is digital transformation changing relative you know the big trend in macro trend globally how is it changing buyer expectation how is it changing the customer brand relationship that's top of mind Peter Paris who heads up by research for wiki bond and he used to do the b2b practice at Forrester around digital and stay Volante now we're talking yesterday that digital now is everything right so if you look at digital it's not just oh marketing need some tools to send emails out or oh I need to get a website up call IT up and provision or landing page this is now a fabric of pure infrastructure yet the infrastructure was built in the web days and you can go back to your business object days and go back again even back in the 90s that infrastructure now is so hard and as instrumentation there's no agility so that I feel that and we here in our in our teams and our customers that I want agility but I also want to control what the infrastructure might look like but then I don't want to touch it again I wanted to work for me do you see that same dynamic and how does that play out because I mean it's kind of the nuance point but the end of the day shadow marketing is going on shadow IT oh it's happening and it's on this unequivocally I mean so the the it literally the what's crushing the marketer right now is every time we get a new touch point a a watch so we go from just a watch that tells me the time to an Apple watch right every time there's a new touch point there's a new point solution for it and it's crushing the marketer so if it's social there's point solutions if it's mobile there's point solutions if it's a watch there's point solutions I blew my mind I literally saw it start up this is we can do you know monitoring and engagement of people on a watch it's just it's overwhelming the marketer and so their landscape of applications is looking like 30 40 different apps and their big win single sign-on that's the big win for the marketer internally it's just crushing them so what they're looking for your point is the Mahr tech or marketing technology graph and map is so big each one of their own underlying stack database software is that kind of what you're getting at absolutely absolutely you pick a marketing cloud it really doesn't matter you could say Oracle's marketing cloud sales force marketing cloud Adobe's marketing cloud it's just convoluted the the graph or chart of what's out there so point solutions just put together cobble together that's exactly right and so we're the benefit are that this is the the problem with that is what well the problem with that is that you first of all you lose any context relative to who you are there's no way that I can across 30 or 40 systems keep a consistent definition of job for you it's just impossible to do and our notion is we're looking at and what we're driving is a single engagement platform where the definition of you who you are no matter what touch point how we listen to you how we learn from you and how we engage with you it's all the same it's all integrated so let's get back to this point because I think an engagement platform and then the applications are interesting so I mentioned the CMOS earlier there's more development going on in marketing with like programmers developing apps because creig's of course okay so they're using the cloud and the marketing cloud is not like a one-off it has to be part of the core infrastructure so one of the things that wiki bonds gonna be releasing a new research coming up but I saw David floor yesterday who's a head of the research project that they're gonna show market share numbers of Amazon Google all the top cloud guys yeah interesting dynamic past is squeezing now platform-as-a-service is being squeezed down and SAS is increasing and then I as infrastructure stores is kind of shortening which means this automation in there so that the middle layer is gone but yet there's more sass how does that relate to the marketing cloud because the marketing cloud would be considered middleware or is it just the SAS app and does that speak to an explosion of SAS applications well I mean you're gonna see an explosion of SAS applications regardless I mean we reached that point of critical mass a while ago that's there's no going back at this point but if you look at kind of I think you're absolutely right there's compression at the IaaS layer in the past layer etc because these these these larger kind of SAS applications they are really ruling today and if you look at how that applies to marketing we actually think about three technology tiers within marketing there's the listen learn and engage tier the listen it's here is how do I listen on these digital channels the myriad that are out there and then the learned here is core to our platform the engagement platform it's all about an automation engine an AI engine and an analytics engine it's learning and then engaged here is how do I go back to those self same channels I was listening to and engage you the way that you want to be touched and so that's really the stack that comprises the Marketo engagement platform what's interesting the dynamic for us is we're actually seeing our own native applications that we're building on our engagement platform and then we have over 600 partners that are building applications are not building applications on our engagements they're writing software on top of the market absolutely so they're extending it so if social listening which I know is a big thing for Silicon anger that's like the I mean you guys are masters at it that if that's your thing then we have a not only do we have social