(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme, this showcase is MarTech, the emerging cloud scale customer experiences. Season two of episode three, the ongoing series covering the startups, the hot startups, talking about analytics, data, all things MarTech. I'm your host, John Furrier, here joined by Christian Wiklund, founder and CEO of unitQ here, talk about harnessing the power of user feedback to empower marketing. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. Happy to be here. >> In these new shifts in the market, when you got cloud scale, open source software is completely changing the software business. We know that. There's no longer a software category. It's cloud, integration, data. That's the new normal. That's the new category, right? So as companies are building their products, and want to do a good job, it used to be, you send out surveys, you try to get the product market fit. And if you were smart, you got it right the third, fourth, 10th time. If you were lucky, like some companies, you get it right the first time. But the holy grail is to get it right the first time. And now, this new data acquisition opportunities that you guys in the middle of that can tap customers or prospects or end users to get data before things are shipped, or built, or to iterate on products. This is the customer feedback loop or data, voice of the customer journey. It's a gold mine. And it's you guys, it's your secret weapon. Take us through what this is about now. I mean, it's not just surveys. What's different? >> So yeah, if we go back to why are we building unitQ? Which is we want to build a quality company. Which is basically, how do we enable other companies to build higher quality experiences by tapping into all of the existing data assets? And the one we are in particularly excited about is user feedback. So me and my co-founder, Nik, and we're doing now the second company together. We spent 14 years. So we're like an old married couple. We accept each other, and we don't fight anymore, which is great. We did a consumer company called Skout, which was sold five years ago. And Skout was kind of early in the whole mobile first. I guess, we were actually mobile first company. And when we launched this one, we immediately had the entire world as our marketplace, right? Like any modern company. We launch a product, we have support for many languages. It's multiple platforms. We have Android, iOS, web, big screens, small screens, and that brings some complexities as it relates to staying on top of the quality of the experience because how do I test everything? >> John: Yeah. >> Pre-production. How do I make sure that our Polish Android users are having a good day? And we found at Skout, personally, like I could discover million dollar bugs by just drinking coffee and reading feedback. And we're like, "Well, there's got to be a better way to actually harness the end user feedback. That they are leaving in so many different places." So, you know what, what unitQ does is that we basically aggregate all different sources of user feedback, which can be app store reviews, Reddit posts, Tweets, comments on your Facebook ads. It can be better Business Bureau Reports. We don't like to get to many of those, of course. But really, anything on the public domain that mentions or refers to your product, we want to ingest that data in this machine, and then all the private sources. So you probably have a support system deployed, a Zendesk, or an Intercom. You might have a chatbot like an Ada, or and so forth. And your end user is going to leave a lot of feedback there as well. So we take all of these channels, plug it into the machine, and then we're able to take this qualitative data. Which and I actually think like, when an end user leaves a piece of feedback, it's an act of love. They took time out of the day, and they're going to tell you, "Hey, this is not working for me," or, "Hey, this is working for me," and they're giving you feedback. But how do we package these very messy, multi-channel, multiple languages, all over the place data? How can we distill it into something that's quantifiable? Because I want to be able to monitor these different signals. So I want to turn user feedback into time series. 'Cause with time series, I can now treat this the same way as Datadog treats machine logs. I want to be able to see anomalies, and I want to know when something breaks. So what we do here is that we break down your data in something called quality monitors, which is basically machine learning models that can aggregate the same type of feedback data in this very fine grained and discrete buckets. And we deploy up to a thousand of these quality monitors per product. And so we can get down to the root cause. Let's say, passive reset link is not working. And it's in that root cause, the granularity that we see that companies take action on the data. And I think historically, there has been like the workflow between marketing and support, and engineering and product has been a bit broken. They've been siloed from a data perspective. They've been siloed from a workflow perspective, where support will get a bunch of tickets around some issue in production. And they're trained to copy and paste some examples, and throw it over the wall, file a Jira ticket, and then they don't know what happens. So what we see with the platform we built is that these teams are able to rally around the single source of troop or like, yes, passive recent link seems to have broken. This is not a user error. It's not a fix later, or I can't reproduce. We're looking at the data, and yes, something broke. We need to fix it. >> I mean, the data silos a huge issue. Different channels, omnichannel. Now, there's more and more channels that people are talking in. So that's huge. I want to get to that. But also, you said that it's a labor of love to leave a comment or a feedback. But also, I remember from my early days, breaking into the business at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, where I worked. People who complain are the most loyal customers, if you service them. So it's complaints. >> Christian: Yeah. >> It's leaving feedback. And then, there's also reading between the lines with app errors or potentially what's going on under the covers that people may not be complaining about, but they're leaving maybe gesture data or some sort of digital trail. >> Yeah. >> So this is the confluence of the multitude of data sources. And then you got the siloed locations. >> Siloed locations. >> It's complicated problem. >> It's very complicated. And when you think about, so I started, I came to Bay Area in 2005. My dream was to be a quant analyst on Wall Street, and I ended up in QA at VMware. So I started at VMware in Palo Alto, and didn't have a driver's license. I had to bike around, which was super exciting. And we were shipping box software, right? This was literally a box with a DVD that's been burned, and if that DVD had bugs in it, guess what it'll be very costly to then have to ship out, and everything. So I love the VMware example because the test cycles were long and brutal. It was like a six month deal to get through all these different cases, and they couldn't be any bugs. But then as the industry moved into the cloud, CI/CD, ship at will. And if you look at the modern company, you'll have at least 20 plus integrations into your product. Analytics, add that's the case, authentication, that's the case, and so forth. And these integrations, they morph, and they break. And you have connectivity issues. Is your product working as well on Caltrain, when you're driving up and down, versus wifi? You have language specific bugs that happen. Android is also quite a fragmented market. The binary may not perform as well on that device, or is that device. So how do we make sure that we test everything before we ship? The answer is, we can't. There's no company today that can test everything before the ship. In particular, in consumer. And the epiphany we had at our last company, Skout, was that, "Hey, wait a minute. The end user, they're testing every configuration." They're sitting on the latest device, the oldest device. They're sitting on Japanese language, on Swedish language. >> John: Yeah. >> They are in different code paths because our product executed differently, depending on if you were a paid user, or a freemium user, or if you were certain demographical data. There's so many ways that you would have to test. And PagerDuty actually had a study they came out with recently, where they said 51% of all end user impacting issues are discovered first by the end user, when they serve with a bunch of customers. And again, like the cool part is, they will tell you what's not working. So now, how do we tap into that? >> Yeah. >> So what I'd like to say is, "Hey, your end user is like your ultimate test group, and unitQ is the layer that converts them into your extended test team." Now, the signals they're producing, it's making it through to the different teams in the organization. >> I think that's the script that you guys are flipping. If I could just interject. Because to me, when I hear you talking, I hear, "Okay, you're letting the customers be an input into the product development process." And there's many different pipelines of that development. And that could be whether you're iterating, or geography, releases, all kinds of different pipelines to get to the market. But in the old days, it was like just customer satisfaction. Complain in a call center. >> Christian: Yeah. >> Or I'm complaining, how do I get support? Nothing made itself into the product improvement, except for slow moving, waterfall-based processes. And then, maybe six months later, a small tweak could be improved. >> Yes. >> Here, you're taking direct input from collective intelligence. Okay. >> Is that have input and on timing is very important here, right? So how do you know if the product is working as it should in all these different flavors and configurations right now? How do you know if it's working well? And how do you know if you're improving or not improving over time? And I think the industry, what can we look at, as far as when it relates to quality? So I can look at star ratings, right? So what's the star rating in the app store? Well, star ratings, that's an average over time. So that's something that you may have a lot of issues in production today, and you're going to get dinged on star ratings over the next few months. And then, it brings down the score. NPS is another one, where we're not going to run NPS surveys every day. We're going to run it once a quarter, maybe once a month, if we're really, really aggressive. That's also a snapshot in time. And we need to have the finger on the pulse of product quality today. I need to know if this release is good or not good. I need to know if anything broke. And I think that real time aspect, what we see as stuff sort of bubbles up the stack, and not into production, we see up to a 50% reduction in time to fix these end user impacting issues. And I think, we also need to appreciate when someone takes time out of the day to write an app review, or email support, or write that Reddit post, it's pretty serious. It's not going to be like, "Oh, I don't like the shade of blue on this button." It's going to be something like, "I got double billed," or "Hey, someone took over my account," or, "I can't reset my password anymore. The CAPTCHA, I'm solving it, but I can't get through to the next phase." And we see a lot of these trajectory impacting bugs and quality issues in these work, these flows in the product that you're not testing every day. So if you work at Snapchat, your employees probably going to use Snapchat every day. Are they going to sign up every day? No. Are they going to do passive reset every day? No. And these things are very hard to instrument, lower in the stack. >> Yeah, I think this is, and again, back to these big problems. It's smoke before fire, and you're essentially seeing it early with your process. Can you give an example of how this new focus or new mindset of user feedback data can help customers increase their experience? Can you give some examples, 'cause folks watching and be like, "Okay, I love this value. Sell me on this idea, I'm sold. Okay, I want to tap into my prospects, and my customers, my end users to help me improve my product." 'Cause again, we can measure everything now with data. >> Yeah. We can measure everything. we can even measure quality these days. So when we started this company, I went out to talk to a bunch of friends, who are entrepreneurs, and VCs, and board members, and I asked them this very simple question. So in your board meetings, or on all hands, how do you talk about quality of the product? Do you have a metric? And everyone said, no. Okay. So are you data driven company? Yes, we're very data driven. >> John: Yeah. Go data driven. >> But you're not really sure if quality, how do you compare against competition? Are you doing as good as them, worse, better? Are you improving over time, and how do you measure it? And they're like, "Well, it's kind of like a blind spot of the company." And then you ask, "Well, do you think quality of experience is important?" And they say, "Yeah." "Well, why?" "Well, top of fund and growth. Higher quality products going to spread faster organically, we're going to make better store ratings. We're going to have the storefronts going to look better." And of course, more importantly, they said the different conversion cycles in the product box itself. That if you have bugs and friction, or an interface that's hard to use, then the inputs, the signups, it's not going to convert as well. So you're going to get dinged on retention, engagement, conversion to paid, and so forth. And that's what we've seen with the companies we work with. It is that poor quality acts as a filter function for the entire business, if you're a product led company. So if you think about product led company, where the product is really the centerpiece. And if it performs really, really well, then it allows you to hire more engineers, you can spend more on marketing. Everything is fed by this product at them in the middle, and then quality can make that thing perform worse or better. And we developed a metric actually called the unitQ Score. So if you go to our website, unitq.com, we have indexed the 5,000 largest apps in the world. And we're able to then, on a daily basis, update the score. Because the score is not something you do once a month or once a quarter. It's something that changes continuously. So now, you can get a score between zero and 100. If you get the score 100, that means that our AI doesn't find any quality issues reported in that data set. And if your score is 90, that means that 10% will be a quality issue. So now you can do a lot of fun stuff. You can start benchmarking against competition. So you can see, "Well, I'm Spotify. How do I rank against Deezer, or SoundCloud, or others in my space?" And what we've seen is that as the score goes up, we see this real big impact on KPI, such as conversion, organic growth, retention, ultimately, revenue, right? And so that was very satisfying for us, when we launched it. quality actually still really, really matters. >> Yeah. >> And I think we all agree at test, but how do we make a science out of it? And that's so what we've done. And when we were very lucky early on to get some incredible brands that we work with. So