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Martina Lauchengco & Greg Sands, Costanoa Ventures | CUBE Conversation, May 2020


 

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios today on this kind of ongoing leadership conversation, reaching out to the community during these crazy times, we're two months into the COVID crisis, and we're excited to have two of our favorite guests, one is a frequent guest, Greg Sands, he's the founder and managing partner of Costanoa Ventures, Greg, great to see you. And he brought along Martina Lauchengo, also from Costanoa, Martina, great to see you, is this, I think your first time on theCUBE, right? >> This is my first time, nice to be on, Jeff. >> Great, and Greg, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here. >> So let's get into it, I mean, part of this conversation came from a lot of efforts that you guys are putting into really getting information out to the community, and I think if there's a silver lining and there's a couple here and there, that have come from this, is that everyone is really trying to help each other out. So you've come up with something you call virtual office hours. What is that all about, is that new, or is that just kind of a greater emphasis now that most people are working from home? >> Well, we've also always done a great deal of work with our portfolio on how to deal with changing times, how to graph, go to market, both sales and marketing onto what are often product-led and founder-led companies, and in a time of crisis, we felt like it was important to share that knowledge more broadly, and to set up a venue where we can interact with the broader startup community, and hopefully in the process of doing that, we're useful. >> I just saw a quote I think today or yesterday, from Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford, and it was "I didn't have the playbook for the global pandemic," in terms of preparation and being able to pull something off the shelf to help work through this, so as we've gone through mid-March, just this immediate, full stop, unanticipated light switch moment, now we're two months in, what are the specific actions you've been giving to your portfolio companies, and how has that changed over the course of the last 60 days? >> Well I'll take a first stab, and Martina, feel free to jump in if you've got additional thoughts, I think the first piece, going back, six, seven, eight weeks, was we all had that hair on fire moment, where you just have to understand where you are. And so I think that sense of situational awareness, and how does it affect your customers and your market, and figure out if the basics of the business, including revenue rate and what's guaranteed and what's not and expense base and planned growth trajectory are any of those foundational elements what you thought they were going to be, and readjust them, and re-plan, so almost every company went through two or three complete planning cycles, trying to understand where we are. And I think also trying to do that with a sense of authenticity and transparency and humanity, 'cause you're dealing with a company, and people's careers and people's jobs. So now I think we're more at the place where we understand the foundation, and you can more reasonably plan for the future. >> Yeah, I'd say I think what I've observed in our portfolio is people are through the shock, and that's also true for all of the customers that they're trying to reach out to, and the big adjustment is, what does our new normal look like? Jeff, before we started we were talking about how everyone has moved digital and virtual, so people did that initially because they had no choice, but now they're looking at the data they've been collecting saying "Gosh, should this mean that we should no longer do "physical events because we're having five or 10x "the amount of registration that we did before." Our digital channels are way more successful than they were in terms of outreach and awareness raising, and so everyone's looking at this moment, and saying "How should be adjust our new normal, "even post-COVID era, and do things differently "as a result of what we're learning from this time "where we have to be constrained in what we--" >> Right, so Greg, you had an interesting quote in an article recently talking about the harder challenge is going to be for people that are on this blitz scaling run, and you've talked about there's kind of two paths, there's growth at all costs, and then there's growth within a reasonable plan, clearly, if you were growth at all costs, and you were Uber or Lyft or one of these types of operations where your revenue just got turned practically off, really significant challenge, so as you look at it from an investor point of view, and what is a good rate of growth, what is the way to build a company versus this hellbent hair on fire, grab global market share at absolutely no, just spend spend spend spend spend? >> Yeah, and so of course this is independent of the pandemic, I think it's the case that there was this orientation towards blitz scaling, towards we're going to grow as fast as we can, and one of the things, if you just think about a biological metaphor, growth is expensive, growth takes a ton of capital, a ton of hiring, a ton of on-ramping, and the like, and you do all of that at very rapid speeds and you tend to cut corners, have people poorly trained, drop balls on the floor and the like, so I think the, generally speaking, our experience is that our portfolio companies, partly due to our guidance, partly 'cause we've selected each other, have been, look, we've got some very fast growers, we've got companies like Alation that have been here a lot, that have created brand new categories, but they've done it with bounce, and they've done it efficiently, and that's always what we preach, it's always what we've believed in, and I think our companies are in much better shape as a result. Martina and I both grew up as young athletes, and one of the things