>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella sees a different future for cloud computing over the coming decade. And as Microsoft Ignite keynote, he laid out the five attributes that will define the cloud in the next 10 years. His vision is a cloud platform that is decentralized, ubiquitous, intelligent, sensing, and trusted. One that actually tickles the senses and levels the playing field between consumers and creators by placing tools in the hands of more people around the world. Welcome to this week's wiki buns cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll review the highlights of Nadella's Ignite keynote share our thoughts on what it means for the future of cloud specifically, and the tech industry generally. We'll also give you a more tactical view of Microsoft and compare its performance within the ETR's dataset to its peers. Satya Nadella's forward-looking cloud attributes comprised five key vectors that he talked about. The first was ubiquitous and decentralized computing, Nadella made the statement that we've reached peak centralization today that we're witnessing radical changes in computing architecture from the materials used to semiconductors software, and that is going to serve a new frontier that's forming at the edge. Nadella envisions a world where there will be more sovereignty and decentralized control. We couldn't agree more. The cloud universe is expanding and the lines are blurring between what's being done on-prem, across public clouds and the cloud experience which is going to extend everywhere, including the edge. And of course, data is going to be flowing through this hyper decentralized system. Next was sovereign data and ambient intelligence. To us data sovereignty means that whatever the local laws are the system is going to have the intelligence to govern privacy, ensure data provenance, and adhere to corporate edicts. Ambient intelligence is a field of research that leverages pervasive sensor networks and AI to respond to and anticipate humans and machines. Nadella sees the future where a business logic will move from being code that is written to code that is actually learned from data, pretty interesting. He sees this autodidactic system if you will, as fundamental to tackling big problems like personalized medicine or even climate change. Third, he talked about empowered creators and communities everywhere. Nadella said, there'll be increasingly a balance between consumption and creation. His talking about an economic balance essentially he's predicting that creation will be democratized and his vision is to put tools in the hands of people to allow them to tip the scales toward knowledge workers, frontline employees, students, everyone, essentially creating content, applications, code, et cetera power to the people if you will. And underneath this vision is a new form of or emerging new forms of Silicon operating systems and entirely transformative digital experiences. Next was economic opportunity for the global workforce. So picking up on the accelerated themes of remote work that were catalyzed by COVID, Nadella emphasize that the future has to accommodate flexibility in how, when and where people work. He sees a new model of productivity emerging, not necessarily defined by corporate revenue per employee for example, but by the economic advantages that become accessible to everyone through better access to technology, collaboration tools, education, and healthy lifestyles, all enabled by this ubiquitous cloud. Finally, trust by design, Nadella said that ethical principles must govern the design, development and deployment of AI. The system he said must be secure by design with zero trust built in to protect business assets and personal privacy. So this was a big vision that Nadella put forth it, connects the dots between bits and atoms and sets up Microsoft to extend its reach well beyond office productivity tools and cloud infrastructure. He cited the Microsoft cloud as the underpinning of its future and specifically called out Teams, he mentioned 365, HoloLens 2 and the announcement of Microsoft Mesh, a new mixed reality platform. Nadella said Mesh will do for virtual reality what X-Box live did for gaming. Take the experience from single person to multi-person imagine holographic images with no screens, empowering advances in medicine, science, technology, and very importantly social interactions. Now, one of the things that we took away from his talk was this notion of Microsoft as a technology arm's dealer. No, we're not, Nadella avoided slamming the competition directly by name one statement that he made, stood out. He said, " No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other" And to us this was a direct shot at Amazon, Google and Apple. How so you ask? And what does it tell us? In his book "Seeing Digital" author David Moschella said, "that Silicon Valley broadly defined as a duel disruption agenda." What does that mean? Not only are large tech companies disrupting horizontal layers of the tech stack like compute, storage, networking, database, security, applications, and so forth. But they're also disrupting industries Amazon and media, grocery, logistics, for example. Google and Amazon on healthcare, Google and Apple on automobiles, all three in FinTech. And it's likely this is just the beginning but Nadella's posture suggests that Microsoft for now anyway, is content being mostly a horizontal technology provider, aka arms dealer. Now, there are some examples where you could argue that Microsoft sort of crosses the line maybe as a games developer or as a SAS competitor. Do you really want to, if you're a SAS player do you want to run your system on Azure and compete with Microsoft? Well, it depends if you're vertically oriented or maybe horizontal in their swim lanes, but anyway, these are more natural cohorts to technology than say for example, Amazon's retail business. So I thought that was something that was worth taking a look at. All right, let's take a quick look at how Microsoft compares to a couple of the great tech giants of the past several decades. Here's a financial snapshot of Microsoft compared to Oracle a highly profitable software company and IBM an industry legend. The first two things that jumped right out of Microsoft, size and it's growth rate. Microsoft is twice the revenue of IBM and nearly four extent of Oracle. And yet Microsoft is growing in the mid-teens compared to low single digits for Oracle and IBM continues to shrink so extensible you can grow. Microsoft's gross margin model has been pulled down by its hardware business but its operating margins are unbelievable. Meanwhile, the cash on its balance sheet is immense much larger than Oracles, which is very impressive. It's certainly dwarfs that of IBM, a company that had to take on a lot of debt to acquire Red Hat and has a balance sheet, that increasingly looks more like Dell's than it's historical self. And then on the last two rows Oracle and IBM, both owners of their own cloud have been lapped by Microsoft in terms of CapEx and research & development investment. Ironically, as we pointed out, IBM's R & D spend in 2007 the year after AWS launched the modern era of cloud was comparable to that of Microsoft. Let's now pivot it to some of the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft fares. We'll start by sharing a fundamental basis of the ETR methodology, that is the calculation of net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum and here's how it's derived. This chart shows the components of Microsoft's net score. It comprises five parts and represents the percentage of customers within the ETR survey with specific spending profiles. The lime green is new adoptions, the forest green is increased spend of 6% or more for 2021 relative to 2020, the gray is flat spend, the pinkish slice is spend declining by more than 6% or 6% or more relative to last year and the bright red is replacing the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score. As you can see, Microsoft's net score is 53% which is very high for $150 billion Company. Now let's put that in context and expand the scope here a little bit. This chart shows how Microsoft fares relative to its peers, the vertical axis shows net score against spending velocity and the horizontal axis shows market share. Market share measures pervasiveness in the survey. In the table insert, you can see the vendors they're sorted by net score and the shared end column is there as well, which represents the number of shared accounts in the dataset. On both accounts bigger is better. Now note the red dotted line, that's the 40% watermark which is my personal indicator of an elevated net score anything above that in our view is really solid. Microsoft is as usual off the charts strong well to the right with it's market presence and then an overall net score of 53% as we showed earlier. And then there's Azure, separate from Microsoft overall. We wanted to plot that specifically which of course it doesn't have the presence of Microsoft overall, no surprise, but it's still prominent on the x-axis and it has a net score approaching 70%, which is quite amazing. AWS not surprisingly is highly elevated with a presence that's even larger than Azure. And you can see Zoom, Salesforce and Google Cloud all above the 40% line. Google as we've reported is well off the pace in the horizontal axis and even though its net score is elevated, we would like to see it even higher, given its smaller size relative to AWS and Azure. You know, SAP always stands out because it's a large company and it's got a net score that's hovering just under 30%. It's not above that 40% line, but it's solid. And you can see IBM and Oracle now we're showing here IBM and Oracle overall so it's the whole kitchen sink comparable to Microsoft that turquoise dot, if you will. So you can see why those two are valued much lower