Pinterest is a big customer of ours. We have Spotify. We just signed new bank, Chime. So like we even signed BetterHelp recently, and the world's largest Bible app. So when you look at the types of businesses that we work with, it's truly a universal, very broad field, where if you have a digital exhaust or feedback, I can guarantee you, there are insights in there that are being neglected. >> John: So Chris, I got to. >> So these manual workflows. Yeah, please go ahead. >> I got to ask you, because this is a really great example of this new shift, right? The new shift of leveraging data, flipping the script. Everything's flipping the script here, right? >> Yeah. >> So you're talking about, what the value proposition is? "Hey, board example's a good one. How do you measure quality? There's no KPI for that." So it's almost category creating in its own way. In that, this net new things, it's okay to be new, it's just new. So the question is, if I'm a customer, I buy it. I can see my product teams engaging with this. I can see how it can changes my marketing, and customer experience teams. How do I operationalize this? Okay. So what do I do? So do I reorganize my marketing team? So take me through the impact to the customer that you're seeing. What are they resonating towards? Obviously, getting that data is key, and that's holy gray, we all know that. But what do I got to do to change my environment? What's my operationalization piece of it? >> Yeah, and that's one of the coolest parts I think, and that is, let's start with your user base. We're not going to ask your users to ask your users to do something differently. They're already producing this data every day. They are tweeting about it. They're putting in app produce. They're emailing support. They're engaging with your support chatbot. They're already doing it. And every day that you're not leveraging that data, the data that was produced today is less valuable tomorrow. And in 30 days, I would argue, it's probably useless. >> John: Unless it's same guy commenting. >> Yeah. (Christian and John laughing) The first, we need to make everyone understand. Well, yeah, the data is there, and we don't need to do anything differently with the end user. And then, what we do is we ask the customer to tell us, "Where should we listen in the public domain? So do you want the Reddit post, the Trustpilot? What channels should we listen to?" And then, our machine basically starts ingesting that data. So we have integration with all these different sites. And then, to get access to private data, it'll be, if you're on Zendesk, you have to issue a Zendesk token, right? So you don't need any engineering hours, except your IT person will have to grant us access to the data source. And then, when we go live. We basically build up this taxonomy with the customers. So we don't we don't want to try and impose our view of the world, of how do you describe the product with these buckets, these quality monitors? So we work with the company to then build out this taxonomy. So it's almost like a bespoke solution that we can bootstrap with previous work we've done, where you don't have these very, very fine buckets of where stuff could go wrong. And then what we do is there are different ways to hook this into the workflow. So one is just to use our products. It's a SaaS product as anything else. So you log in, and you can then get this overview of how is quality trending in different markets, on different platforms, different languages, and what is impacting them? What is driving this unitQ Score that's not good enough? And all of these different signals, we can then hook into Jira for instance. We have a Jira integration. We have a PagerDuty integration. We can wake up engineers if certain things break. We also tag tickets in your support system, which is actually quite cool. Where, let's say, you have 200 people, who wrote into support, saying, "I got double billed on Android." It turns out, there are some bugs that double billed them. Well, now we can tag all of these users in Zendesk, and then the support team can then reach out to that segment of users and say, "Hey, we heard that you had this bug with double billing. We're so sorry. We're working on it." And then when we push fix, we can then email the same group again, and maybe give them a little gift card or something, for the thank you. So you can have, even big companies can have that small company experience. So, so it's groups that use us, like at Pinterest, we have 800 accounts. So it's really through marketing has vested interest because they want to know what is impacting the end user. Because brand and product, the lines are basically gone, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So if the product is not working, then my spend into this machine is going to be less efficient. The reputation of our company is going to be worse. And the challenge for marketers before unitQ was, how do I engage with engineering and product? I'm dealing with anecdotal data, and my own experience of like, "Hey, I've never seen these type of complaints before. I think something is going on." >> John: Yeah. >> And then engineering will be like, "Ah, you know, well, I have 5,000 bugs in Jira. Why does this one matter? When did it start? Is this a growing issue?" >> John: You have to replicate the problem, right? >> Replicate it then. >> And then it goes on and on and on. >> And a lot of times, reproducing bugs, it's really hard because it works on my device. Because you don't sit on that device that it happened on. >> Yup. >> So now, when marketing can come with indisputable data, and say, "Hey, something broke here." And we see the same with support. Product engineering, of course, for them, we talk about, "Hey, listen, you you've invested a lot in observability of your stack, haven't you?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "So you have a Datadog in the bottom?" "Absolutely." "And you have an APP D on the client?" "Absolutely." "Well, what about the last mile? How the product manifests itself? Shouldn't you monitor that as well using machines?" They're like, "Yeah, that'd be really cool." (John laughs) And we see this. There's no way to instrument everything, lowering the stack to capture these bugs that leak out. So it resonates really well there. And even for the engineers who's going to fix it. >> Yeah. >> I call it like empathy data. >> Yup. >> Where I get assigned a bug to fix. Well, now, I can read all the feedback. I can actually see, and I can see the feedback coming in. >> Yeah. >> Oh, there's users out there, suffering from this bug. And then when I fix it and I deploy the fix, and I see the trend go down to zero, and then I can celebrate it. So that whole feedback loop is (indistinct). >> And that's real time. It's usually missed too. This is the power of user feedback. You guys got a great product, unitQ. Great to have you on. Founder and CEO, Christian Wiklund. Thanks for coming on and sharing, and showcase. >> Thank you, John. For the last 30 seconds, the minute we have left, put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking for? Give a quick pitch for the company, real quick, for the folks out there. Looking for more people, funding status, number of employees. Give a quick plug. >> Yes. So we raised our A Round from Google, and then we raised our B from Excel that we closed late last year. So we're not raising money. We are hiring across go-to-markets, engineering. And we love to work with people, who are passionate about quality and data. We're always, of course, looking for customers, who are interested in upping their game. And hey, listen, competing with features is really hard because you can copy features very quickly. Competing with content. Content is commodity. You're going to get the same movies more or less on all these different providers. And competing on price, we're not willing to do. You're going to pay 10 bucks a month for music. So how do you compete today? And if your competitor has a better fine tuned piano than your competitor will have better efficiencies, and they're going to retain customers and users better. And you don't want to lose on quality because it is actually a deterministic and fixable problem. So yeah, come talk to us if you want to up the game there. >> Great stuff. The iteration lean startup model, some say took craft out of building the product. But this is now bringing the craftsmanship into the product cycle, when you can get that data from customers and users. >> Yeah. >> Who are going to be happy that you fixed it, that you're listening. >> Yeah. >> And that the product got better. So it's a flywheel of loyalty, quality, brand, all off you can figure it out. It's the holy grail. >> I think it is. It's a gold mine. And every day you're not leveraging this assets, your use of feedback that's there, is a missed opportunity. >> Christian, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations to you and your startup. You guys back together. The band is back together, up into the right, doing well. >> Yeah. We we'll check in with you later. Thanks for coming on this showcase. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Appreciate it very much. >> Okay. AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode three, the ongoing series. This one's about MarTech, cloud experiences are scaling. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at the ARIA in Las Vegas you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022 live in person, but there's a big hybrid event going on. Close to 40,000 people watching online. This is the CEO segment. The newly minted CEO Anand Eswaran is here. And it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on. First time on theCUBE. >> Yeah, first time on theCUBE, excited to be here. Newly minted, those words, I haven't heard those for a long time. But thank you for the warm introduction, Dave. >> So why Veeam? What did you see that attracted you to Veeam? You have a great career, awesome resume. Why Veeam? >> A lot of different things. You know, it started with when I spent a good bit of time... I spent months with, you know, Insight, with Bill Largent who is now the chair of the board. And for me a few things, one, it started with the company culture. I absolutely loved... I spent time with our engineering team that it's an innovation-focused culture. It's an engineering-focused culture, which is so critical to any software company. And so that was the first place. And I spent a good bit of time with customers, reading, research, you know, brilliant products, always innovating. You know, even though it's a category you would think is fairly mature. I mean, when Veeam for example, did instant recovery. I mean, that was extreme innovation. And so that was the first thing which was appealing. The second thing was, you know, yes, we've reached a billion, but it still has that, you know, feel of a start up. It still has that feel of a... Jeff Bezos says this best, "A day one culture." Which is super critical, you know, we scale but you don't want to lose your soul and what made you special in the first place. And then you come down to the rest of the stuff, it's an execution machine. You know, it's an absolutely interesting category, especially in the day and the world we live in right now. You know, the proliferation of bad actors, security, backup, recovery, you know, everything you... Ransomware is starting to become you know, a meaningful threat to every company. So many different things coming together. This category is an interesting place. But that's not all, I feel that we are going to see this category evolve and shape very differently. You're going to see adjacencies coming and you're going to see in a couple of years or three years you're not going to just look at this and say, "Hey, it's backup and recovery." And so it's an opportunity to shape what is going to be a very important inflection point in this whole space. So a whole bunch of things. Excited about it. >> So flip question, why Anand? What did Insight see and the board see? What do you see as your key skills that they wanted here? Go after that opportunity- >> You should also get insight on this man. And you should ask them this question. I know Peter and Sokolov (laughs) >> So, you know, I don't know... I'll tell you where I think there's relevant experience is if I look at the future of Veeam. I think the first thing is we've got to think through what the next evolution of Veeam is. You know, there's a ton of work to do even in the path we are on, on data protection. And the team is absolutely brilliant at that. But how do you start to think ahead? How do you think about data management? How do you think about, you know, where are the adjacencies and how does it... How do you shape and reshape the category? You know, and I have some experiences in that. As I look at growth, Veeam has done a phenomenal job you know, 35,000 partners, an execution machine. I mean, just last year we grew ARR, you know, 27% we are sustaining that growth. But as I look ahead, you know there's huge opportunities to further accelerate our share in the enterprise to actually go work with creating multiple layers of partnerships beyond the very successful partnerships we already have. You know, how do you start to get GSIs in the mix? How do you start to get MSPs in the mix? How do you start to actually get to being a core part of the portfolio and platform of our primary storage partners, HPE, Pure Storage and so on. So reinvigorating and creating a multidimensional partnership strategy is key as well. And then just my experience in, you know I ran the enterprise for Microsoft and so those sort of experiences sort of are very relevant to our next step of the journey as well. And finally, you know I think the one thing which matters most for me and yeah, you realize... Again, I think we've forgotten what it means to have a microphone on. But culture, you know, I spent a lot of time in every company I've worked in, in contributing to the culture of what shapes and you know how do you create a purpose-led company and how do you get on that path? Which is a very, very important conversation inside Veeam. you know, and we already do that... You know, there's a huge focus on purpose. There's a huge focus on diversity. There's a huge focus on inclusion, but you know, the cultural aspect of Veeam attracted me to it. And I think my work and my passion for it attracted me to Veeam as well. So just a few of those things. >> Yeah, you speak from the heart, you can sense that. Dave and I were talking with Zias about platform versus product. Now you've got some experience with platforms, obviously, Microsoft, you know the amazing platform. RingCentral Zias brought up. And then I brought up HP, which actually never could figure out its software platform. So you've seen some successes. You've seen some, you know, couldn't ever get there. Do you see Veeam as a platform company? >> You know, the way I look at it is this. I mean, I may actually not answer your question directly but I'll answer the question. >> Dave: Okay. >> Which is, if you look at the biggest successes in the industry, call it Microsoft, Adobe now- >> Dave: Sure. >> Salesforce, eventually the path from a high growth startup to scale is platform and partners. That is the key. >> Dave: Ecosystem- >> So yeah. Platform and the ecosystem. So it all comes together. And so, yes, I mean, I think we already do that. I mean, we have a singular platform