listening capability but there's an app for that there's dozens so we could potentially plug into that oh absolutely so that's your vision so the vision let's go back to the so more apps a platform that enables more satisfaction yeah and and you mentioned people building on it that's an integration challenge and that's something that people they want to do more of they want to integrate other things with platforms which could be a challenge but it brings up the point data where does the data sit because now the data is the crown jewel yes and also a very important aspect to get real-time information so if you have information on me you won't have access to that data fast that's right and so there's an architectural challenge there there is your thoughts and reaction to the role of data well I first of all marketers still want to own their data and I think we need to be you know the reality is is that if you look a lot at a lot of these marketing clouds that are out there they're the vendor perspective is going to be will if I own your data I own you and our perspective is well you know that your data can sit within our platform but we can actually drive that data into you know on-premise warehouse etc etc so we're our goal is not to own your data ergo we own you that's not our goal I think the big thing like in the content you're saying is you want to use their data to give them value absolutely and so for us it's a matter of you know we can we can do to protect their data - exactly and so for me it's all about you know it's securing the data its but it's also the data is so complex now for the marketer so you've got social data highly unstructured you know you're listening for key words they still have to interpret that information you've got highly structured data demographic for example so it's how do you bring all that together you can bring that together in the Marketo engagement platform and then you can turn that into something meaningful it's always funny always to love to interview the new CEOs because we got the fresh perspective but I can't ask the tough questions cuz you lived in there for two months you get it say I won't even that two months I really can't answer that so I'll get the more generic on that what to try to get this at some of the hidden questions that I like to expose for the audience and really the main one is what attracted Univ Marketo I mean you left a pretty senior very senior position NSA p-president and Marketo is like the ship that's out there it's a motorboat but some are saying that the ways might be big enough and so you know be like okay but their public company so everything's out in the open what attracted you to market what God did say you know what I want to ride this speedboat well the trigger point for me was you know especially it s if he get exposed to kind of the big macro trends big macro trend everybody knows it is digital transformation as if he's talking that Microsoft Accenture picked the big company they're talking digital transfers and it is real the reality is you either are a digital native company were born digital uber or you're going digital ie you know you're a hospitality company trying to compete with air B&B and you gotta go digital so it's yeah I wrote an article I want on go digital or die right that's that's the that's the notion and when I looked at that I said so how does that lens apply to marketing well the reality is is that the marketer in the digital economy is only going to win if they can engage with not two or three people but Millions in an authentic and personalized manner at scale so that it's kind of juxtaposed how do you do that how do you engage with millions of people but at scale but deliver personalized an authentic experience and I looked at Marketo and I saw this platform and I just said oh my gosh there they are there's like this this convergence of those two things that are going to happen and I just think that the whole kind of marketing automation space which is known as really I I want to transform that into the engagement space we're talking about things like this engagement economy trend I absolutely believe we are fully in this notion of the engagement economy I think Marketo is right there so I gotta ask you a question is this is interesting you mentioned getting personalized information one of the things that's apparent we talked about on my Silicon Valley Friday show if you go to soundcloud.com /john for every year that people watching can get the copies of those but the thing was the recent election highlighted an issue around trust right v news younger natives digital natives younger kids they actually don't know what fake news is and what real news is a lot of people are moving off cable TV into digital which opens up the snapchats of the world different channels omni-channel like things and so this brings up this notion of communities because what people are turning to in this time of no trusting the mainstream media right news or Trump or what they were saying it's causing a lot of theater but it highlights an issue which is what's real what's not its content content is also has a relationship with users content is marketing content is trust is now a huge deal how do marketers now deal with the fact that content marketing coming from a company it could be fake news but there's a real or not and how do they get the context jewel connections is it the communities and we see that election people kind of going back to their tribe and saying oh anti Trump or Trump or whatever so tribal communities are a big part of data it is what's your thoughts on this trust factor