that you learn as an athlete is you got to be balanced, you don't know if your next step is going to have to be forward, back, left or right, and you've got to have all your sensors out and be paying attention, to figure out where you ought to go, and if you're all in one direction, you can only go forward. And when the environment changes, you're toast. >> Yeah, it's really wild to see, 'cause who ever plans for literally a binary turnoff of revenue stream, and we're seeing it in hotels and in obviously conferences and airlines and a whole bunch of industries, so it's pretty challenging. But for a lot of people, business still goes on, and Martina I want to jump into it with you, 'cause you've been a marketer in tech for a long time, but man oh man, the conference itself, the physical events, whether it be a big giant one like AWS re:Invent which had I don't know, 50,000 people, it's going to outgrow Vegas, to smaller events, those are no longer an option, yet people are still delivering products, they still have messaging to get out, they still want to touch their community. How are you kind of looking at the new normal around marketing, both for the portfolio companies but also a little bit of a broader view? >> So I'll start with the broader view, I'd say in general, Dreamforce is canceled, AWS, I mean all these things have shifted so massively and all the major companies have simultaneously made that shift, and I think one thing that they are all seeing is, they are getting a lot more registration, they're getting a lot more in engagement, this happened at Atlassian where, they rapidly made the shift to virtual, and what they saw was because they had that many more people participating in events, that they had a much bigger social bump, because that many more people were talking about what was happening simultaneously, and it also became this virtuous loop, where more and more people were talking, it was creating this intrigue, where people wanted to participate and see what was happening. So, I think people are looking at that and saying "Well how does that affect our business, "and how does that increased potential "for evangelism actually positively convert towards "a future customer, or more people talking about us "in a positive way?" So this is where they're looking at what they've put out in market and seeing what they should learn from that and I'd say that's the number one recommendation I have for all of our companies is, look at what the data is telling you, and trying to extract what your lessons are about this to what your ongoing normal should be from a marketing perspective. >> Yeah, it's such a good tip, there was so much focus at the beginning of this about what you cannot do in digital, you can't have the hall room chat or you can't have the water cooler chat, but on the other hand there's so many things you can do in digital that you can't do in the physical. And by separating content generation versus content publishing, if you will, and then content consumption, and those no longer have to happen at the same one hour window where there's an available conference room for a breakout session at the Sands on Tuesday at six, that I can't see 'cause I want to see somebody else's conference Tuesday, I mean there's so many things that you can do, and kind of just democratization of the access to the conference, if you don't have the means, the time, or just the ability to get on a plane and fly to Vegas or to New York or San Francisco, so there's a lot of stuff you can do in digital that's different, it's just not the same as the physical space, what are some of the other things that you're finding that are kind of unique and novel and actually really great? >> Well, one thing that you talked about is it relates to events, it's not just the attendees being there, it's also the talent. A lot of times you would want talent, but they're not available because they have a conflict or they can't accommodate that travel, a guy participating in a conference that's based out of London, and they are having people that it doesn't matter what time zone you're in, because they're like "Oh, you can prerecord it, "you can do it live if you choose," and so there's a flexibility that just wasn't there before, certainly as it relates to events. But in terms of novel stuff, people are reexamining things that they might have charged for in the past, so one company in our portfolio used to charge for their certifications, and now they've made it free and they've had over 1000 signups in the last couple of weeks, and so that was a small program that they ran and it's now the single largest generator of new leads for them, because they reexamined it and said "Well what assets do we have "and how can we use them differently?" And so I'd say it's not so much that people are doing monumentally new things that they haven't tried before, but they're examining the quiver of assets they have at their disposal and they're saying "Well how can we deploy them differently?" And they see the two things that are really bubbling up are you just have to do things in an excellent way, number one, and number two, you really have to do it in that much more empathetic way. >> Right, right. And Greg, I want to go back to you, go ahead. >> Jeff, if I can add two things, I think there are some things that it's worth noting that digital is uniquely good at. So one of which is inferring intent, which you don't necessarily get in the context of conferences, and the second is that as companies have dug deep and realized that they really need to take full advantage of their assets, one of the things that we find people really trying to do is to marry first party data, their own data about their own customers and their own interactions, with third party data which includes that intent data, and when you combine those together in a business to business marketing context, you can really do extraordinary things, and many companies have been under-optimized on that because they could rely