today for the multiple workloads we protect from, you know physical to cloud, to Kubernetes to the hybrid architectures the ability to actually, you know restore your data into any cloud, you know, back up from AWS restore into Azure or a physical data center. So we already have a robust platform in place but the scale or the growth from where we are a billion to the next set of milestones 2, 3, 5, 10 is going to be an absolute maturity and amp of platform partnerships ecosystem. >> That's a high wire act. When you talk about platform and scaling, you know, think about moving forward, when you have pressure to grow, often the easiest thing to grow is to acquire and add adjacencies that might not be as core to your core value proposition as they could be. How do you navigate that as you move forward in a world where... Look, Veeam was founded in an age when it was all about meantime between failure, recovery point, recovery time objectives. Now the big concern is malicious actors. So Veeam has been able to navigate that transition very well so far, but how do you do that? How do you balance that moving forward? This idea of platform is a desirous state to be in but you don't want to be a fake platform where you just glue a bunch of things on. >> It all comes down to thinking through where we see the world going from this point in time. How do you see technology evolving? How do you see the outside's, you know influences evolving. And when I say influences, it's, you know, just a euphemism for all the bad actors we expect to see getting even more active. So, you know, the way I think about it is either platform or acquisitions are not things you do piecemeal or point in time. It all needs to accrue to a larger strategy of how you create the ability for all of your customers to own protect, secure, you know their data and eventually create intelligence from it so that they can actually be proactive about it. So that, you know, if that's the thing, you know, our ambition is starting to become how do we sort of secure the world's data and help companies create intelligence from it so they can be proactive about it? You know, everything else sort of accrues from there the platform we evolve from the platform we already have, you know, stems from it. The acquisitions we may do, will do evolves from it. It all are... You know, its pieces coming together to the overall puzzle framework we've already created. >> Yeah. I have so many questions for you. And I want to get into a little bit of your philosophy, but before we do it, I want touch on the TAM a little bit more. You mentioned in the analyst discussion this morning that the market's fragmented. A lot of people think, "Oh, backup, storage, we'll just put it together. You know, Dell now or EMC brought it all together." But they're just dramatically different markets. You're seeing some of your competitors. One in particular is now kind of pivoting to security. It's an adjacency, but it's, yeah, I'm not sure you want to walk into that mess but it's clearly part of a data protection strategy. And you said you want your... My words, legacy to be a significant increase in market share, dominant position in the market. Even if it's number two, whatever, number one's nice, great. But much larger share than what is your 10, 12% today. How do you think about the TAM? It's so undercounted, I think. You know, we used to look at purpose built backup appliances, "Oh, it's a couple billion dollar market and it's a ceiling there." It reminds me of service management with ServiceNow. It's virtually unlimited TAM because it's data. How do you look at the TAM? >> How much time do you have? >> I know, I got so many questions- >> But I'll tell you this, right? You got to piece this question very carefully because I'll look at it in a variety of different ways. Number one, if you do nothing, if you just do nothing. I mean, today, as I shared in IDCs latest report last week we were joined number one, you know, for the first time we actually got- >> Dave: Yeah. Congratulations. That's a big milestone. >> That's huge, that's exciting. >> Dave: And that's revenue by the way. That's not licenses- >> Yeah. That's in share. But the thing is this, right? If, if you look at share, we are at 12%, you know as is the... You know, so 12% is not representative of how I think about number one. When you look at a market with a clear winner you expect to see 40 to 60% market share. So doing nothing is an opportunity to actually continue the path we are on which is taking share from every one of the top five significantly and growing as fast as we are. I mean, we are going to be on a path to, you know doubling our market share in the next two to three years. So there's share to gain doing nothing. And this is... You know what? This is the first and the most simplest aspect of TAM. Now layer in other aspects of TAM but just still stay in data protection. You know, talk about every single SaaS workload coming on. I mean, I shared 270 million Teams' users right now monthly actives. The TAM, if you were able to secure every one of those Teams' users and protect the data, I mean that's close to 6 or $7 billion. It's not factored in into any of the TAM numbers you see right now. Gartner talked about 13. You know, others talked about TAM being 40. I mean, but SaaS workloads, you know each of them are not factored in as much as it could be right now. So, you know, we are bringing in Salesforce, Microsoft 365. We secure 11 million paid users with Microsoft 365 backup. And so add all of them on, execute. We see a path to taking share and getting from here 12 to 25 to 40 and being an outsize number one. And then you'd come down to what you said, which is how do you think about adjacencies? Now, at Veeam, yeah, messaging is important, but unlike some of the competitors, we don't use words frivolously. If we say something, data protection, modern data protection, ransomware attacks, we mean it. And there's product truth behind it. We do not use frivolous security words to create a message and get attention and have no product truth behind it. That's where we are. We expect to see adjacencies come up. We expect Veeam to beyond execution and bringing in more SaaS workloads to look at the next layer of data management. We expect us to create partnerships which allow us to go do that meaningfully. And as time goes, you should expect us to be the prime influencer in reshaping this category with other adjacencies coming in. But we talk about it and there's product truth behind it. >> I wanted to get into your philosophy of management a little bit. I went to your LinkedIn recently and I loved the little graphic that you had. But I know a lot of people put up a picture of a pretty lake or mountains. I got theCUBE up there. You had a number of items. I wonder if I could read. You had a rocket ship, which was very cool. You had teamwork, you had innovation. I wrote down ABC, always be closing, Alec Baldwin. But everybody sells, I think is what it was and then keep it simple. >> Anand: Yep. >> I really like that. I mean, people going to... If they're going to evaluate Veeam they're going to go to your LinkedIn page. So tell us where that came from what your philosophy is as a manager. >> Yeah, no. So there's a few things and this is the philosophies which I put on is a meld of what I believe in and what Veeam believes in and has believed in for a long time which is life starts with a customer. For us, everything starts with a customer. You know, even the product creation philosophy 15 years back was, "Hey let's not just create some check marks and create a feature because someone, you know thought it's an important check mark to have." What is the value it creates for the customer? And is it different enough, unique enough, where, you know, it actually creates a moment where the customer sees the value impact their core business. That's where it all starts for us at Veeam. And then everything we do relates back to, "Is this moving the ball enough for our customers and for our partners and for our developers and users?" Everything comes back to there. Are we easy enough to do business with? You know, are we keeping it simple? Simple to use. A product should be really simple. It should be brain dead simple, you know are our processes such that, you know it's easy for us to connect with our partners, connect with our customers, connect with our users, you know it all comes back to keeping it really simple. And then, you know, I come down to a set of personal philosophies, which matters as well, which is, you know, how do we make sure that, you know, we used to say everyone is in sales, but we got to evolve it. Everyone is in customer success because we all know that it's not just the first sale which matters which was true 15 years back, what matters today is, yeah, the sale matters, everybody is there to sell. But what matters even more is the whole company rallies behind the customer's success at every step along the way. Because when you do that, you don't need to sell. You know, you get in through BBR and then we have a world of workloads to actually create value for the customer with, from, you know Microsoft 365 backup or, you know soon to come Salesforce backup cost. And we see that on net retention or, you know... And it's manifested in numbers, right? It's manifested in growth. It's manifested in net retention and it's manifested in NPS. I mean, Dave, I'm hugely excited about that, man. NPS of 80 where we are. I mean, you guys have been around for quite a bit. I mean, that's huge numbers. I mean, that's- >> Apple's- >> Apple was 76 or 77. And so eventually that is what matters more for me because it's... Share is important. And I'm excited about, you know, IDC saying, "You're joint number one." Hugely important, but that is a consequence. Growth is important. 25% ARR growth in Q1, super important but that is a consequence. What really matters is value for your customers. And the number one metric I look at is NPS, you know and NPS at 80, all the other things start to happen pair it with the engineering culture the innovation culture we have, long roadmap ahead. >> Veeam has made some... What appear to be, from the outside anyway, pretty successful acquisitions. Kasten is an obvious one. I remember it wasn't the first time I met Ratmir. It was maybe the third or fourth time we were at like a late night, Peter Bell party this Highland Capital at VMware. And we were walking down Howard Street. I see Ratmir and some of his colleagues, we start chatting. We, you know, got into a good conversation. I'm like, "What about an IPO?" He goes, "We're not doing an IPO. We don't need to do an IPO." And then several years later on theCUBE, he's like, "No, I'd be open to an IPO." And then of course the big acquisition happened. So you've got an opportunity here M and A obviously is a possibility. But what about the IPO in your future? Presumably, that's something Insight wants to do. What can you tell us about that? >> No, it's a great question. I was waiting when you were going to ask me that question. But this is what I would say which is, by the way, Veeam, at today's numbers, I mean, we shared numbers at the end of last year. 1.1 billion in ARR, 1.2 in revenues, 99.99% organic, right? You know, Kasten was the only acquisition we shared how Kasten is a blip at this point in time. And so the philosophy has always been organic. And as I look ahead, this is how I think about it. I think the pace of market change is going to be extreme. And so we will be a lot more open-minded, thinking about acquisitions for complimentary technologies which allow us to expand TAM and think about adjacencies, more to come there. IPO, see the good thing is this, a lot of companies want to enter the public markets to raise money, create liquidity. That's not the primary lens for us. And so the good news is that, you know we are incredibly profitable. We shared, you know, 30% EBITDA, you know, for 2021. So money is not the issue, but we do think that we entering the public markets is a good thing for a variety of other reasons, because when you are public and it comes with the, you know, transparency, which we believe we're already transparent. But it puts the focus on you. And that creates even better growth impetus. Especially as you go work with large enterprise customers they are a lot more amenable and you know and so we feel that it's a strategy of growth not a strategy of liquidity for us, but stay tuned. You know, I fully expect for something like that to happen sometime towards the middle of next year, to the end of next year. >> Yeah, we had a similar conversation with Frank Slootman they obviously were able to raise money. But wow, what a change since the snowflake IPO in terms of just the brand value. And again, so many questions. I thought your keynote was great, by the way. >> Anand: Thank you. I love the focus on, you know, ransomware, of course. I thought the bot jokes were great. Keep 'em coming. I mean, I really did enjoy- >> (laughs) Absolutely. >> It lightens things up. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate your time. >> Absolutely appreciate it, Dave and Dave. By the way, I mean, it's funny, I mean about, you know, Dave and Dave, Dave and David reminded me of Thompson and Thompson, guess which comic book they're from? >> Thompson and Thompson- >> Thompson and Thompson. I don't know. >> Don't know. >> Tin Tin. >> Oh (laughs). >> (laughs) So you got to go read up. You guys don't look anything like that, but Dave and Dave, was an absolute pleasure. My first theCUBE and look forward to many more to come. >> Love to have you back- >> Absolutely. >> All right. Thank you for watching. >> Thank you. >> Keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022, 2 days of wall to wall coverage here at the ARIA in Las Vegas, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud, in the distance. It's expanding. It's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multicloud is the next big thing in infrastructure, and at the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference, we got a major dose of that theme, and with me to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkan Maner, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Great to be back here. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Okay, so you just completed another .NEXT. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes, and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multicloud, and I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but, Tarkan, what were your impressions, coming out of the event? >> Look, you had a great entry. Our goal, as Monica is going to outline, too, cloud is not a destination. It's an operating model. Our customers are basically using cloud as a business model, as an operating model. It's not just a bunch of techno mumbo-jumbo, as, kind of, you outlined. We want to make sure we make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, we want to make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, you know, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use-cases, partner ecosystem with ISVs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs we're working with like Citrix on end user computing, like Red Hat on cloud native, and also bringing the right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer to use the cloud as an operating model. That was the biggest goal here. >> Great, thank you. Monica, anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? >> Well, I think Tarkan said it right. We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was our big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio, which is much more simplified, now. It's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we are building an ecosystem around it, and really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. >> So, Monica, could you just, for our audience, just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? >> Yeah, we actually made four different announcements, and most of them were focused around, obviously, our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to our cloud platform to help customers build modern, software-defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting their business-critical applications, and that was really about the next version of our flagship, AOS six, availability. We announced the general availability of that, and key features really included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software, and skills are now built into our platform. And, most importantly, all of this functionality being managed through a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So that was one announcement. The second announcement was focused around data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2x, big data workloads by 3x, so lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is a new unstructured data governance service. So, again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships, and we'll talk more about that, is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure, and that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so, now, we are in preview on that one, and we're super excited about that. And then, last but not least, and I know Tarkan is going to go into a lot more detail, is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of big news coming out of it. I just gave you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this, as well. >> Okay. Now, I'd like to give you my honest take, if you guys don't mind, and, Tarkan, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me, okay? So the first thing I'm going to say is I think, Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial, and I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years. To actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going, as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload in any cloud. And then what you're doing, as I see it, is abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem, across clouds, and as I say, that's hard. I will say this: the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort, and, very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multicloud opportunity, which, again, is really challenging, but my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets, but, from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multicloud-- you're on that journey-- that I've seen to date. So I would give you high marks there. And I like the ecosystem-building piece of it. So, Tarkan, you could course-correct anything that I've said, and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village, you know, you're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton, to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that, as well. >> Look, actually, you hit all the right points, and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago. The last two years with Monica, with the great executive team, and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. We're not necessarily, you know, passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. We're passionate about customer outcomes, and some of those outcomes sometimes are going to also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multicloud. It is not multicloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. We want to make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, whether those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dell, Supermicro. We just announced a partnership with Supermicro, now, we're selling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake. Lenovo, we run on TruScale. Big support for Lenovo. Dell's still a great partner to us. On cloud partnerships, as Monica mentioned, obviously Azure. We had a big session with AWS. Lots of new work going on with Red Hat as an ISV partner. Tying that also to IBM Cloud, as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM Cloud go hand in hand, and also tons of workarounds, as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We want to make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere, for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we want to make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators, run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest, obviously, on the Citrix or the UC side, as Monica mentioned earlier, we also just announced the Red Hat partnership for cloud services. Right before that, next we highlighted that, and we are super excited about those two partnerships. >> Yeah, so, when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, it's clear to me you're not wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And, again, that's why it's hard. You could take advantage of those things, but-- So, Monica, you were on the stage at .NEXT with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. >> Absolutely. First of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure. It's a big deal. We've been working on it for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And, obviously, we're looking forward to then announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We're already seeing tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industries' research, by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourselves. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources, and, most importantly, there's a disparity between the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's what we are focused on, together as partners, is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads in Azure cloud, do cloud disaster recovery, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is our partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native, and that's something we've already provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications, and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on nutanix.com/azure. And I would say, for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to nutanix.com/azure and taking the test drive. >> Excellent. Now, Tarkan, we saw recently that you announced services. You've got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, their Azure service, which is called TruScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way, face to face. Awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? >> So, look, as we talked through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship. One of our fastest growing partnerships. You know, our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX, is the platform. But beyond that, now, if the customers want to use HPE service as-a-service, now, Nutanix software, the entire stack, it's not only hybrid multicloud platform, the database capability, EUC capability, storage capability, can run on HPE's service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, we're doing similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, giving our customers choice. If they want to go to a public club partner like Azure, AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this, with our GSI partnerships and new service provider program, we're giving options to customers because, in some other regions, HPE might not be their choice or Azure not be choice, and a local telco might the choice in some country like Japan or India. So we give options and capability to the customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. >> I think that's a really important point you're making because, as I see all these infrastructure providers, who are traditionally on-prem players, introduce as-a-service, one of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customers choice? Because that's, really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product, and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose. Of course, they want to sell their own, but, if you innovate fast enough, which, of course, Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as-a-service models. So, Monica, Tarkan mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? >> Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, I do want to make sure our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix totally is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side, has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing, here, forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously, when you say one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers, as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS, in global 2000 accounts across many different industries, retail, financial services, energy, and we are really focused, for example, with them, on expanding our joint business around mission critical applications deployment in our customer accounts, and specifically our databases with Nutanix Era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution SKALE DB, we showcased at .NEXT just yesterday. And SKALE DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers which includes a Nutanix platform, including Nutanix Era, which is our database service, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware/software that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then, moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Cyxtera, who, in fact, was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many other service providers, including working with, you know, all of the edge cloud, Equinix. So, I can go on. We have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us. All the way from, as Tarkan said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat, Citrix, and, of course, our service provider, GSI partnerships. And then, last but not least, I think, Tarkan, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. >> No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSIs we support, new SP program, enterprise solution providers, service provider program, covering telcos and regional service providers, like you suggested, OVH in France, NTT in Japan, Yotta group in India, Cyxtera in the US. We have over 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things, obviously, to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely. We have Christian Alvarez, who is running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about cloud by itself. It's outcomes, but cloud is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multicloud fashion. And last point I would add to this is help customers regardless of the stage they're in in their cloud migration. From rehosting to replatforming, repurchasing or refactoring, rearchitecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what we're trying to do, with Monica's help, with the entire team: choice. Choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud, and choice on platform. >> So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman. The state-of-the-art was converged infrastructure, at the time, bolting together storage, networking, and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, "We're going to have a software-led version of that." And you popularized, you kind of created the hyperconverged infrastructure market. You created what we called at the time true private cloud, scaled up as a company, and now you're really going after that multicloud, hybrid cloud opportunity. Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud, and the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers, last year, just spent a hundred billion dollars on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking, so I like it. You've got to move fast, and you are. So, guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both-- maybe, Tarkan, you can start, and Monica, you can bring us home. Give us your wrap up, your summary, and any final thoughts. >> All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back. This is like a broken record, but it's so important we hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination. It's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes, regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. >> Dave: Right, thank you. Monica? >> Yeah. And I, again, you know, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this but I'll remind everybody that why we started out. Our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers, making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And, as you can see, coming out of .NEXT, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multicloud platform so our customers can really run any app, anywhere, on any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because, you know, our customers love us. NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But, again, the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice. And, really, our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. >> Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .NEXT, where I meet a lot of those customers. And I, again, we've been following you guys since the early days. I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them, driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so, guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix. We'll be there reporting and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and, as always, we'll see you next time. (light music)