Microsoft. The large base of its business that's declining is much, much larger than the pieces of their business that are growing. Now Oracle has some momentum, the Back Aaron's article on February 19th, which declared Oracle a cloud giant and it declared its stock a buy combined with some earnings upgrades including one today from Ramo Lyncho of Barclays has catapulted the stock to all time highs and a valuation over $200 billion. IBM is a different story as we've discussed frequently Arvind has a lot of work to do to get this national treasure back to what's prominent itself. Okay, let now unpack Microsoft's vast portfolio a bit and see where it's doing well and where it's making moves and maybe where it's struggling, some. This graphic shows Microsoft's net score across its entire product portfolio within the ETR taxonomy. And you can see it's pretty much killing it across the board. Microsoft plays in almost every sector in the ETR taxonomy and you can see the 40% red line and how many of its offerings are above that line. The yellow bar being the most recent survey and while there's quite a bit of gray, i.e. flat spend relative to 2020, we're talking about some very tough compares from last year. And yet there's still a huge chunk of the portfolio in the green meaning spending momentum is actually up from last year and some of Microsoft's most important sectors like Cloud and Teams and Analytics. Look only Skype and Microsoft Dynamics are lagging, so really nice story there in our view. Now let's come back and take a look at Microsoft's cloud business specifically as compared to its peers. So Satya basically said that Microsoft's future will build on top of its cloud and looking at this picture it's pretty encouraging for the company. This chart, again, shows net score or spending momentum inside specifically Fortune 500 customers and it's a key bellwether in the ETR dataset, and you can see Azure and Azure functions well above the 40% red line and extremely well positioned relative to AWS and GCP. Importantly, the yellow bar tells us that compared to previous surveys Microsoft's cloud business is actually gaining momentum in this very important sector. Now, other notable call-outs on this chart VMware Cloud, which, it's on-prem hybrid cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS, which is reportedly doing well but off from the momentum of its highs last spring. You can see Oracle jumped up indicating cloud momentum, but still well below the performance of the largest cloud players. The IBM Cloud appears to be a non-factor in the survey and as we previously stated, we'd like to see IBM recalibrate the financials for its cloud business and come up with a reporting framework that better represents the prevailing mental model of cloud computing. We think a cleaner number would allow IBM to build on the Red Hat momentum. I'm not sure what to make of the HPE boost, it looks significant, but in digging into the data it's only 17 data points, but look 17 within the Fortune 500 companies is not terrible. And HPE net score in that sector is more than double its overall cloud net score so that's positive we think. Okay, let's wrap by looking at how customers are thinking about multi-cloud adoption and really this data that we're about to show you simply asking customers about clouds they're using versus any type of long-term vision. So it's a good representation of what's happening today and what CIO is are thinking about in the near future particularly over the next 12 months. The survey asks customers to describe their cloud provider usage and strategy. You can see that only 14% of the survey respondents have exclusively a mono-cloud strategy, but now add in another 22% who were predominantly single cloud and you now have more than a third of the customer base gravitating toward mono-cloud. Another 14% say they're concentrating cloud providers more narrowly. Now on the flip side, you've got a big group, 29% that are moving toward multi-cloud and if you add in the additional 16% who say they are and will continue to be evenly spread, 45% of the survey is solidly headed in that direction so it's a mixed picture. What's the takeaway? Well, we think Andy Jassy is right when he says that while many customers use more than one cloud, they tend to have a primary provider and have something like a 70,30 or even 80,20 split between primary and secondary clouds. Now we think, however that this will change, but only to the extent that the vendor community is adding value on top of the existing hyperscale clouds. What we're saying and have been saying is that there is a real opportunity to create value on top of the cloud infrastructure that's being built out by AWS, Google and Microsoft. Instead of fearing cloud, the vendor community should be embracing it creating a layer on top, abstracting away the underlying complexities associated with cloud native, exploiting cloud native, and then building on top of that. Snowflake's data cloud vision is right on in my view, we can envision virtually every layer of the stack following suit. Even within database there are opportunities to identify more granular segments across clouds. For example, despite Snowflakes early multi-cloud lead you're seeing competitive firms like Teradata begin to architect a system across clouds that can query data warehouses from distributed locations, including on-prem as part of what they refer to as a data fabric, sounds kind of like Snowflakes global data mesh, or maybe better Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh. Yeah, sure but Teradata has capabilities that Snowflake doesn't for example, the ability to do complex joins and we can see plenty of market for both companies to differentiate. And why shouldn't similar vision extend from on-prem, across clouds to the edge for data protection, security, governance, hybrid compute ,analytics, federated applications, its a huge market that the hyperscale providers are likely too busy worrying about their own walled gardens to start building across on top of their competitors clouds. So Dell, HPE, VMware, Cisco, Palo Alto Fortunate, Zscaler or Cohesity, Veeam and hundreds of other tech companies, including by the way IBM and Oracle should be saying thank you to AWS, Google and Microsoft for spending all that money to build out great infrastructure on which they can build value, tap for future growth. And many of you will say, Hey, we're already doing this. Okay, I'll be watching to see the ratio of real versus slideware because generally today, in my opinion the denominator is much larger than the numerator. So when that ratio hits 1X we'll know it started to become real. Okay, that's it for today remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibun.com and siliconangle.com. Please comment on my LinkedIn post or you can tweet me @DVellante or feel free to email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey and data science action. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here at the Orange County Convention Center in the middle of the show floor, one of Microsoft's biggest shows, 26,000 people from around the globe. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're joined by a third cohost, but he is also the Principal CTO Advisor, Keith Townsend. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> It's a pleasure to have you. So, you come to a lot of these shows, I'm interested in your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2019. >> So, I'm part of the V community, which is a pretty close knit community, very focused on one part of the whole IT pitch, which is infrastructure. It is amazing coming to a show like Microsoft Ignite where the breadth of content is so wide, and the conversation, so wide and, surprisingly, deep. This is been one of my, I think, favorite shows of the year so far. >> Talk about the content, you're absolutely right, we had so many product announcements, it felt like an Amazon Show, we were saying, because of the number of products that were being announced and demoed here. 87 pages from the Comms Team, so, does this feel like a different era for the company itself? >> You know what, Microsoft announced, I think UiPath has some crazy over billion dollar evaluation. Microsoft wildly announced that they're entering RPA, Robotic Process Automation, they're challenging SAP when it comes to data warehousing and data analytics. And then, they just happen to announce that, oh, yeah, by the way, we're making Kubernetes easier. Then, there's still the Teams announcements. The amount of content and the areas that Microsoft is going in, just to highlight it, Azure Arc replicates data, one of the jobs is replicate data, and they said they'll replicate data to AWS Cloud. Microsoft, great position. >> Keith, as you're alluding to, Microsoft has a large portfolio of applications. If you think business productivity, you're probably using Microsoft. Everything from Teams, that we're hearing a bunch about, to, of course, O365 is the solution that gave everybody the green light to go SaaS-ify as many of your applications as you will, and Arc, very much from what I've seen so far, takes that application specific view of Kubernetes, we know Kubernetes is supposed to help be that platform to build on top of, but, I've tended to hear a very infrastructure view of here's what you'll build in your data center and the compute network and storage that you need to think about, here's the IAS that it might live on. But, when you talk about Arc, they're talking about it's about SQL and databases and how those pieces go together. And this is a view for Microsoft, but, if you want to go do open shift, if you want to do spring with a Pivotal VMware or Tanzu with there, Microsoft, of course, is saying that that's your option but would love your view point so far as your Arc and where Microsoft sits in this broader ecosystem today. >> So, I'm