on going to events and traditional face to face marketing activities. >> Well, and to me there's so many things, I mean conferences were designed in an age where there was no telephone, and you sent letters, and the speed of communication was weeks, and so that's how you had to get people together, but today, 2020, when information flows, it seems so waterfall to me to kind of squeeze everything in, especially for a big company, into three days in Las Vegas, in terms of all your product announcements, all your partner announcements, all these things, it seems completely against the trend of more of a DevOps world, which is if product group A is ready to roll, why do they have to wait to that date, and wait for product B and everyone else, not to mention that if you're some esoteric cool thing that gets lost in the sea of product announcements and press releases and events, does it really make sense? What we're seeing is there's certainly an opportunity for what's called a rally moment, whether that's a keynote or introducing a new CEO, or we want to have this moment where we have singular focus, but as soon as that's open, let the content be free, let people find what they want, when they want, and to your point Martina, if people want to self-organize, you can actually have almost infinite long tail sessions, if you give people a platform in which to organize, versus being this one way conduit of information which is the old way of working, but not really the new way in which we find, consume, and learn about things in 2020, it just seems so antiquated when we actually take a step back and think of how do we get our information today, and it's not wrapped up in one big giant splash moment. >> Well Jeff, I want to pull on a thread a little bit that you just brought up, which is that the old way of doing things, and I'd say old average, just there's no space for it right now, so I'm going to read through five things that were in my inbox this morning that went into the auto-delete pile, which is what everyone does every morning. "Tomorrow's webinar," "Only three days left, "have you registered yet?" "This week in review." So those were the bad ones that went to the automatic delete pile, that's the average run of the mill stuff that all of us get every day, and I hope everyone that's listening to this stops sending them. And here's the ones that stood out, "Why every startup CEO needs a chief of staff," so something that was specific, it told me more concretely why I should engage with what was being sent to me, it didn't tell me if it was an article or webinar, but it engaged me with content, and if you just look at Netflix as a platform, as an example of how they're very very content-forward, and they're trying to find what specifically is going to get you engaged, all the way down to the thumbnail level, that's what we are needing to do as marketers, where we're taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of our customers, where they are, and trying to create genuine connection with whatever it is we're trying to bring to them. >> With data, right, and you can AB type and all the stuff that Netflix does, it's so funny to me, the answers are all around us, we're just not looking in the right place, but I want to shift gears a little bit for marketing and talk about leadership, we've been doing a lot of these around leadership, 'cause leadership is so important. And really the uncertainty, more even the tough times, I think it's the uncertainty that really challenges people, and you mentioned something Greg, earlier, about really the transparency, and I think there's so much to be learned in terms of being human in your leadership, showing vulnerability, admitting, I'm a little scared too, I don't know what's happening, no one has been through this type of inexperience before, so from just a leadership perspective, again, what are you sharing with your portfolio companies, how are you advising people who are in this position, because they're probably nervous and uncomfortable as well, to lead these teams and to help them through this time of uncertainty. >> Well, it's an amazing and uncertain time, and frankly everybody is challenged by it, nobody's been through it before, even those of us that went through 2008 and 2000 and 2001, the ecommerce blowup in 9/11, this is different, it has a different cause and a different set of effects. I know in my case I spent the weekend rereading Jerry Collona's book, "Reboot," which talks about leading from the heart, and leading with transparency, and leading with authenticity, and what we've been trying to do in working with our founders is one, listen, and be there, and be a support, and recognize that we don't know all the answers either, and so we're in it together. Second is to try to give them the confidence and the room to do that in leading within their teams, and then the third is to focus on a couple of things that I think are particularly important, which is as I said before, situational awareness, you got to understand where you are, and the second is focus. So one of the things that everybody is finding, and we find it true with people's customers, too, hey, we were going to do five things, now we're going to do two. So companies have got to narrow the scope, they got to figure out how to be in the top two for their customers that have to get done. And so you got to do that from a strategic and execution perspective, you got to lead your team to do it, and in order to rally around it, people have to understand the facts, they have to trust you. And they have to know that your heart's in it. >> Yeah, it's almost interesting, the fact that everyone is separated, we have to communicate more, we have to communicate more frequently and we had Darren on from GitLab talking about the variety of types of communications beyond just your standard staff meeting and project updates to things, like social things and happy hours and these things, so it almost feels like because we're forced into scheduled