and data and the content yeah yeah well so I think I mean a couple things first of all you know the I I think you or I as a consumer you know where anybody really we don't respond well to stare I'll moderately creepy advertisements that show up that you you know you know okay you're tracking my cookie you know in my browser and that that is just that's a non-starter I think that that in and of itself is is not interesting now we respond well to there's I said that that kind of personalized and I use that word authentic content so if there's content it's not just hey I know that you visited you know three websites about cars so I'm just going to pump you with ads full of cars but if we deliver thoughtful content it could be a comparison of vehicles that you've been looking at and take a look so there's more thoughtful content that you can deliver that that I think can come through a Mar tech platform like what we have our engagement platform no I will tell you that that trust to me it's it's not just the the authentic nature it's also a consistent engagement you can't show up show me an ad one time and I'm just gonna buy from you it doesn't work that way anymore so it's about having a relationship digital at scale but you know it's it's delivering that human touch I wrote a blog on this one where I said how do you deliver the human touch its Kate for blog addresses it it's on Marquitos website actually yeah right on our website so we talked about that as well and as companies are moving away from you or I managing the social engagement to the AI engines the machines engaging with us I think that we run the risk the marketer runs the risk of reinforcing the stare aisle you know kind of engagement and that's not what we want we want warm human touch that breeds trust sowhat's marcado's technology I mean people look at Marketo and people in marketing general yeah they're just hiring agencies to do all this work this isn't real maar tech marketing technology going on I like some of the technology for the folks watching because yeah I think it's pretty interesting most people don't understand that's a lot of machine learning a lot of technology involved in databases from security to trust also enabling real-time yeah share some insight into what's going on there so so this so there's a notion of engagement platform which we believe is is just fundamentally different than your run-of-the-mill marketing cloud so the engagement platform for Marketo is all about that listen learn and engage kind of methodology that we think about and the listening notion as I said literally as we can listen to anything your custom data social channels smoke signals if we had to we can read and consume almost anything and if we can't do it one of our partners can with like a DMP for example they learn the core of our engagement engine and this is pretty neat so we have three engines in our engagement engine we have the automation engine which is all about I hear you say something on Facebook I can engage with you then there's the analytics engine so I can help you understand what are people talking about on Facebook what are you talking on a LinkedIn and then there's the AI engine now this is where I think the the merger of the marketer and the machine is going to start coming together in a big big way so our AI engine allows you to not just say well if people say Silicon angle on Twitter then send them this but you can actually have it adapt and customize learn and reason learn and reason so X writes out and do some it's right it's predictive Oh not only just predictive actually have it I think it's borderline kind of clairvoyant but understand well I'm not just gonna immediately react to something that you put on Twitter I'm gonna go and I'm gonna check the rest of your digital persona there's a digital assistant basically not a sales rep it's more of an assistant it is it is and and so the future of marketing is simple I can build a marketing or an engagement campaign and I can click a button that says make it adaptive and then that's when the machine in the marketer come together and so on top of that engine we have our marketing applications our native apps like marketing automation we have an account based marketing which is a pretty big deal especially in the enterprise account based marketing is all about going from the single buyer to the consensus buying that you know behavior that's see in the enterprise and then we have other technologies like mobile marketing so we can track when you open an app if you close it if you click on it so it's not just one thing we have a range of marketing apps that sit on the platform right so I want to get the final question I get your thoughts on just the future of the business obviously a year you're there two months you got to get to know the team you've got to get to know the players any changes on the horizon that he let's shop so you got a big launch coming up with it well Ryan codename Orion which is there a new engagement platform that you guys pre-announce and get the announcement coming up there got a book you going on but if for Marketo what's the guiding Northstar for you what do you what do you say to customers and kind of the vision and and what changes you look that might be coming down the pike yeah so I think so the vision really there's two elements to that one is that our core focus like at its core is we're going to help the CMO build the lasting relationship derive revenue for the company and the way that we're going to do that is deliver the engagement platform which we are now rolling out I mean we've been working on a