coming off fresh a conversation with David Armor, the PM for Microsoft Arc for Azure stack, and their attention to detail is amazing. You know, I'm not the world's biggest Kubernetes fan, for some of the very reasons that you mentioned. It's too much attention to the details in order to provide a Kubernetes experience that developers will accept. Microsoft, a big developer focused company, so when you look at Arc and what it does for Kubernetes on Azure stack, it makes the provisioning, the storage networking, et cetera, invisible so that you can take Microsoft's cognitive services, deploy them on Azure stack, and just consume those services. Microsoft, again, when you look at it from a different angle, when you're not taking the infrastructure angle added and you're doing the whiz bang features of making sure that Kubernetes can do X, Y, and Z, more importantly, can I use it to build applications is Microsoft's approach, and you can see it in the Arc and how they approach it in the Azure stack. >> Absolutely, and you're talking, right now, about this app development for everyone. We had Satya Nadella, yesterday, talking about democratizing computing, anyone can do it, AI for all, too. What are the most exciting new tools that you're seeing, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with developers around these new tools? >> So, I just talked to a professional services architect, or an architect for professional services, one of the global big four's, and he was telling me that they've deployed RPA to the entire organization of over 100,000 consultants and end users, so that they can build robots to power the next phase of productivity increases within their organization. No rules, no constraints, just here's the tool, go out and do. Microsoft talked about 2.5 million non-technology focused developers, it is, I think, a key theory of the CTO advisors that their future of enterprise IT is that companies, like Microsoft, then, will push AI, machine learning, these robotic automation processes down to the end users so that they're creating the content. There's just not enough of Keiths and Stus in the world to do this by hand. So, great vision. >> And Keith, you brought up the SIs, and you've worked for some of the big SIs in the past. How is Microsoft doing out there? We've seen with Cloud and AI, the biggest guys, rolling out armies of people to help integrate this, to help customers adopt this. Cloud and AI, Cloud, specifically, was supposed to be cheap and easy and we know it's neither of those two things. So, if you look at Cloud and AI, how is Microsoft to be a partner with and I would love a little compare and contrast to the Vmwares and AWSs of the world. >> So, if you look, let's take a look at VMware, I'm a big VMware fan, but one of the things that if you're a VMware VAR, or you're in VMware period, if you go outside of your lane, that infrastructure lane, you go to have conversations, the technology is there. You can use VMware, vRealize, automation suites, the CloudHealth, the Heptio, they have the individual components, technology components, but they absolutely need the Pivotals of the world to go in and add credence to their talking points around these products because they don't have that reputation to come in and have the conversation with the CMOs or the application developers. Microsoft on the other hand, developers, developers, developers. And then, they also have Microsoft Dynamics, we ran into a customer, who was desperately just searching out, she came to the conference expecting to see Dynamic experts, and I'm sure she found them. Microsoft has the ecosystem to support their vision. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE this week, at Ignite, is that it seems like a different kind of Microsoft, it seems like one that is, not only embracing customers who choose Microsoft in addition to other companies, but championing them and supporting them and saying, "whatever you want, "we're meeting you where you are." Have you found that, and is that striking to you, based on the Microsoft of Yore, which was more proprietary about where it's customers went for it's technology. >> So, we mainly cover enterprise tech, but, I think today or tomorrow, the Surface Pro X gets released, which is an arm based device, that runs full version of Windows. I was in one of the Lightning talks, Microsoft Lightning talk, on a completely different topic, and at the bottom, they had a logo for UiPath, Automate Anywhere and Blue Prism, three of the, I think, leaders in a space of RPA. And they were talking about the integrations that Microsoft has gone on with these companies, and their own power automate was not even mentioned as part of that session. So, Microsoft is meeting customers where they're at. I think the AWS, the example for Arc, replicating to AWS, customers have AWS, they're the biggest Cloud provider, Microsoft isn't closing their eyes to it. >> Yeah, well, we noticed the biggest thing repeated over and over again in the key note yesterday was trust. And while the Microsoft of old days was you're going to buy my OS, and my apps, and everything Microsoft on top of it, and we're going to maximize our licensing, the Microsoft today is those choices. We talked to UiPath yesterday, they're not worried about their relationship with Microsoft. When I talked to the ecosystem of partners here, they trust that they can work with Microsoft. Compare that to some others out there in the industry, and the big Hyperscalers, there might not be as much trust. What I'm curious about, from you Keith, is do customers see that? Do they understand that today is a different Microsoft than the one that we grew up with? >> So, some of the conversation on Twitter, just remotely, people not here, this is the best Ignite I've ever seen. People who are not even here, this is from the keynote yesterday. I think customers are starting to embrace Microsoft and trust Microsoft. I think there's still some hold out, some people who remember this sting of forced to use Microsoft management suites on products that probably didn't integrate well with those suites. But, as that sting starts to subside, you have to look at it objectively and say, "Microsoft is a different company." This is not a show I think I would have enjoyed three years ago. >> What's driving it though? This is something we're seeing in the technology industry at large, this understanding of customers needing different things and wanting best in breed. But are there other elements that we're not privy to, would you say? >> I think it's the democratization of technology via Cloud. I talked to a just regular, small business owner. She runs a trucking business, she uses her computer as a tool, it was a five year old device, she really didn't care, did the job that she needed to do. We talked a business challenge that she was having, and I described Cloud in general and she never even considered Cloud as a thing. She just said, "you know what, "I want this solution and if it's Microsoft AWS or Google that provides it, or even VM Works." She didn't care, she wanted to buy it. And that relationship wasn't a traditional ISV, MSP, these are, I think, business owners and business leaders are being approached with, whether it's ISVs or consultants and business advisors, and they're being advised to adopt these technologies, regardless of the source. There's no loyalty anymore to just Microsoft. Remember when you bled blue? Whether it was IBM blue or Microsoft blue. I read an unfortunate article on one of the big ERP providers had a 100 million dollar failure, and the company just decided, you know what, we're not going to go with just one provider anymore, we're just going to go with best of breed across these business processes. >> So what does that mean for the competitive landscape? I mean, we talked a lot about this. Does Microsoft really have a shot at taking on AWS or will it always be number two. Well, Microsoft won a 10 billion dollar JEDI contract from the US. I wrote about this in my newsletter last week, is that one billion dollars over 10 years will make Microsoft Azure better. You can't help but to have that type of discipline that comes from a contract like that impact Azure. Will they catch up with Microsoft, I mean, with AWS? AWS is still a very, very small fraction of the overall IT landscape. That business owner I talked to never heard of AWS. 50,000 person conference in a month, she only knew Amazon as a book seller. So, to say that Microsoft won't catch up with AWS is a very, very short view of the landscape. >> We're just scratching the surface when it comes to Cloud. >> Keith, what other thing have you seen at the show jumping out at you? You said you might not have enjoyed the show three years ago so what are some of things that make this show enjoyable? I know for me, it is a different community than the V community out there, there are a lot of overlaps, a lot of friendly faces that I know here, but community, diversity, inclusion, super strong here, would love your comment on that and any other takeaways. >> So, someone pointed out to me that I didn't notice and I'm happy I didn't notice it, was that there is a lot of women at this show, and I looked up and I'm like wow, the lines for men's bathroom aren't as long. And that's a nice thing because I don't think it's just facilities. It is a massively diverse show, not just from a ethnicity and gender perspective, but from career levels and age groups. There's Millennials all the way up to Boomers, and the conversations, the conversations that I've had, I'm really surprised with. Straight on business conversations, to deep and dirty, you know what these are the Cloud providers Azure provides for Kubernetes. That's super geeky, and that conversation's all around best. Infrastructure, application, business, and then even social, I had that social conversation about