communication, it's almost happening more frequently because you have to make sure it does, then maybe some of the ad hoc stuff that might happen in the hallways are on a more informal basis. You find that happening, are people really stepping up the scale in which they're making sure they're touching base with their team members? >> I'm definitely seeing that throughout our portfolio, so people are doing things like scheduled game nights that would've been more ad hoc in the past, or specifically scheduling water cooler time, or one of our companies has been doing specific meetings and get-togethers of parents, how do you maintain your full time job and actually coparent or figure it out while your kids are doing whatever it is that they need to and being a part of home, and working at home, and so they've definitely scheduled more, but it's really been about acknowledging the whole self that is part of this unique time, and that everybody's in the same boat, I think that is something that is really unique about this is that it is a global phenomenon, and so it's not sort of like oh, this country or this state or this industry is facing this, all of us are facing this, and so to your point, Jeff, about what does it mean to be human and to connect, it is a time in which we are uniquely capable of connecting with one another, and we all have the same way to do it, I meet a bunch of new people every week, and now we all start off actually seeing each other's homes. Saying "Oh, what is that, what book are you reading?" And so it's almost an invitation to have a more personal connection and I've definitely found despite the fact that we're doing all these meetings virtually, I actually feel more connected to a lot of people than I would have normally. >> Law of unintended consequences, you just never know. So last topic to shift gears before I let you go, we're still in the business of investing, and as I'm sure you're seeing or starting to see, now that the shock and awe's kind of over, and people are starting to define new opportunities, basically, to reassemble assets, to reassemble delivery methodologies, to reassemble business plans, and I wonder, as you look forward now to your next wave of investments, assuming everything's medium settled with the current portfolio, how is your investment thesis changing a little bit, what are you seeing in kind of a rejiggering of assets and business models that are going to take advantage of this new normal, 'cause sure enough, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people in garages right now that are building those companies based on this new normal that are going to be leaders down the road. What are you thinking of, how are you thinking about what's going to happen later this year, and in 2021 and beyond? >> So, we absolutely are continuing to invest, and so for quick context, we're seed and A up and down the stack of enterprise technology, so think of it as applied AI and the infrastructure that supports it, much of which is data and machine learning infrastructure, but also cybersecurity and DevOps, and I think for us, one of the things that showed up right away was this idea of, we're all going to work in more distributed fashion. And I think many versions of that were "Oh, we've got a new work from home app," or the like, and we haven't actually found that those are the difference makers, what we think is that these business processes that tie together application logic and data and analytics and a collaboration layer, like in Alation, so that you can collaborate on your data, you can collaborate while you're performing an absolutely critical business function, and what used to be tribal knowledge that was passed around in the halls is embedded in software, and cataloged. And so we're seeing lots of opportunities to do that, both in workflow context and in the context of data scientists and data engineers working on the data stack and developers in and around the DevOps ecosystem, that we think are really interesting and acknowledge the fact that you can't assume that all the people working on this application are sitting in the same building, and get to talk around the water cooler. So they talk about it in the application. >> I just want to add a little something to what Greg said in terms of the things that we're seeing, really the importance of data right now, people are trying to refactor all of our operating plans, they're trying to say "What is this actually doing to our demand," and so the accuracy of data and the quality of it is more important than it ever has been, and being able to do that wherever it exists, if it's frontline, inside of a dashboard, if it's cleaning up stuff that's coming out of a data lake, people are investing in that infrastructure right now because they have the capacity to, so that's a place where we've seen I'd say probably the least amount of change, and then the other thing that this has revealed are gaps in the technology infrastructure that wasn't available, so for example supply chain, being able to identify all the elements of the mask, or the ventilator supply chain. Those systems were massively disconnected and extremely manual, and so people are looking at that saying there are some gaps that still need to be closed in a big way with infrastructure and technology, and those are some areas that we're seeing very interesting and illuminated as a result of this time. >> Yeah, I mean to certainly, what we've been talking about really is just a light switch moment, in terms of digital transformation and whether that is working from home, which is probably the top focus for a lot of people in the short term, or whether that's in education, suddenly everyone from kindergarten teachers to professors at Stanford had to suddenly learn to teach online with absolutely no preparation, no time to think about it, and then up into the data layer as well, because it's just this ongoing democratization and now with distributed teams, you are forced now to make that