(gentle music) >> We all know that virtually every organization is using the cloud in some way, shape or form. But those same organizations are building or maybe buying abstraction layers that attempt to hide the underlying complexity of these clouds. Which are now connected to on-prem workloads, they're in hybrid models, spanning across multiple clouds, and bleeding out to the edge. Now, while such an approach is extensively simplifies technology, provisioning and management, it brings challenges. And these challenges are fundamentally data problems. For example, with the sprawling clouds, how do you track sensitive data and know where it lives? How do you ensure compliance and privacy protections in a world of ever-changing regulations? How can you securely share data in an increasingly decentralized environment? How can you identify gaps in security policies and how can organizations identify and stop exfiltration in this complex environment? And, oh, by the way, very importantly, how can this all be automated? Because the number one challenges that CSOs face is a lack of talent. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this CUBE conversation where we profile emerging technologies, innovative startups and disruptive trends in enterprise tech. And today we're pleased to welcome two guests from a really interesting firm trying to solve many of these problems. With us are Dr. Noah Johnson, who was the co-founder and CTO. And April Mitchell, head of engineering, both from Dasera. Folks, welcome April. Great to see you again. >> It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Dave. >> Okay Noah, let me start with you. I got to ask you, is security in your mind a do-over? >> Hey Dave. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. So yeah, you hear the adage a lot today, security is broken. And certainly if you look at the number of data breaches and misuses of data in the last few years, clearly something isn't working, right? Now, our view actually is that data security needs to be rethought, and kind of designed from the ground up for the modern way that the data is used. And that's exactly what we're doing. So we don't say, do over, so much as data security re-imagined, especially for the cloud. >> Yeah, you can't just rip and replace, but it's a little tongue in cheek there. But tell me more about the background of the company. Why did you and your co-founders start the firm? Are those challenges that I laid out upfront, the ones that you're directly attacking? >> Yeah, we're attacking all of them. So the background of the company, our technology originally came from PhD work that I did while I was studying at UC Berkeley. So I've spent most of the last decade or so looking at different cybersecurity problems. And my dissertation specifically focused on, how do you secure sensitive data while still allowing people to access it in a flexible way? As part of that work, I was able to collaborate with a big tech company, Fortune 500 company, who were facing very similar problems internally. They needed to get a handle on their data. And so through that kind of research collaboration, we built a platform that was able to track data and monitor how the data was used to better protect it while still allowing the company to be data-driven. They ended up deploying the system at scale. And so this was really strong, at least initial validation. The approach that we're using at Dasera actually is quite effective and sound. So since then, we've talked to hundreds of other CSOs and security teams, and really sort of gotten a deeper appreciation for the magnitude of the problem today. No person that we've spoken to has high confidence in their data security. And we can dig into the reasons for that. It's not for lack of effort, it's that this is a very hard problem, especially with the moving to the cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, trust is popping up on the NPS surveys. It's like the number one factor today. April, let's bring you into the discussion. You and I met early last decade and we've followed your career since then. What attracted you to Dasera? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Dave. I've spent my career at Fortune 10 companies with 15,000 plus employees. What made me take this step to go to all the magnitude, a smaller company and team? And I would say it was an easy choice and I was driven by a bold vision, the right team and an innovators heart. When I had a conversation with Ani, the CEO and Noah's co-founder, Ani and I crossed paths back at HP, and he had the opportunity to work with myself and one of my collaborators. And I'd say at the time we were the two co-founders running our own little two-person startup within HP labs, delivering consumer web services. And Ani and I connected then. And we knew we wanted to have that chance to work together in the future. And I was blessed with the opportunity to go from analytics, to programmability at HP at Cisco. And when Ani called me up just a little over two months ago, and he told me about Dasera, immediately I was interested. Data security is a wonderful hot space with so many challenges, and that innovation and the challenge from a real research perspective is what drew me to Dasera. And I had the conversation with Noah. And we went deep into differential privacy and the cracks of his PhD research. And I understood there, this company is built on very strong bonds. And really, to be successful, it's about the team. You have to have a diverse team with great experience. And when I talked to every single one of the team members, they shared a vision and they shared a passion. And you know me, I love being a part of a strong team and I love building strong teams. And that's exactly what we're doing here at Dasera. >> Thank you for that April. So Noah, give us the north star. Like early on, you guys got to focus in on where you're headed. What is that north star? >> Our goal is to really solve data security. You know, we touched on earlier, clearly current solutions aren't working. We think we have a very innovative solution that is designed specifically for where data lives today, which is the cloud. We see ourselves as being the kind of gold standard for tracking and managing and securing data in the cloud across the entire life cycle. You know, from the point the data is created to all of the different ways that data is used, to when the data is deleted, we want to build a system that lets companies for the first time, get that visibility, create that feedback loop between the data users, the different security stakeholders, the legal teams. Help them make better, more informed security decisions by providing that visibility. >> So April, I use this chart sometimes when I do segments on security. I think it's from Optiv and it's this, it shows all the different segments and this is a very fragmented market space. So I'm wondering, like for first of all, like who's the enemy, I mean, who you're trying to attack? But it's so fragmented, maybe there isn't one. But from an engineering standpoint, part two of the question is, what are the really gnarly problems that you're focusing on? But talk about part A first, if you would. Who are you targeting here? >> Absolutely. I would say the best defense is a really good offense. And how are we approaching this problem differently? And there are many data security tools out there. Many processes, from access control to DLP, but we still had 4,000 events, 4,000 breaches in the last year alone. So we can't continue to expect different outcomes by using these same approaches. So that's where we are changing the story. And we have a bold purpose. We don't want to be a typical existing cybersecurity company. We want to take the approach of treating data security as sacred, we want to make the world a safer place, and we want to do that by securing data across its life cycle. Creation to deletion. You asked about the gnarly challenges that are out there. To do that right, you have to do it at speed. You've got to do it in real time and you have to do it at scale. And those are definitely the challenges that we're running into right now from an engineering perspective. >> So Noah, when you looked at the landscape, you saw, as April said, it was just so many different tools out there. How do you describe your difference in the marketplace? And April, please chime in as well. >> Sure. Yeah. So everyone has a slightly different approach. April touched on this earlier. We want to fix data security. So in some sense, we're all on the same team. We have different views of the most effective way of solving this problem, but ultimately everyone wants to solve the same problem. I would say, we're the only ones that give a comprehensive look at the entire data life cycle. So if you look at other similar security offerings, a lot of players are focused on just access control, right? Or data loss prevention, or specific features like encryption. And these are all really important technologies, but they're not sufficient, right? These are technologies that have been in use for the last decade and yet we still see data breaches on a daily basis. And the reason for that is, even if you have those systems in place, there's a lot that can go wrong between when someone is granted access to all of the different ways they consume and share the data. And so where we're unique is we give this holistic picture of the data end to end. And we don't necessarily replace those other solutions. Actually, we compliment them. Our system can tell you, if you have an encryption solution in place, are you encrypting the right data, right? Are you using it the right way? So you get more value out of those tools. Or if you have access control, our platform can be a set of guard rails or kind of a backstop that can let you know, are those access control rules properly configured, are certain users over privileged, and so forth. So really providing that context, like I said earlier, to make better security decisions. That's where we're differentiated. That's kind of our unique view of how to solve the problem. >> April, anything you'd add to that? It sounds like you're a platform for all these tools. I feel like I need that for my apps. But what's the secret sauce there? >> Yeah. I think the secret sauce is that we've learned from the challenges that our customers are facing. We have an approach where we want to rapidly innovate and rapidly validate. And our team is doing that. Noah mentioned a couple of the key features. I'm going to add a few more, because really when you're making a choice, what should I use, you've got to start with, what do you want to protect? Your data and your people? How can we help you protect that? Well, we can help you manage data sprawl. You'd be surprised by how many customers on the cloud are really interested, or use our product for the first time and go, "Oh my gosh, I did not know that that was there. When did that get there? How did it get copied there? Why is it there?" You know, and they're asking these questions. So we want to help you track that sprawl of your data. We want to monitor the data when it's in use. How are people growing it? How are your employees accessing it? How are they using it? Are they using it in the right way? Are they using it in the right way today? Are they using it on the right way tomorrow based the permissions? And we can give you that risk analysis and that perspective. We also want to let you know that when the data's sprawls, when there's a new copy that's stored in the new data store, is it configured the right way? Are you protecting it the right way? We can analyze that for you as well. So really the completeness of the features from the end to end solution, you can't protect across the entire data life cycle from creation to deletion, unless you're truly connecting and understanding how the data is being used. >> Great. Thank you. Noah, what's the ideal customer look like? Big, small, different industries? Will you give us the ICP? >> So as far as industries, our view is, a data breaches is a data breach. So any company that collects data and needs to protect it would benefit from our solution. I will say specifically, organizations that are cloud first and data-driven. Meaning they collect a lot of data and need to use that data, especially if that data is sensitive. So think B to C companies, retail, e-commerce, social media, finance, any company that collects consumer data, there are legal obligations, security obligations, kind of a higher standard of care that's required for that data. And that's where we can really help. So we're seeing traction actually from all of these industries. As far as the ideal user profile, we are targeting data security professionals. But we are a platform. We are a collaboration platform. Our system is designed to let different stakeholders within the organization, work together. From the security team, to the legal team, to the different data custodians, they can all collaborate seamlessly within the platform using that context that we're stitching together about the data flow. >> That last point is important because it used to be, it was the SecOps team. It was their problem. And now it's IT, it's security, it's legal, it's the line of business. And then the first point you made about cloud first and data-driven, that's good news for your term. Because if you're not cloud first and data-driven, you're probably not going to be in business by the end of the decade. So, how about the business case? You know, your startup, the ideal startup situation is you're 10X the value at 1/10 the price. Now, maybe in your case it's a little different 'cause you're taking that holistic view as opposed to one narrow view. But what's the justification? Lay out the ROI. >> Yeah. So we've designed the platform actually to be very quick time to value and easy to deploy. The platform is fully automated, has built in policies and machine learning. So you spin it up and it will automatically discover the data stores, it will go and crawl the data to automatically classify it. And so now you've already solved the problem of just data sprawl, knowing what data is out there. And then we can show customers, here's how the databases are configured, is the data sufficiently protected, here's how employees are interacting with the data. And then finally optionally to write policies and workflows to make sure that there's a process in place to protect the data across its entire life cycle. So there's sort of an evolution of different features. So there's kind of a maturity evolution from just, number one, identifying the data, or like we say, you can't protect what you don't know exists, to protecting it and identifying whether there are any security risks and compliance gaps. And then finally automatic proactive protection and remediation by security policies. >> So where are you guys in terms of the maturity? Obviously it's early days, but where are you in terms of product market fit? Have you nailed that? Still trying to figure that out? I know you've raised around 9 million, you're out of stealth. You give us a sense of the maturity curve. >> I can jump in on that one and speak a bit about our first customers. And then Noah can add more detail as well. But we're seeing these cloud first organizations, the CSOs, the chief security or privacy officers coming to us because they know that traditional approaches aren't working. We are here, we are ready to engage. We aren't just grabbing, what's coming, we're talking about what we have now. And we will sit arm to arm with you and made sure that we are solving the challenges that your team is facing right now. And that's where we're getting early feedback. That's where we've really been able to showcase some new innovations and to validate and move from there. But I would say, if you're interested in talking to us, please call, please visit the website and make that connection. Because we're not stealth, we're not hiding. We're engaging and definitely have a offering that is ready to be used. >> So okay, so you're in market with that offering. What do I buy from you? Is it a SAS, is it a subscription, is it a service? >> Yeah, so we have a few different product offerings and deployment models, depending on where the data's stored and the environment that the company wants to run the software. So we support on-prem, we also have a SAS offering as well. >> Okay, and that runs in the cloud, obviously, the SAS offering, or you can sort of put it as in a require on appliance? How do I deploy it on on-prem? >> No appliance runs. Runs purely in the cloud. And within an hour to onboard, to connect to the environment and to get a scan up and running. >> And it's status of the company, am I right, I think you've raised like $9 million. Head count, anything you can share in that regard? Are you hiring? I'm sure you are. >> We're growing very quickly. There's been tremendous traction as April mentioned earlier, and we're super excited about the opportunity ahead of us. It's clear we've tackled the very big problem that is still unsolved. So we have big plans and we fortunately have been able to raise some capital to help us build out the team, to add the capabilities that we need to fully solve this problem end to end. So we're well on our way, but it's a journey. This is an unsolved problem for a reason, right? It's quite complex. And we've got a great headstart, we've got a great approach, we've got some great early customers, but there's a way to go still. >> And I'll use that opportunity to say, yes, we are hiring. And if you're interested in this space, if you want to learn from a team of experts, but also grow your skills and take on some new challenges, then please go to the website and check out the current positions that we have. Dropped me ping through any of the social media networks, 'cause we'd love to hear from you. >> Great. Website is Dasera, D-A-S-E-R-A. All right. So check it out. Guys. great to have you on. Thanks so much. Best of luck. We'll be tracking you, and really congratulations on getting to this point. And I know you have a lot more work to do, but really exciting times, I'm sure, for you. >> Thanks Dave. >> It's a pleasure to see you this way and hopefully in person soon. >> Hopefully. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully in '21. We'll see. We'll see. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE, we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay thanks, Adam, and the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action, the keynotes are going on in the background. It's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante's on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE, but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, and kicking it off day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me! It's very exciting! I love what you guys have got over here, very fun! >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is, and also, Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> No, I mean, the atmosphere is absolutely palpable. Isn't it? You can just feel it. People walk in and see what the future looks like for the telecoms industry. Very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage, we're really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. After the keynotes are going on, we're going to have DR maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that out. But let's check out this videotape. This is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel, and we'll be right back, and we'll talk about it. (smooth electronic music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson space at MWC 21, and for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is their unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston, or DR, as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat instrumental music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona! I'm here for MWC 21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors, and 70 demos, to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience. We're going to talk about what's in store for the new network, and the future of work. And I'm really excited to create a community, and invite awesome telco executives to see this new feature. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC 21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get-go, we planned this amazing experience that we call Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series, where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs, and awesome vendors, talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud, hosted by John furrier and Dave Vallente. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests focused on telco in the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco, and 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, am on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements, and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested $1,000,000 in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market this week at MWC. The first is at planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement, coupling your network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement, and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing is a planetary scale BSS system, built on top of the TM Forum Open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show floor. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco! I'm super excited to bring to you the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona, and virtually around the world! (upbeat instrumental music) Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry, and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (groovy electronic music) >> Okay, thanks. Just rolling that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel, I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star. And I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision, and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there! I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, it really is. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world! She's innovative, she's exciting. And if we've learned anything over the last 18 months, it's that we need that in this industry, to grow for the future of the industry. So, so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration! >> And I love the fact that she's so takes the tiger by the tail. Because the telco industry is being disrupted, she's just driving the bus here. And I remember, I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon Web Services, she was running the public sector, and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC, and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player! And she was an exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing, and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" >> Now of course, it's always that way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time, people thinking what is going on here, we don't like change, why are being shaken up? But actually, afterwards, in retrospect, they think, "Oh, okay. I see why that happened, and we needed it." So, really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here on theCUBE. Obviously, the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you missed some of the action, this is obviously the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a hybrid event, a lot of virtual action going on. So, you got theCUBE Virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites. But in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, and what was happening around the show. Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (groovy electronic music) (cheerful instrumental music) (groovy electronic music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're on the main floor out here with Chloe, who is emceeing, hosting, and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean so far, day one, I was watching your presentations and fireside chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, no, for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage, and his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing. And in 10 years, it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So, really interesting! I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great. Everyone's excited. It's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content! It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. It's very exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event, so since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event, and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry because of COVID, and people are glad to be here. But a lot of stuff's changed! >> Yeah. It's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed! Digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though, John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> John: Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years. We know that! But what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years. >> Oh, man. That's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks, and telecom, which is basically radios, and wireless, and then mobile. But it's very global, a lot of networks. But now it's evolving! And many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting, that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe, because of all the technology from the cloud players, and from the chips, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So people look at the chips, the hardware. It's less about the speeds and feeds, it's more about the consumer experience. We got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I went, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, you order it, you pick it up. So that's kind of what can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. So, a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry? That is, the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is there anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well, I think the incumbents are going to lose their positions. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the the company that you don't see. (audience in background applauding) And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this! We saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. >> Chloe: Yeah, for sure. >> She just walked out there, and she's not afraid. >> Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up! And you can see as soon as she walks out, that is what she intends to do today. >> I love her mojo. She's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Chloe: Yep. >> I mean, even when Apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash, when Steve Jobs brought back Apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company, the iPad was a seminal, iPod, a seminal moment. Then the iPhone, and just, the rest is history. That kind of disruption is coming. You're going to see that now. >> Oh, it's exciting though, isn't it? To be future ready, rather than future proof! But actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about wire, as you're on AWS and Google Cloud, why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity. And it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. It's almost like global warming now, the icebergs are melting, and it's going to just change. And because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing, it's not like a better phone. It's a commercial app opportunity, because it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts, or football games, or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out. Can't upload their picture to Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them on the network. That's where 5G solves a problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth, and that's going to bring the edge to life, and that's money. So when you got money, and greed, and power, changing hands, if it's on the table, and the wheel's spinning, it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know! >> Oh, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved! And I suppose it circles back to the fact that DR is really leading the charge, and they're probably thinking, "Okay, what's going on here? This is different. We want something new." You did notice it, OpenRAN is something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here at Cloud City Live mention OpenRAN. What is it all about, Don? Because why all the buzz if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we get excited about it? >> That's a great thing. The 5G certainly will drive the main trend, for sure. OpenRAN is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular, and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation, has been the driver for most of the open source software. So, they're trying to make open software, and open architectures, to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware, and around infrastructure, because we need more infrastructure, we need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices. That could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology, and you want to minimize the licensing, and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What did we look at? So on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Phillip Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud, and within telco. So you just mentioned that OpenRAN is all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easily more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it at risk? >> I think it's going to increase the value of security, and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in a sense that could be explored by hackers, but open can also protect. And I think we've seen open source, and cloud in particular, be more secure. Because everyone said, cloud is not secure, open source is insecure. And as it turns out, when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security threats, but actually I was speaking to some leaders across various industries, and particularly in tech, and they were saying, actually, there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open-source environment, we are able to track them, and measure them, and defend more efficiently. So actually, they're being batted away. But the number is probably the same as it always was, we just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats, and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so to the threats. So on a net basis, it's more, because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look it, there's money involved, they are organized. There's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank, or ransomware is at an all time high. >> Yes! >> So this is like a big problem, and it's beyond the government. It's around individual freedom. So, security is huge. And I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think, the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's, again, about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time, but without collaboration, the industries are going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I'd just say on security, don't download that PDF, if you don't know who it came from. The phishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here of Mobile World Live. We're going to show this next segment, and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience, Chloe, for people who aren't here. To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona, and all the action. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Daniel Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDR. But you can call me DR! Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time! Let's do it. Holy shit! It sure is a great time to be a tech company! I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, Door Dash, or Uber, life's pretty great! Just look at these stock prices over the past five years, with their shareholder value going up and to the right. Totally amazing! But where's telco? Dare I add our stocks to this awesome chart? Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, TIM, America Movil, and Zain Group. Huh. Not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you, senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up! Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T than to Apple, because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people! I get it. You have the security blanket. You're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network, and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network, and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things. But because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far, you haven't had to. Every Telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best. Just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat. And it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting to WeChat, WhatsApp, and the other OTT apps. But it is not just texting. The total adjustable market, or TAM, of the mobile app disruptors is huge! Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love! They look at every interaction with the customer and say, how do we make the customer love this? Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive, they must make customers love them. So, they focus on it in a big way! And it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70, and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS, and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch, and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps, and becoming customer centered! Retooling around the customer is a huge change, so let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples, and drive big shareholder value, just like the tech companies on that chart! Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies in a variety of categories vying for your subscribers' disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services. Who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high valuations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You! Hello? What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAMs they throw around, you'd be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the cap ex to build out the network, I say to myself, hell yeah! We should totally go do it, and do whatever it takes to go get it. For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a Southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focus started in Rideshare, but then leveraged its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a Telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with the valuable services that helped grow your ARPU. That would be huge! So, how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app! A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great, but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called to Totogi that is going to help carriers build world-class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users. It's not the average order value. It's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user. That's the metric that matters. How many have you used that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top-up, or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences. Like Apple credit cards, no information required application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies. Like how Door Dash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings, because they do simple things, like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app, rather than forced you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. Hm, what do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder. While you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day, you have something that's 10 times better! You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network. 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to, your crappy, over customized, on-premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it, the public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi! Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network, and all the network interactions, into customer engagement. This is something that super apps don't have, but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focused to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying, massive cap ex investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps, with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day, and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100,000,000 into it. You heard me right. $100,000,000. Is this what it feels like to be SoftBank? I'm investing into Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage their network interactions into super app usage! Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience, and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those telco valuations will go from down here, (buzzes lips) to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts. And I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, "Click. Eh." Everyone says, no way. Telcos can't do it. Zero chance. Total goose egg. (egg cracking) One suggested I build a bonfire with a hundred million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well, I think those people are dead wrong! I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco, and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because Totogi takes the value of the network, and the power of the public cloud, to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focused guys, like the other telcos. Instead, you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors, they know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf, and make the customers want to choose you. You need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We'll have to give up the security blanket of the network, and change. Instead of NPS at the thirties, it needs to be in the seventies. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible! I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me, and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time, and I can't wait to see you there! >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier. Chloe Richardson's filling in for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her involving major action, major pump you up, punch in the face, "Wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here!" She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is, John, there's trillions of dollars on the table, and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in, and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> And it's not going to be, it's going to be a fight! Who will win? >> Who will win, but also who will build the next big thing? (John laughing) >> Someone needs to die in the media conversations. It's always a fight. Something's dead. Something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. Think what's happened is Telco's already acknowledged that they need to change. And the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple. They've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm. You've got all these new things. So, the chips are getting faster, and the software's more open source. And I'm telling you, the cloud is just going to drive that bus right down Cloud Street, and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peepin' on the board as it drives down. (John laughing) John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written, and one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me, what does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets, and growing markets, things behave differently, and certainly economics, and the people, and the makeup, and the mindset. So the telco has been kind of this mature market, it's been changing and growing, but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit. You know, to install a lot of cable, you got to get the rents out of that infrastructure. And that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market. And it's about building, not just operating. And you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together. Builders being software developers, new technology, and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking. But in a growth market, it's turbulent, and the ride might not be quiet, first-class ticket to paradise. It's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer? Are there parallels there? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, replatform with the cloud, and then refactor your business! If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over, or go out of business. And that's what the telcos with all these assets, they're going to get bought, rolled into a SPAC, Special Purpose Acquisition Company, which is super hot in the United States. A lot of roll-ups going on with private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor, or replatform then refactor, they're going to be toast, and they're going to get rolled up, and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad, people, process, technology, and we think, process and technology really to the forefront here. But like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously, Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday, and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations, establishments. How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about? >> Yeah. I mean, education's huge, and this highlights the change that telco's now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around, and mobile was there. But once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So, you start to see people now aware of the value. And if you look at during COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses, and everyone survived because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad Zoom meetings here and there, and some teleconferences that didn't go well, but for the most part we survived, and they really saved everybody. So, they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education. People care about that stuff, so now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why the edge has got trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, "Oh, there's no jobs." Or, "I can't work." That's a bunch of BS, because you can just get online, get on YouTube, and just get a degree. You can get a degree. You can get an Amazon job. It pays a hundred thousand dollars a year! American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds, and be unemployed six months, and then be employed. So negative unemployment means, there's more jobs than people to fill them all, in fact. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in something, I think there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity. And there's such a skill shortage. There is nobody around to fill it! So it's an interesting problem to have, isn't it? Because it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades! And obviously, telco is in the same space. But what can we do about it do you think, to actually -- >> I think it's going to take leadership, and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university if they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money, if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there. But to me, it's the relationships, the mentorship. You're starting to see a women in tech, and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear courseware. Nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate, or degree, and accreditation, no problem. But the communities are out there, so that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that. And I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills. You can get that online, so why even go to school? So, people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also, even transferring. I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't they, so we could easily be talking to people from other industries, and bringing them into telco, and saying, "Look, bring what you know from your retail background, or your healthcare background, and help us at telco to, again, drive forwards." Just like DR was saying, it's all about the next big thing. >> Well, Danielle is always also driving a lot of change. And if you think about the jobs, and the pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy Leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to the school like that, and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now the jobs that are available weren't around five years ago, so there's no like pedigree or track record. There's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now, from a job standpoint, is people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy League, or the big degree, or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emerging and making things happen. Entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas! >> It's interesting you mention that, John, because we can't have more than five years experience in this space, we know that. But in telco, there is a problem. And maybe it's, again, it's a flipped problem where telco recruiters, or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> I think that's just, I mean I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening, one. But two, I think, you know, to be like a chip engineer, (laughs) you can't learn that online. But if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So, embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely paths you can specialize. Space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on. You see Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on a virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And you know, Danielle Royston always says, "What's going to happen first, Mars colony, or telco adopting public cloud?" And some people think Mars will happen first, but. >> What do you think, John? >> I think Telco's going to get cloud. I mean first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud, and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important, because it's an architectural beachhead. And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. So, the inside baseball, and the inside money, and all the investors are focusing on the edge, because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows, it's a public secret, and it's fun to watch everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah no, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So, it's an interesting flip. And I wonder if, with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development, this efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times, John. >> John: Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So, we're the hybrid CUBE, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. That is critical dynamic! And you're seeing it. Like virtual reality, for instance, now you're seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. You got, companies like Roblox went public recently. Metaverse. It's a good time to be in that business, because experiential human relations are coming. So, I think that's going to be powered by 5G. You know, gamers. So, all good stuff. Chloe, great to be with you here on theCUBE, and we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam, and the team. We're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City. And this is theCUBE, from Cloud City, back to you, Adam, and the studio.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. 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(bright music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. 