diversity, and for a change, I wasn't the one that brought up the conversation. >> You know, that's a really good point, and even just even here, I mean, I know you made the schedule, which I salute you, because we are having many more women, many more people of color on our stage, which is reflective of who's here. >> And it's easier at this show than it is at most, as opposed to please find me some more underrepresented or diversity there. And luckily, there is a lot of options at a show like this. >> Yeah, the pool just hasn't, and other shows, the pool just isn't very big. Normally, I can usually say at a show, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and hey, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and this show is not that case. >> No, there's more, there's more, exactly. >> Well, Keith Townsend, thank you so much for coming on, a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and Keith Townsend, you are watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (dramatic music) >> Hi, everyone, welcome to this week's Breaking Analysis. It's Friday, October 18th, and this is theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Today, ETR had its conference call, its webcast. It was in a quiet period, and it dropped this tome. I have spent the last several hours going through this dataset. It's just unbelievable. It's the fresh data from the October survey, and I'm going to share just some highlights with you. I wish I had a couple hours to go through all this stuff, but I'm going to just pull out some of the key points. Spending is flattening. We've talked about this in previous discussions with you. But, things are still healthy. We're just reverting back to pre 2018 levels and, obviously, keeping a very close eye on the spending data and the sectors. There is some uncertainty heading into Q four. It's not only tariffs, you know. 2020's an election year, so that causes some uncertainty and some concerns for people. But, the big theme from ETR is there's less experimentation going on. The last several years have been ones where we're pushing out digital initiatives, and there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of redundancy. So, I'm going to talk more about that. I'm going to focus on a couple of sectors. I'm going to share with you there's the overall sector analysis. Then, I'm going to focus in on Microsoft and AWS and talk a little bit about the cloud. Then, I'm going to give some other highlights and, particularly, around enterprise software. The other thing I'll say is that the folks from ETR are going to be in the Bay Area on October 28th through the 30th, and I would encourage you to spend some time with them. If you want to meet them, just, you know, contact me @dvellante on Twitter or David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. I have no dog in this fight. I get no money from these guys. We're just partners and friends, but I love their data. And, they've given me access to it, and it's great because I can share it with you, our community. So, let's get right into it. Alex, if you just bring up the first slide, what I want to show is the ETR pulse check survey demographics, so every quarter, ETR does these surveys. They've got a dataset comprising 4500 members, panelists if you will, that they survey each quarter. In this survey, 1336 responded, representing 457 billion in spending power, and you can see from this slide, you know, it's got a nice mix of large companies. Very heavily weighted toward North America, but you're talking about, you know, 12% AMIA out of 1300. Certainly substantial and statistically significant to get some trends overseas. You can see across all industries. And then, job titles, a lot of C level executives, VPs, architects, people who know what the spending climate looks like, so I really like the mix of data. Let me make some overall comments, and, Alex, the next slide sort of gives some snapshot here. The big theme is that there's a compression in tech spending, as they say. It's very tough to compare to compare to 2018, which was just a phenomenal year. I mentioned the tariffs. It was an election year. Election years bring uncertainty. Uncertainty brings conservatism, so that's something, obviously, that's weighing, I think, on buyers' minds. And, I'll give you some anecdotal comments in a moment that will underscore that. There's less redundancy in spending. This has been a theme of ETR's for quite some time now. The last few years have been a try everything type of mode. Digital initiatives were launched, let's say, starting in 2016. ETR called this, I love this, Tom DelVecchio, the CEO of ETR, called it a giant IT bake off where you were looking at, okay, cloud versus on prem or SaaS versus conventional models, new databases versus legacy databases, legacy storage versus sort of modern storage stacks. So, you had this big bake off going on. And, what's happening now is you're seeing less experimentation so less adoption of new technologies, and replacements are on the rise. So, people are making their bets. They're saying, "Okay, these technologies "are the ones we're going to bet on, "these emerging disruptive technologies." So, they're narrowing their scope of emerging technologies, and they're saying, "Okay, now, "we're going to replace the legacy stuff." So, you're seeing these new stacks emerging. I mentioned some others before, but things like cloud native versus legacy waterfall approaches. And, these new stacks are hitting both legacy and disruptive companies for the reasons that I mentioned before because we're replacing legacy, but at the same time, we're narrowing the scope of the new stuff. This is not necessarily good for the disruptors. Downturns, sometimes, are good for legacy because they're perceived as a safer bet. So, what I want to do, right now, is share with you some of the anecdotals from the survey, and I'll just, you know, call out some things. By the way, the first thing I would note is, you know, ETR did sort of an analysis of frequency of terms. Cloud, cost, replacing, change, moving, consolidation, migration, and contract were the big ones that stood out. But, let me just call a couple of the anecdotals. When they do these surveys, they'll ask open ended questions, and so these kind of give you a good idea as to how people are thinking. "We're projecting a hold based on impacts from tariffs. "Situation could change if tariff relief is reached. "We're really concerned about EU." Another one, "Shift to SaaS is accelerating "and driving TCO down. "Investing in 2019, we're implementing "and retiring old technologies in 2020. "There's an active effort to consolidate "the number of security vendor solutions. "We're doing more Microsoft." Let's see, "We have moved "to a completely outsourced infrastructure model, "so no longer purchasing storage," interesting. "In general, we're trying to reduce spending "based on current market conditions." So, people, again, are concerned. Storage, as a category, is way down. "We're moving from Teradata to AWS and a data lake." I'll make some comments, as well, later on about EDW and Snowflake in particular, who, you know, remains very healthy. "We're moving our data to G Suite and AWS. "We're migrating our SaaS offering to elastic. "We're sunsetting Cognos," which, of course, is owned by IBM. "Talend, we decided to drop after evaluating. "Tableau, we've decided to not integrate anymore," even though Tableau is, actually, looking very strong subsequent to the sales force acquisition. So, there's some comments there that people, again, are replacing and they're narrowing some of their focus on spending. All right, Alex, bring up the next slide. I want to share with you the sector momentum. So, we've talked about this methodology of net score. Every time ETR does one of these pulse surveys, they ask, "Are you spending more or are you spending less? "Or, are you spending the same?" And then, essentially, they subtract the spending less from the spending more, and the spending more included new adoptions. The spending less includes replacements. And, that comes out with a net score, and that net score is an indicator of momentum. And, what you can see here is, the momentum I've highlighted in red, is container orchestration, the container platforms, machine learning, AI, automation, big theme. We were just at the UiPath conference, huge theme on automation. And, of course, robotic process automation, RPA. Cloud computing remains very strong. This dotted red line that I put in there, that's at the, you know, 30%, 35% level. You kind of want to be above that line to really show momentum. Anything below that line is either holding serve, holding steady, but well below that line, when you start getting into the low 20s and the teens, is a red zone. That's a danger zone. You could see data warehouse software is kind of on that cusp. and I'm not, you know, a huge fan of the sector in general, but I love Snowflake and what they're doing and the share gains that are going on there. So, when you're below that red line, it's a game of share gain. Storage, same thing we've talked about. The overall storage sector is down. It's being pressured by cloud, as that anectdotal suggested. It's also being pressured by the fact that so much flash has been injected into the data center over the last couple of years. That given headroom for buyers. They don't need as much storage, so overall, the sector is soft. But then, you see companies, like Pure, continuing to gain share, so they're actually quite strong in this quarter survey. So, you could see some various sectors here. IT consulting and outsourced IT not looking strong, data center consolidation. By the way, you saw, in IBM's recent earnings, Jim Kavanaugh pointed to their outsourcing business as a real drag, you know. Some of these other sectors, you could see, actually, PC laptop, this is obviously a big impact