data available to them, really as a process as much as an objective to get it into hands to do more things, so certainly a digital transformation accelerant, like nobody expected, there's no more time to prepare and plan, it's ready set go, now. So we see it over and over again. Well thank you so much for coming on, thank you for sharing the information, just kind of last point, one of the things that I think is so interesting about today's time is it used to be the power was held by the people that had the information. And really what we've seen, and what you guys support is now the information is infinite and it's everywhere, and you should be able to find it. Now it's more about who shares the information, who's a trusted source to filter, to find the right information, and who can I go to who I know's going to give me stuff that's relevant for me, and I think you guys have really shown time and time again that in sharing information and helping others to do better, you get this multiplier effect that you wouldn't get if you're just worrying about yourself, and I think it's such a modern way to think about empowering people, and as you said, it even makes you more powerful and more successful, so really a very different way than it used to be in terms of everybody kind of holding the information, and who had the keys, had the information, that's completely turned up on the side of it's head. >> That is absolutely right, and we're thrilled to be here talking about it with you today, thanks for your continued support of the community and trying to help good people get the word out. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> Thanks for doing exactly what you're talking about, which is getting the right information out to people so they can be better. >> All right, well Greg, Martina, stay safe, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully next time we'll see you in person. You're watching theCUBE Conversation, Jeff Frick here in Palo Alto studio, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (calm music)

Published Date : May 11 2020

SUMMARY :

leaders all around the world, and we're excited to have nice to be on, Jeff. great to see you as well. that you guys are putting into and hopefully in the process and you can more reasonably and the big adjustment is, and the like, and you do all and in obviously conferences and airlines and I'd say that's the and those no longer have to happen and so that was a small back to you, go ahead. and the second is that as and so that's how you had and if you just look at and I think there's so much to be learned and the room to do that in and we had Darren on from GitLab and that everybody's in the same boat, and people are starting to and in the context of and so the accuracy of and what you guys support and trying to help good information out to people and hopefully next time

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Martina Grom, atwork | Microsoft Ignite 2019


 

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. We are in day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all things Microsoft. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu, a minimum. We are joined by Martina grom. She is the CEO at work of at work in Vienna and a Microsoft MVP. >>Thank you so much for coming on the show. My tags for the invitation. I'm glad to be here. So tell us a little bit about at work, what do you do? So, so what we are doing, we are an ISV located in Australia and in Germany we are around 25 people and we do software development on the one side. And on the other side we support customers in going into the cloud to develop a deployment strategy to use Microsoft technology and yeah, governance, deployment, migration. And recently we also started with adoption and change management because it's a huge topic for many customers. So who >>are your customers? What, what kinds of industries are they in? >>Yeah. So, um, we actually do not focus on a specific industry. We are more focusing on enterprise customers. So every, every customer was a large customer. So one friend once told me, you like the complicated cases. So I like to work with enterprises and learn what they are doing from a security perspective and how they do that. And we have customers in the financial sector as well as in retail business. So all over that and mainly in Europe we have some customers in the U S as well. >>So, so Martina, I know from a Microsoft MVP standpoint, you focus on Oh three 65 is, is that the primary engagement that you have with customers or is it a span of product? >>Yes. Yeah. The interesting part is I started with Microsoft three 65 in 2008 when Microsoft started going into the cloud business. So that time back, my first product I looked at was exchange hosted services, which was the antivirus, anti-spam solution. Microsoft provided. And then, um, every single partner first told us, Matina you will never earn money with cloud technologies because no customer will do that. Everyone was still on premises. And in 2011 I got the MVP award because I was one of the first to focus so heavily on office three 65. And the benefit I have out of that is that I know all products services quite well. And currently I'm more focusing on the security and compliance side. >>Yeah, it's interesting because today when I talked to Microsoft customers in on premises to the exception and it's usually, Oh, I'm a government agency and I need to be completely cut off from certain environments, so therefore I can't do it. Um, you know, I, I've said for the last few years, Microsoft actually gave customers not only the green light, but the push to go sass with what they're doing. So tell, tell, give us a little bit of, you know, the landscape today is, is that, is that the exception rather than the rule and are most people kind of okay with O three 65 in the cloud? >>Yeah, I, I think cloud services, it's a matter of trust. So as I am located in Europe, we um, and especially in the German speaking countries like