ryan for a long time way before I showed up and Orion takes the ability for a marketer to go from millions of interesting touch points per year social mobile did you know digital touch points to quadrillions of touch points we are ready for that digital transformation what we call the engagement economy era I'm writing a book on there the whole notion of engagement economy we're entering this new era where if you're not able to engage with people and and also things because things will be out there too at scale you won't win you just won't we want to get your thoughts on one final point I know we're kind of running up on time in this segment but if you look at the cloud go back to 2008 2007 timeframe when it really emerged and Amazon is already you know had a couple years under their belts with what they were doing you saw the DevOps movement developed merging development and operators be the real catalyst those early adopters you know those you know Navy SEALs the Green Berets you know eating nails and spit and glass out so so that was Facebook that was the big web scalars Yahoo essentially invented Hadoop which became big data you saw all these companies that were new natives build their own stuff not buy off-the-shelf equipment and they became the the canary in the coal mines for everybody else now everyone wants to be like AWS and even Microsoft's changes to be more like AWS and competing directly with them Google is changing so there was early guys on Facebook what they're doing drones and virtual reality you know what these stuff they're doing with open open compute those are now leaders so they're the predictors of the future in my opinion so I look at it so the question I want to ask you is how does Marketo rank up because companies that don't have huge early adopters of the scale side of it platforms that can't scale probably won't have any Headroom so do you have an example where your business has guys pushing the tech scaling it up that are gonna be that canary in the coal mine you guys have that mix of business can you give some examples yeah first of all we have fantastic customers that are using us today kind of scale Oh at scale absolutely whether it's a GE for example GE is literally attributing billions in revenue to the the Marketo engine and the campaigns and efforts that they're driving through that but ge is a perfect example Microsoft another great when there's lots of great examples of customers of ours that are doing what I would I would call hyper scale in engagement within marketing data and they're with marketing data etc so they're using your tools at large large scale yeah and I'd say it's the scale that that today you get these hyper scale example points but tomorrow everybody's gonna have to do it it's just what's neat for us you see the same thing I was mentioned that those hyper scales are gonna be the you know the pioneers that are gonna let the settlers come in and and behind them do you see that more typically and the neat part for us is is because as a marketing automation technology or an engagement platform we're fully integrated with Facebook Linkedin etc so they actually pull us forward we get that I think we get that we've got the telescope to see the canary in the coalmine a little bit further down the road assuming it's a well-lit coal mine but we get to see that a little bit further down the road so I it's an advantage for us strategically I got to ask you the question because in the database world the systems of record the services of engagement and then systems of AI IBM calls it cognitive yes how do you guys play in that new era is that just all marketing for them well I mean everybody has their cognitive exist yeah and you have something it's so they're every two degrees so everyone has tech and we certainly have what what I characterize as adaptive and intuitive that's my version of AI you know I think saying artificially intelligent it's kind of like I've met a bunch of teenagers that I consider to be artificially intelligent but the reality is is that everybody to a degree has this brochure layer tech that they run around waving it really comes down to what's practical what's usable and for us that's we're focused on is what is adaptive and intuitive technology that's going to merge the marketer in the machine final question final final question is what's the top three priorities for you if we look back on your performance next year this time what are the top three things you want to accomplish as the new CEO of Marketo well number one champion engagement economy that whole we're there and I think people just need to understand what it is to is help the market or win I mean the reality is if you boil it down you ask the question what does the marketer what they want to win they just want to win help their company win and so we want to help the marketer win and then three is really engage our marketing nation we've got a community of an online community talking about communities over a hundred thousand marketers that are working inside of that community it's just absolutely huge and so I want to engage the community if we can do that and be just customer centric and oriented our technology the AI all of those things part of our engagement platform it's gonna help us win to stick congratulations on being the co-chief executive Marketo great to see you Steve Lucas here inside the cube and Paul all those new Studios here in Pella 4,500 square feet you see a lot more content live programming as well as featured interviews with top CEOs of Silicon Valley and top technology companies I'm John Fourier thanks for watching