for Dell and HP, you know, kind of holding steady. Actually, better than storage, so, you know, for that large of a segment, not necessarily such a bad thing. Okay, now, what I want to do, I want to shift focus and make some comments on Microsoft, specifically, and AWS. So, here's just some high level points on this slide on Microsoft. The N out of that total was 1200, so very large proportion of the survey is weighted toward Microsoft. So, a good observation space for Microsoft. Extremely positive spending outlook for this company. There's a lot of ways to get to Microsoft. You want cloud, there's Azure, you know. Visualization, you got Power BI. Collaboration, there's Teams. Of course, email and calendaring is Office 365. You need hiring data? Well, we just bought LinkedIn. CRM, ERP, there's Microsoft Dynamics. So, Microsoft is a lot of roads, to spend with Microsoft. Windows is not the future of Microsoft. Satya Nadella and company have done a great job of sort of getting out of that dogma and really expanding their TAM. You're seeing acceleration from Microsoft across all key sectors, cloud, apps, containers, MI, or machine intelligence, AI and ML, analytics, infrastructure software, data warehousing, servers, GitHub is strong, collaboration, as I mentioned. So, really, across the board, this portfolio of offerings powered by the scale of Azure is very strong. Microsoft has great velocity in the cloud, and it's a key bellwether. Now, the next slide, what it does is compares the cloud computing big three in the US, Azure, AWS, and GCP, Google Cloud Platform. This is, again, net score. This is infrastructure as a service, and so you can see here the yellow is Microsoft, that darker line is AWS, and GCP is that blue line down below. All three are actually showing great strength in the spending data. Azure has more momentum than AWS, so it's growing faster. We've seen this for a while, but I want to make a point here that didn't come up on the ETR call. But, AWS is probably two and a half to three times larger in infrastructure as a service than is Microsoft Azure, so remember, AWS has a $35 billion at least run rate business in infrastructure as a service. And, as I say, it's two and a half to three times, at least, larger than Microsoft, which is probably a run rate of, let's call it, 10 to 12 billion, okay. So, it's quite amazing that AWS is holding at that 66 to now dropping to 63% net score given that it's so large. And, of course, way behind is GCP, much smaller share. In fact, I think, probably, Alibaba has surpassed GCP in terms of overall market share. So, at any rate, you could see all three, strong momentum. The cloud continues its march. I'll make some comments on that a little bit later. But, Azure has really strong momentum. Let's talk, next slide if you will, Alex, about AWS. Smaller sample size, 731 out of the total, which is not surprising, right. Microsoft's been around a lot longer and plays in a lot more sectors. ETR has a positive to neutral outlook on AWS. Now, you have to be careful here because, remember, what ETR is doing is they're looking at the spending momentum and comparing that to consensus estimates, okay. So, ETR's business is helping, largely, Wall Street, you know, buy side analysts make bets, and so it's not only about how much money they make or what kind of momentum they have in aggregate. It's about how they're doing relative to expectation, something that I explained on the last Breaking Analysis. Spending on AWS continues to be very robust. They've got that flywheel effect. Make no mistake that this positive to neutral outlook is relative to expectations. Relative to overall market, AWS is, you know, kicking butt. Cloud, analytics, big data, data warehousing, containers, machine intelligence, even virtualization. AWS is growing and gaining share. My view, AWS will continue to outperform the marketplace for quite some time now, and it's gaining share from legacy players. Who's it hurting? You're seeing the companies within AWS's sort of sphere that are getting impacted by AWS. Oracle, IBM, SAP, you know, cloud Arrow, which we mentioned last time is at all time lows, Teradata. These accounts, inside of AWS respondents, are losing share. Now, who's gaining share? Snowflake is on a tear. Mongo is very strong. Microsoft, interestingly, remains strong in AWS. In fact, AWS runs a lot of Microsoft workloads. That's, you know, fairly well known. But, again, Snowflake, very strong inside of AWS accounts. There's no indication that, despite AWS's emphasis on database and, of course, data warehouse, that Snowflake's being impacted by that. The reverse, Snowflake is taking advantage of cloud momentum. The only real negative you can say about AWS is that Microsoft is accelerating faster than AWS, so that might upset Andy Jassy. But, he'll point out, I guess, what I pointed out before, that they're much larger. Take a look at AWS on this next slide. The net score across all AWS sectors, the ones I mentioned. And, this is the growth in Fortune 500, so you can see, very steady in the large accounts. That's that blue line, you know, dipped in the October 18 survey, but look at how strong it is, holding 67% in Fortune 500 accounts. And then, you can see, the yellow line is the market share. AWS continues to gain share in those large accounts when you weight that out in terms of spending. That's why I say AWS is going to continue to do very well in this overall market. So, just some, you know, comments on cloud. As I said, it continues to march, it continues to really be the watchword, the fundamental operating model. Microsoft, very strong, expanding its TAM everywhere, I mean, affecting, potentially, Slack, Box, Dropbox, New Relic, Splunk, IBM, and Security, Elastic. So, Microsoft, very strong here. AWS continues to grow, not as strong as '18, but much stronger than its peers, very well positioned in database and artificial intelligence. And so, not a lot of softness in AWS. I mentioned on one of the previous Breaking Analysis, Kubernetes', actually, container's a little soft, so we always keep an eye on that one. And, Google, again, struggling to make gains in cloud. One of the comments I made before is that the long term surveys for Google looked positive, but that's not showing up yet in the near term market shares. All right, Alex, if you want to bring up the next slide, I want to make some quick comments before I close, on enterprise software. There was a big workday scare this week. They kind of guided that their core HR business was not going to be as robust as it had been previously, so this pulled back all the SaaS vendors. And, you know, the stock got crushed, Salesforce got hit, ServiceNow got hit, Splunk got hit. But, I tell you, you look at the data in this massive dataset, ServiceNow remains strong, Salesforce looks, very slight deceleration, but very sound, especially in the Fortune 100 in that GPP, the giant public and private companies that I talked about on an earlier call. That's one of the best indicators of strength. Tableau, actually, very strong, especially in large accounts, so Salesforce seems to be doing a good job of integrating there. Splunk, (mumbles) coming up shortly, I think this month. Securities, the category is very strong, lifting all ships. Splunk looks really good. Despite some of the possible competition from Microsoft, there's no indication that Splunk is slowing. There's some anecdotal issues about pricing that I talked about before, but I think Splunk is really dealing with those. UiPath's another company. We were just out there this past week at the UiPath Forward conference. UiPath, in this dataset, when you take out some of the smaller respondents, smaller number of respondents, UiPath has one of the highest net scores in the entire sample. UiPath is on a tear. I talked to dozens of customers this week. Very strong momentum, and then moving into, got new areas, and I'll be focusing on the RPA sector a little later on. But, automation, in general, really has some tailwinds in the marketplace. And, you know, the other comment I'll make about RPA is a downturn actually could help RPA vendors, who, by the way, all the RPA vendors look strong. Automation Anywhere, UiPath, I mentioned, Blue Prism, you know, even some of the legacy companies like Pega look, actually, very strong. A downturn in the economy could help some of the RPA vendors because would be looking to do more with less, and automation, you know, could be something that they're looking toward. Snowflake I mentioned, again, they continue their tear. A very strong share in expansion. Slightly lower than previous quarters in terms of the spending momentum, but the previous quarters were off the charts. So, also very strong in large companies. All right, so let me wrap. So, buyers are planning for a slowdown. I mean, there's no doubt about that. It's something that we have to pay very close attention to, and I think the marker expects that. And, I think, you know, it's okay. There's less spaghetti against the wall, we're going to try everything, and that's having a moderating effect on spending, as is the less redundancy. People were running systems in parallel. As they say, they're placing bets, now, on both disruptive tech and on legacy tech, so they're replacing both in some cases. Or, they're not investing in some of the disruptive stuff because they're narrowing their investments in disruptive technologies, and they're also replacing some legacy. We're clearly seeing new adoptions down, according to ETR, and replacements up, and that's going to affect both legacy and disruptive vendors. So, caution is the watchword, but, overall, the market remains healthy. Okay, so thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching this Breaking Analysis. We'll see you next time. (dramatic music)