Austria, Germany, Switzerland, many people just didn't trust it from the beginning because they said it's a American company. We don't know where all our data is. Antawn at Microsoft is very open and um, and what the did, they are very transparent what they are doing. So you get tons of material around how to trust the cloud, how it works and so on. And the current state is more for an on premises customer. He is safer to go into a cloud service then stay on premises. And this is one of the things I really like about that because it's, it doesn't depend on the customer side. Even a small customer can have the same security features a large enterprise customer has. >>Okay. If you could just expand on that a little bit because you know, for the longest time security was the blocker to do there. And for many now looking at the cloud, it at least it lets me restart and rethink what I'm doing as opposed to, you know, often security was something that got pushed to the back burner in my data center. So is it that Microsoft has, you know, all of the security taking care of, is it a combination of getting to restart and rethink of it? How do you look at that? >>Um, I think the main point is traditionally when you are on premises, you think your data center is secure because you own it, you hosted, you organize it, you operate it and everything is there. And we are very an and those customers are very focused on endpoint security. So everything comes from the outside. Uh, might be dangerous. But with cloud technologies, it's not only your, your own network you need to just to have a safe place for, you also need to secure the cloud services. And that means if you broaden that experience and going into a SAS service, you have much more security there. In terms of the talking at the very beginning where you said, I liked the complicated cases, so we know you like a challenge. And then you also said you're getting into more adoption and change management. Talk about some of the challenges that you're seeing in terms of your clients embracing this, this, this technology. >>Yeah, so from my perspective, one of the biggest challenges customers currently have is Microsoft is moving very fast and people need to change and get comfortable with an evergreen service, which might change today and might change next week again. And this is something people need to adopt and, and use put a lot of pressure on that because they say, Oh, there are the nice, fancy tools, the new tools, it's teams, it's everything else. And we need that to do, to work properly and to be in a modern workplace. And this is quite the challenge for every it operations team because they need to build a secure environment. It needs governance and it also needs change and adoption. Okay. >>Martina, you mentioned the modern workplace. So another area you work on is enterprise social. So, you know, I worked for a large enterprise, you know, a vendor in this ecosystem back when that, you know, social wave was hitting, you know, use jive, uses Yammer when it first launched long before Microsoft had uh, brought it, um, you know, we don't talk about the wave anymore. Bring us, you know, what's happening in that space these days. >>Yeah. So enterprise, social and I love being there as well because I, I try to get people, so what, what I saw what, what I saw when Microsoft acquired Yama, it brought a lot of change into Microsoft itself because um, there was currently a graph technology in a, in, in Yammer as a product which brings up more relevant content to the users and people really liked that. And then you saw all the collaboration, which is mainly document based on SharePoint, SharePoint, online and so on. And currently those, um, services come together and then after a couple of years you got Microsoft teams and people that again got confused and that, so this is the next tool helped me what tools I use when, and that's one of the biggest question many customers have currently because they probably don't understand it from the beginning, but if they start adopting that, the use cases become pretty clear for them. >>That to say we work in teams in our project environment, but we, if we want to reach the whole organization, we go into Yammer or in an enterprise social tool. >> So talk about, there's been a lot of new changes to teams that have been announced this week here at ignite. What as an acre slapped MPP? What is most sparking your interest? Um, I'm not a Microsoft employee, but a VP, sorry. Yeah. Um, so what I like about that is that teams brings kind of a good user experience to use as they have one client. They have the outlook client, they have the teams client and they can work within the team. In Microsoft teams, they can use it for video calls, for conferences, anything. So it's, it's a one stop shop defined in teams and with the extension which is brought now in, in with the new Yammer experience, they also have the broad experience of the enterprise social network integrated into their teams client. And this will bring a fundamental change because then a project team which is working together can also look out of one client. What is going on in my organization. Are there any questions? Can I share that? And Tom, >>Martina, I want to go back to a word that you brought up. When you talk about the cloud, it's trust. It's something that we heard over and over. And again, the keynote is Sacha positioning Microsoft as a trusted partner. A, they've got, what? What's it 47, sorry, 54 different Azure regions worldwide. So, uh, you know, are they local enough? Are they engaged enough? Is Microsoft earning the trust of you as a partner and as your customers, do they, they seem Microsoft as a trusted partner? >>Yeah. So from my experience, Microsoft is a trust verse it company. Because what, what I learned from them during their whole cloud journey, they got a lot of push backs. In the beginning they said it's, it's just in the European union, we don't like that. We want our data centers, which are