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering the Conference Boards Sixth Annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back here, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Innovation Mater Class at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. Really excited to be here, never been here, surprisingly, for all the shows we do just up the hill next to VMware, and Tesla. This is kind of the granddaddy of locations and innovation centers, it's been around forever. If you don't know the history, get a couple books, you'll learn it pretty fast. So we're excited to be here and our next guess is Antony Brydon, four-time founder and CEO, which is not easy to do. Again, check the math on that, most people are successful a couple times, hard to do it four times. And now he's the co-founder and CEO of Directly. So Antony, great to see you. >> It's good to be here. >> So, Directly, what is directly all about for people aren't familiar with the company? >> Most companies are excited to, and pursuing, the opportunity of automating up to 85% of their customer service. That's the ambition, and giving customers a delightful answer in their first experience. Most of those companies are falling down out of the gates because there are content gaps, and data gaps, and training gaps, and empathy gaps in the systems. So we build a CX automation platform and it puts experts at the heart of AI, letting these companies build networks of product experts and then rewarding those experts for creating content for AI systems, for training AI systems, for resolving customer questions. >> Right. So let's back up a step. So Zendesk is probably one we're all familiar with. You send in a customer service node, a lot of the times it comes back, customer service to Zendesk. >> Yes. >> But you're not building kind of a competitor of Zendesk, you're more of a partner, if I believe, for those types of applications, to help those apps do a better job. >> We are, we're a partner for Zendesk, we're a partner for Microsoft Dynamics, for Service Cloud and the like, and, essentially, are building the automation systems that make their AI systems work and work better. >> Right. >> Those are pure technology systems that often lack the data and the content to deliver AI at scale and quality, and that's where our platform and the human network, the experts in the mix, come into play. >> We could probably go for a long, long time on this topic. So what are some of the key things that make them not work now? Besides just the fact that it's kind of like the old dial-in systems. It's like, I just want to hit 0000. I just want to talk to a person. I have no confidence or faith that going through these other steps is going to get me the solution. Do you still see that on the online world as well? >> No, there are very clear gaps. There are four or five areas where systems are falling down. AI project mortality, as I refer to it. Very few companies have the structured data that systems need to work at scale. >> On the back, to feed the whole thing. >> That's right. Labeled, structured, organized data. So that doesn't exist. Many companies don't have the content. That's a second area. They may have enterprised knowledge bases, but they're five years old, they're seven years old, they're outdated, they're not accurate. Many companies don't have the signal. When a automated answer's delivered, they have to wait for a customer to rate it, and that tends to be really poor signal on whether that answer was good or not. And then last, many companies just don't have the teams to maintain these algorithms and constantly tune them. And that is where experts at the heart of a platform can come into play, by building a network of product experts who know the products inside and out. These could be Airbnb hosts for one of our customers, these could by Microsoft Excel users in the Microsoft example. Those experts can create that content, train the data, and actually resolve questions, filling those gaps, solving those problems. >> Right. I'm just curious, on the expert side, how many--? I don't know if there's best practices or if there's kind of certain buckets depending on the industry. Of those expert answers are generated by people inside the company versus a really kind of active, engaged community where you've got third-party experts that are happy to participate and help provide that info. >> Over 99% of the answers and the content is actually generated by the external network. >> 99%? >> 99%. You start with sources of enterprise knowledge, but it's a long, hard, arduous process to create those internal knowledge bases, and companies really struggle to keep up, it's Britannica. By the time you ship it it's outdated and you have to start all over again. The external expert networks work more like Wikipedia. Content constantly being organically created, the successful content is promoted, the unsuccessful content is demoted, and it's an evergreen cycle where it's constantly refreshing. Overwhelmingly external. >> Overwhelming. I mean, I could see where there's certain types of products. I was telling somebody else the other day about Harley-Davidson, one of the all-time great brands. People tattoo it on their body. Now, there aren't very many brands that people tattoo on their body. So easy to get people to talk about motorcycles or some of these types of things, but how do you do it for something that's really not that exciting? What are some of the tricks and incentives to engage that community? Or is there just always some little corps that you may or may not be aware of that are happy to jump in and so passionate about those types of products? >> There are definitely some companies where there's very little expertise and passion in the ecosystem around it. They're few and far between. If you find a product, if you find a company, you can find people that rely, love, and depend on that company. I gave some of the B to C examples, but we've also got networks for enterprise software companies, folks like SAP, folks like Autodesk. And those networks have experts that are developers, resellers, VARs, systems integrators, and the like. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the talent and the passion exists, you just have to have a simple platform to onboard and start tapping that talent and passion. >> So if I hear you right, you use kind of your Encyclopedia Britannica because that's what you have to start, to get the fly wheel moving, but as you start to collect inputs from third-party community, you can start to refine and get the better information back. And I ask specifically that way because you mentioned the human factors, and making people part of this thing, which is probably part of the problem with adoption, as I'd want confidence that there's some person behind this, even if the AI is smart. I'd want at least feel like there's some human-to-human contact when I reach out to this company. >> Yeah, that's critically important, because the empathy gap is real in almost all of the systems that are traditionally out there, which is when an automated answer's delivered, in a traditional system, it typically has a much lower CSAT than when it comes from a human being. What we found is when you have an expert author that content, when his or her face is shown next to the answer as it's presented to the user, and where he or she is there to back it up should that user still need more help, there you retain the human elements that personalize the contact, that humanize the experience, and immediately get big gains in CSAT. So It think that empathy piece is really important. >> Right. I wondered if you could share any specific examples of a customer that had an automated, kind of dumb system, I'll just use that word, compared to what they can do today, and some of the impacts when they put in some of the AI-powered systems like you guys support. >> So one of the first immediate impacts is often when we go in, a automated or unassisted system will be handling a very small percentage of the queries, and percentage of the customer questions coming in, and-- >> And people are going straight to zero, they're just like, I got to go to a person. >> Yeah, we're mostly in digital channels, so less phone, but yes, because the content there-- >> As an analogy, right. >> Because the content isn't there, it doesn't hit and resolve the question in that frequent a rate, or because the training and the signal isn't there, it's giving answers that are a little off-base. So the first and lowest hanging fruit is with a content library that's get created that can get 10, 50, 100 times broader that enterprise content pretty quickly. You're able to hit a much broader set of questions at a much higher rate. That's the first low-hanging fruit and kind of immediate impact. >> And is that helping them orchestrate, coordinate, collect data form this passionate ecosystem that's outside the four walls? Is that, essentially, what you're doing in that step? >> It essentially is. It is about companies having these ecosystems of these users, millions of hours of expertise in their head, millions of hours free time on their hands, and the ability to tap that in a systematic way. >> Wow. Shift gears a little bit, you are participating on a panel here at the event, talking about startups working with big companies and there's obviously a lot of challenges, starting with vendor viability issues, which is more kind of selling to big customers versus, necessarily, partnering with big companies. But what are some of the themes that you've seen that make that collaboration successful? Because, obviously, you've got different cultures, you got different kind of rates of the way things happen, you've got, beware the big company who eats you up in meetings all the time when you're a little start-up, they'll kill you accidentally just by scheduling so many meetings. What are some of the secrets of success that you're going to share here at the event? >> So we've got experience in that. Microsoft is a partner of ours, Microsoft Ventures is an investor. I think the single biggest key is an aligned vision and a complementary approach. The aligned vision where both the start-up and the partner are aiming for a similar point on the horizon. For example, the belief that automation can delight a very large set of customers by providing them a good, instant answer, but complementary approaches where the core skillsets of the companies round out each other and become less competitive. In this case, we've partnered with-- Microsoft is best in class AI platform and cognitive services, and we're able to tap and leverage that. We're also able to bring something unique to the equation by putting experts at the heart of it. So I think that architectural structure, in the first place, is a great example of kind of getting it right. >> Right. And your experience, that's been pretty easy to establish at the head-end of the process, so that you have kind of smooth sailing ahead? >> No, I don't think it's easy to establish at the head of the process, and I think that's where all of the good work and investment needs to happen. Upfront, on that kind of shared vision, and on that kind of complementary approach. And I think it is probably 20% building that together, but it's also 80% just finding it. The selection criteria by which a corporate partner picks a startup and the startup partner picks the corporate partner. I think just selecting right is the majority of the challenge, rather than trying to craft it kind of midstream. >> If it doesn't feel good at the beginning, it's probably not going to to work out. >> Right, it's about finding it. It's a little bit like the Venture analogy. Do they find great companies, or do they build great companies? Probably a little of both, but that finding that great company is a large part of the equation. >> Yeah, helps. So, Antony, finally get a last question. So, again, four successful startups. That does not happen very often with the same team. And look at your background, you're a psychology and philosophy major, not an engineer. So I'd just love to get kind of your thoughts about being a non-tech guy starting, running, and successfully exiting tech companies here in silicon valley. What's kind of the nice thing being from a slightly different background that you've used to really drive a number of successes? So I think the-- I think two things, I think one, coming from a non-tech and coming from a psych background has given us an appreciation of the human elements in these systems that tech alone can't do it. I'd say, personally, one of the impacts of being a non-tech founder in this valley is a heck of a lot of appreciation for what teams can do. And realizing that what teams can do is far more important than what individuals can do. And I say that because as a non-tech founder, there's literally nothing I could accomplish without being a part of a team. So that, I think, non-tech founders have that in spades. A harsh and frank realization that it's about team and they can't do anything on their own. >> Well, Antony, thanks for taking a minute out of your time. Good luck on the panel this afternoon and we'll keep an eye, watch the story unfold again. >> Yep, I appreciate it. Thanks very much. >> He's Antony, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Master at the Master Innovation Class at Xerox PARC, thanks for watching.

>> Live, from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering, Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington or, as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the Senior Director of Product Management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. >> Hi, how's it goin? >> Great. This is, been a very buzzy morning, for Jeff and I here on this side. Lot's of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so... >> Big growth in just a year. There's a, I think, Mark Mader, your CEO, shared some sats this morning. There are 1100 companies represented here customers. >> Correct. >> From twenty countries, there are more than fifty customer speakers, which is, I think there's no more validating voice, than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, was looking at, you guys are partners with, some of your competitors. One of things I wanted to understand is, where do you have integrations with technology, versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two, and how does is work >> Yeah. >> In a Smartsheet world. >> You know, I think, the integrations really are, where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So, maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or, I want to be able to connect to Google Drive, or 03 Secure, One Drive document, in those native stores. So, that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves, is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization, and I need data to flow between those tools. >> Like a Sales Force. >> Like a Sales Force, or a JEAR, or something like that. Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there, when something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet, or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems. Cause, those are the systems of record, that my company cares about. >> So, a connection is a much bigger step in integration? >> They're just different. >> Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interactions. So, things like Drive and Box and Dropbox, and Slack and Teams and, stuff like that. Or, the web content, which we just announced. We want to be able to embed a Youtube video in a dashboard. That's not integrations, it's not, there's no data flowing back and forth, it's just a link, right? >> Got it, thank you. >> Yeah. >> So, lot of customer's we have, I think fifty customer's presenting, which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's, (laughs), >> Yeah. >> Awfully large. So, just some of the all chatter here. You've been here for a couple of day now, you guys had some early training yesterday. What is some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customer's. Kind of, what's the buzz on some of the new offerings, and what are you hearing, amongst the constituent here? >> I mean, it's always, you know, this is only our second year. But the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away. By just the big list of things that we shipped, this week. And, as I was reflecting, like, I don't remember doing all that much. But then, when you see it all on one big slide, with everything listed out, it's incredible. So, it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product... >> Yes. >> Session, and we're really excited to have shipped, the multi-assign to feature, which has been our number one customer request for a while. But, it's not a, game-changing feature. Whereas, I think some of the Automation Rules ,and Updates there, and Workflow Builder, are really. People are going to go back and it's going to to change the way that they work. And, so people are really excited about that. But, really excited about Dynamic View. And being able to really, taylor the information that is shared across their organization. >> The word collaboration, like symbionic or bi-directional collaboration, popped into my mind. When Gene Pharaoh, your SVP of Product, who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience. In that, number of times, you mentioned, the audience broke into applause. And, it probably feels pretty good. Like, yes, we're listening to you, we're doing this. Enabling, them to have technology that allows them to collaborate with and amongst teams and functions within an organization. But, you're also taking their feedback, directly and collaborating with customer's, to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had, Margo Visitacion on from Forrester. And she was talking about the collaborative work management CW as an emerging market. With respect to collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I can be a licensed user, and share it with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for Smartsheet? >> Well, you know, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative where you can comment on them. Google Doc, and that's great. But, I think where Smaresheet really excels, is really in this free collaborator model. That's not bounded by your particular organization or your team. And it really allows you to create, to spread, and create connections across customer's and vendors and other orgs within your team. And, this is where you're starting to see this these sort of step function changes in these organizations. Where, you know, you see this Office Depot example. And, he talks about, you know, taking a workflow in their organization they, going from, you know, four to six weeks, down to twenty-four hours. And, enabling people who are putting in budget request, to take action on that request, the next day. And, those are the kinds of things, that are going to fundamentally change those businesses. And so, that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful. You can't get that kind of compression in time. Unless, you can really span those traditional business hours. >> So Robin, one of the great things that happens always is, with tech companies is the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important. You get an ecosystem, lot of stuff going on, but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? >> It's always, >> Correct >> Application centric, right. I got a problem, I've got to fix it. At the same time, you guys, you do have a platform. Meaning, you can go across a lot of different applications. So, when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform. Priority, in terms of more of, kind of a general purpose underly, versus and app priority, like you said, multi, how do you