closer to us because it feels more secure if I have a data center region in South Africa, in France, in Switzerland or wherever I am. And Microsoft invests a lot in building that trust and it's completely transparent what they are doing. So you can go to the websites and can say, okay, I'm located in Switzerland. Um, I want my data in there, so what services to get there. So it's really, um, a good opportunities for customers. And also what I learned from customers is if you see a service running and you do not use it, you can't build up on trust because you just don't know. >>It's like swimming in the air without any water. So, and this is many customers just saw and they, um, they discovered, okay, it works, it doesn't fail. We can trust on the solution. And this is really important. You said that you mainly work with European customers, a few in the U S what do you think are the biggest differences between the two groups? Our European customers naturally a little more skeptical, particularly when it comes to data. It's um, in Europe we are very specific in data privacy and the thing that might be a difference between the U S and and Europe, especially in German, that people really look at privacy issues and could that happen on, and then we have GDPR, which was brought up by the European union, which would bring additional trust and security into our customers and on every single website we are surfing on. So I think that's one of the biggest differences from an enterprise side. The, the fears are quite the same. It's, it's like we are going to the cloud and we need to use a service and how can we work through that? I do not see that many differences. So >>Martina, you were proven right? You bet early on a technology adoption has been there. As you're looking forward, what are the things that, that we are early on today that are exciting you or that you think we're going to be talking about 2020 and beyond? >>Yeah. What I think what will come to us is more intelligence and more AI stuff because this is something which will really help us. And you see the, the little small things in PowerPoint that you get your beautiful designed PowerPoint slides automatically that your auto client says, Hey, you have an appointment, you have a really recording in five minutes, you need 10 minutes to go. Should I send an email that you are running late? So we will see much more intelligence in there. And also the new projects which, which are brought, they are, so knowledge sharing will be fundamental in the future that we find the resources we need and they're relevant what we need in, in, in the, in the time we need it. So what does this mean for the future? I mean you're just describing a, a world in which we all can be more productive. >>We are communicating more seamlessly. What does this mean for how teams communicate and collaborate? Yeah. Um, so what does think every positive side also might have a negative side? We go into an always on scenario, so we will be connected everywhere at home during cooking, doing, bringing kids to school and so on. So what I think what we as humans need to learn is how we can separate us from that and how we can just quiet down and get some space left out of the full amount of information which is around us because we can't get every single information and to see that very often when I talk with customers, have around Yammer, they said it's just too much. I have to read so much information because you feel you are losing control and you are losing information and this is what we need to learn as humans. >>Any, you know, what, what guidance do you give to people? The, the world of streams, right? I remember social media, they were like, Oh my gosh, I didn't look at it for the weekend. How do I, you know, look at all of that stuff that I missed. And usually I just frame, I'm like, you ignore everything that you missed and you start where it is today. But it's different in a work environment. >>Yeah. In a work environment. So my advice for customers is everything that I tell you at Tecton is interesting for you. If you're not tech, it's probably not for you. So this is the main curse. It's like unread emails or it's like the little notification bar. You got a message, a personal message to one-to-one message, then you should react on that. That's it. And not read everything because it's probably not relevant for you at. That's great advice. Words to live by. Thank you so much for Martina. Yeah. Pleasure having again, I'm Rebecca Knight for two minimums. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage from Microsoft ignite..

Published Date : Nov 6 2019

SUMMARY :

Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. She is the CEO And on the other side we support customers So one friend once told me, you like the complicated cases. And in 2011 I got the MVP award because I was one of the first to focus so So tell, tell, give us a little bit of, you know, the landscape today is, So you get tons of material around how to trust the cloud, So is it that Microsoft has, you know, all of the security taking care of, I liked the complicated cases, so we know you like a challenge. And this is quite the challenge for every it operations team because they need to build a So another area you work on is enterprise social. And then you saw all the collaboration, That to say we work in teams in our project environment, but we, if we want to reach They have the outlook client, they have the teams client and they can work within the team. So, uh, you know, And also what I learned from customers is if you see a few in the U S what do you think are the biggest differences between the two groups? or that you think we're going to be talking about 2020 and beyond? the little small things in PowerPoint that you get your beautiful I have to read so much information because you feel you are losing control How do I, you know, look at all of that stuff that I missed. then you should react on that.

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