call... >> Multi-assignment. Yeah. >> Multi-assignment, you assign two people to the (laughs). To the no correct product management protocol, but everybody wants it, cause it's the real world. How do you kind of prioritize that? How do yo kind of look at the world when you're deciding, what are you going to roll out next, what are you going to roll out next, ware are you going to roll out next? >> It starts and ends with having conversations with real people. We've taken lots of data and we have enhancement request and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning, actually, was less than 3% of all answered request in the last couple of years. But, it's our number one request. And so, it sort of. >> Oh, Wait, wait wait. So it was less than 3%. >> Of all enhancement request. >> But it was number one? >> But it's our number one. >> So you've got a giant laundry list. >> Giant laundry list of things, right. So, we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually, have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers, and dedicated user experience. People that are going out, we're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them and we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases. Because, there're so many different ways people use the product. There not enough people asking for one thing. >> Right. >> They're all asking for slightly different things. So, we really have to dig in and have a real, qualitative conversation with them. To understand, and bring that back and say okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves, all of these problems in a compelling way. >> Well, it's definitely more than 3% of the people cheer. When, when that. (laughs) >> Yes. >> When the feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other, kind of (mumbles), that you've got to wrestle with is, kind of a low code, no code, we want to be for everybody, yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So, again, that's kind of a delicate, balancing act as well. Cause, you want to let everyone have access to be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it, pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those. >> Well we... >> Priorities. >> We just try to hide as much of that as possible. You know, Smartsheets always been this tool, where it's like, it sort of looks like a spreadsheet, and it sort of looks like project management. But it's got this underlying flexibility built into it. We don't force you to, you know, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there. If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD. Whereas, a lot of purpose built applications, their like, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format, or it doesn't work. We've always had this, sort of, flexibility and complexity trade off. The trade off is, if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt Chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more (mumbles) than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so, we've always sort of danced this line, with making the tool super flexible and assume the users know what they're doing. When they're interacting withhe tool we assume they an intention and they're trinna do something. And, we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that, sort of, plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do, is like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers. And we put stuff out there, well in advance in releasing it. In a situation like this, we announced a bunch a capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And, I think that's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board, than any feature I've seen at this company. But, it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever build, as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right, by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sit in a room and go, oh, we know that perfect solution to workflow management. >> Right. >> Most of our customer's don't even necessarily, use the term workflow. >> And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say. It says words and actions. You know? And little things with words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement. It's when this happens, do this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this. To try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. >> Right. >> You can't avoid it, but you know. >> So, in hiding it, the last thing which your going to do, going forward is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in the field, is for you to leverage that under the covers. To hide. >> Absolutely. >> The nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer. To help suggest the right path. So, that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap. Integrating those types of capabilities, underneath the covers. >> Yeah and, there's been a lot of, we've have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot Company back in January. And, that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. We feel that we have a lot of really good information. But, at the same time, there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI. And, the reality is, that relies on huge data sets. And it relies on a lot of analysis. And that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customer's data, security data privacy very seriously. And we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens, then say a consumer product. That's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data. And you don't really have a lot of recourse, other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it. But we want to enable you, to turn these types of features on. So, we need to look at more of like an off-end model, where a customer can say oh, if I'm a big enterprise user at Smartsheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users, knowing that that information is going to stay in our, is going to comply with our data governance, and our data privacy rules. That our IT team puts forward. >> So the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, Hiding it, (mumbles). I'm curious, when you walk into a customer. Cause here we are in Bellevue, we're not in Vegas, But, we're neighors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced Teams, about eighteen months, or so, ago. You partner with both, you compete, but you, also, you're competing with Teams. When you walk into a customer and an enterprise, likely has a mixture of, tons of different software appications, right. But they probably have, 360, Office 365, Para Bi, Excel... Why would a customer, who has such a familiarity with, say a Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus, well we'll just extend our Microsoft expertese and bring in something like Teams? >> Yeah. >> I'm just curious, what...You've seen in that? >> Well, you know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of, orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And, there's a lot of tools out there where, you're having conversations and tools out there where you're creating content, and there's not a lot of tools out there, that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together. In an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of, Gene will, you'll sometimes here hims say, use this term, shared fabric. The Smartsheet, really provides this shared fabric, that ties a bunch of these tool together. And we really, we want to partner with all these people, because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You talk to some customer, they're like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of ten apps. And, you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later, then they'll be like, I love Smartsheet, it allows me to work with all the tools that I've already got. Very different, and they just have to different coperate goals and objectives there. And so, I think that the reason people like Smartsheet, is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about things. It's going to say look, oh, if you want to use, if you want to us Teams for your communications vehicle, and One Drive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed a PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet, great. We want that to be the case. We do that internally, right, we use all those. If you look at us internally, we're just like every other mordern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using. And it's different from team to team and department to department. So, it's all about just embracing the reality, that as modern business and modern application, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. >> So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1100 companies represented here, at this event. 2,000 people or so, fifty plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind, whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> Yeah, no. I'm trinna think of a good. I don't know that I have a good standout example. I think that we hear little tidbits of that from everyone. And it's not, it's a very common theme. So, I don't know that. It's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, I hear things, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this. Or, I'm going to now pull, integrate with this tool because, you've added this. So, you sort of take some and give some, on the same sentence almost. >> Yeah. You can do both. >> Yeah. >> Well Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time. We're excited to be here. This is our first Smartsheet event. And we have some customers coming up, so looking forward to hearing some more these cases in action. >> Great, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smartsheet Engage, in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back, with our next guest. (tech music) (tech music) (tech music)