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(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco live 2020 brought by Cisco, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBEs live coverage, here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2020, I'm John Furrier my cohost Dave Vellante here at theCUBE. The big story is it's not about the infrastructure's it's about the applications. Of course, Cisco has been connecting businesses with routers and gear throughout the years and their history. Got a great guest here Omar Tawakol, who is the Vice President and General Manager of the Contact Center for Cisco, Omar, thanks to have you on. You're a serial entrepreneur, sold your second company. Now here at Cisco leading the charge, a lot of action Contact Center. Sounds like an old school thing. We all know what Contact Centers are, but a lot of action going on there. Tell us what's happening. >> There's a huge amount of energy and focus in the Contact Center. Now. First of all, thank you for having me and really brands are really investing in it. There's, you know, over 22% growth in this category, so a lot of attention is on bringing Contact Center to the cloud. Infusing it with the AI and just making it a lot easier to serve customers with very high, almost unbounded kind of expectations out of the brand. So we need to really help them technically, >> And it's an impact area too for customers because there's real results. We all know the little started out of Microsoft, it was the little tool that came up, the little paper clip and windows, and it became Chatbots. Now we've seen recommendation engines, AI bots have been great. This is accelerates the customer experience in purchasing and support. What's the next level look like? What does it, what's the next milestone? What's the next industry point? >> Well, you know, one of the ones that we're focusing on is this idea of turning your agents into super agents. When you kind of look at automation, there's two ways to go at automation. One is automate the human out, and the other is kind of the opposite. Take the human and make them more accurate, extend the range, allow them to answer questions faster. So that's what we're doing in the Contact Center. And the way we approach that is we say, there's a certain number of tasks, that really shouldn't, that are simple, that should never hit a human. And so if we can put kind of voice bots and Chatbots on the front end and make those really good interactions, you take off the simple stuff. What you're left with is, the human interactions are now going to be, a little bit more complicated. So now you instead use AI, to help listen along with a human and put up suggestions. So for instance, someone's calling in and they're saying, Hey, I'm traveling from California to Barcelona and I'm calling T-Mobile or AT&T and saying, you know, extend my data plan for there, the AI will listen and say, Hey, we looked at your data plan. It's already covered. You don't have to pay anything else in Spain. So that's going to make the customer happy. Typically agent would have to take 17% of the time searching and putting you on hold. The AI can completely cut that off. And so that makes the agent happier, the customer happier. So there's a lot of ground for improving the experience just by applying AI there. >> There's big spectrum in Contact Center experiences, ranging from a totally asynchronous email us and we'll get back to you, you hope, to one that is, you know, somewhat painful, >> Yes. >> with a synchronous experience in a phone call. Different people like different approaches. I personally like to solve my problem on the phone. So, where do you see Cisco being able to take, its customers and the consumers experiences? What do you see in the next five years that looking like? >> Yeah, so basically the three areas of attack. First off, Cisco acquired Voicea, they acquired MindMeld, they acquired a company, so over half a billion in acquisitions over the past 18 months precisely to bring AI to collaboration. But we also partner with Google. We announced the Google CCII partnership, because we wanted best of breed, and proprietary to attack one problem, get to customer solution faster, in the way that customer wants to interact. So if they want to interact kind of in an automated fashion, make that better, sometimes that's not going to work. And the last thing I want to hear is, Agent, right, So we want to do tech, something's not going to work. In early on say transferring you to human, take all the context of the interaction they had given to the human and then suggest to the human, Hey, we think you should tell them that feature for free get to a customer resolution faster. I see this as a five year journey. >> But that started it starting today. Actually that's some of that's happening today where you would have to sit there, agent, agent, they go right away, >> Right. >> Others who maybe don't use your products or they, you know, you go into that endless loop, so you're starting to see improvements but still a lot of upside. I'm sure you'd agree, which is good. That's good news for the marketplace. >> Absolutely. The next part of there is that the phone call finishes, use AI to wrap it up so they don't spend five minutes, trying to type up the wrap up and then coach them, to be able to identify what went well, what didn't, did they comply, so that you can compress the learning because you know the agent churn is high. Reduce the agent churn, get them to learn faster, keep them there longer. All these, of innovations impact, the economics of running a Contact Center. >> And that's the big one. The economics I want to get into that because the impact is, right in the moment, but there's also, impacting the accelerating the journey of the customer, but also providing contextually relevant interactions. You said super agents, the expert. How do you know when to deploy the right talent, at the right time? These are the challenges I'm talking about that impact to the customer journey and where some specific examples are economically impacted. >> Yeah, so talk about customer journey. We acquired a company called CloudCherry in October and I've already integrated the product in, and it's now Webex Experience Management. And the whole insight that we had there, was that a customer's journey doesn't just show up at the Contact Center. They interact with your brand before, hopefully a lot before they ever get to Contact Center in the Contact Center after the Contact Center. So what we needed to do is have the analytics that ties together kind of essentially listening across 17 different channels. So by the time you come to a customer representative, they now know what you've done in other areas. They understand your sentiment and other areas and they can take that into account and say, we see that you've traveled with us before. The other thing that's even more important than that is now you can give to the management team, the full understanding of the journey. So you can tell them, you know what, these two drivers of your experience, perhaps it's average hold time, or perhaps it's the technical expertise of the person on the phone really drive NPS. So if you invest in that a little, you're going to get a much higher NPS. The alternative is what I call kind of the highest paid executive in the room making intuitive decisions which they think are awesome, which typically are not so awesome, but if they actually had the data, >> Yeah. >> It would be a lot more powerful. >> So having that legacy. Having that corpus to tap into. Talk about developer. We're in the dev net zone. A lot of companies have been trying to build, their own homegrown integrations maybe because of a database issue or other stuff. How do you guys look at your customers, when they say I want to build on top of it? >> It's a really good question. We were at a customer innovation board, where all of our customers were together, telling us what they wanted. And we were telling them about the new, set of AI capabilities that are coming out next quarter and almost unanimously when we asked them would you prefer us to first roll out a UI that has an embedded in it and then afterwards give you some APIs or would you prefer just to get the API first and they unanimous said, just give us API first. >> Really. >> We might not even use your interface, for that and I was like, okay, I'm not going to to take it personally. (laugh loudly) >> Good requirements to get out, Right straight with the customer. >> Do you see any industries as really, leading the charge of I think about, I think about retail. I mean it was going to Amazon war room, and you think about Amazon, they basically say here's a finite set of choices. Pick one and you may be lucky, you may not. Okay, boom end of story. But you've got a relationship with that retailer. Do you see any particular industries, airlines or others really leaning into this and predicting doing well? >> Yeah, we've seen quite a few. Where people are really kind of leaning forward, so finance and insurance, cause they have a very high volume of interactions that they have with customers. So getting this right really impacts the NPS and all their economics. Certainly you've seen in retail some innovative examples. We've see some airlines looking at trying to kind of make the journey a little bit smoother. Surprisingly, I've seen a bunch in healthcare, trying to make the patient experience better. Yeah, it's not, I can't say that(mumbles) cutting edge, but they're really putting a lot of an investment, seeing what's happening with other brands, experiences saying, Hey, we should really revolutionize the patient experience too. So this is pretty across the board? >> Well the upside is enormous. I mean you build a relationship through a Contact Center. I mean that's loyalty for life if they're really good at it. >> Yeah, and that's why I like the approach that says, don't try to automate humans out of that, we want to speak to humans and for many, many, many years to come. The human experience in helping. >> Yeah. >> It's just going to be awesome. So instead of just focusing on getting rid of them, make them more effective. >> I want to get your thoughts on your vision around, the industry because if you think about Contact Center, I think telephony old days, the industry used to be Voice Over IP came from the PBXs in the unified communication space, integrated in, and then in comes the cloud. So what is the real game changer, because that kind of just seemed like telephony market trying to be cool the internet, and it just felt kind of clunky to me and then all of a sudden over the past few years, almost a complete resurgence of robust features, new things. What's your vision? Do you agree with that and what's happening? >> I agree. I think the biggest thing that's happening is the expectation on feature velocity, where before the cloud, all these big enterprises were calculating, okay I have to upgrade a certain version, and it's going to cost me a certain amount of money and time, and I have to coordinate with other, kind of partners that I'm involved with. Whereas when you come to the cloud, you just can move a lot faster cause you leave it up to a company like Cisco to take care of rolling out features in the middle of the night and you not even have to worry about it You don't have to pay for it and you enjoy the features. So I think that's really going to change the game in a significant way. The only thing that's changing, cause you mentioned voice is if you think about your kids, they're growing up and there was this two years ago, a child first uttered Alexa before they uttered the parent's name. (loughs loudly) So that is a generation gap. >> Yeah, and it's a full coming spool circle, voice in a whole new way. >> Voice is coming back in a new way. >> Yeah. >> And we're going to enable a different type of interaction because of that. >> Yeah, Of course, we were talking here on theCUBE and it's being converted into metadata. As you know, text transcription, machine learning, is fed by texts and voice. Working together is a new dynamic. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you have to be completely linked, so now it's not just a blob of audio. I have all the metadata. I have it transcribed. You have NLP to give you an understanding, of the intent of what's happening there. It's searchable, it's linkable. This is going to be a new world here, and of course, as you know, that's what we did a Voicea, so I'm very excited about that. >> I want to tee that up. Congratulations on your acquisition. If someone looks at Cisco and you're fresh to the scene here, you've been an entrepreneur, I'd be like, Cisco really held all these acquisitions. It's going to be hard for them to be competitive. How do you answer that? If someone says that to you and you see them on the street or competitor might say that if someone says if the Cisco, we give thought acquisitions, you guys have done it, you are sold to them. You mentioned the other ones, all those acquisitions coming together. What's that response to that? >> You know you're about to talk to Shree and Amy and what they did is they came to me and they said, I want you to focus on integrated value. So within three months we both integrated deeply into meetings and the Contact Center and we're working on one with Calling. The mentality here is two things, keep the talent, number one, number two, deeply integrate. So it doesn't become a theory about we acquired this company, you really need to show value. to the customer base and that mentality, has been very good for us. If people get energized about that because when you're acquired, you now have this ability to affect hundreds of millions of users on the Webex platform. The faster you integrate to do that, everybody benefits. >> Speed is the new competitive advantage. >> Yes. Omar Thanks for coming on. I know you have a tight schedule. We're going to bring you back in the studio in Palo Alto. >> Thank you for having >> Where we could dive on your business. Thanks for coming in. It's theCUBES coverage I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante will be right back, after this short break. >> Thank you. Sorry, I got up to soon. (soft music)

(futuristic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runway here at Moffett Field. Really interesting place, a lot of cool toys downstairs. But we had a conversation today about customer experience and kind of next gen customer experience, and how to drive a better customer experience so that you have a better customer relationship, and we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Kristy Schaffler, the director of customer experience for Comcast California regions. Kristy, great to see you. >> Thank you! Thanks for having me here, I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, we had this great little panel discussion talking about customer experience, but you kept coming back to employees, and really leading with employees before you worry about what's going on with the customer. Where does that mindset come from and how should people be prioritizing employees for the benefit of customers? >> So, you know, honestly, it all comes back to Comcast itself. It is a very strong employee culture. And so the company began as a small company, family owned, and I think that's what's permeated throughout the company as a whole. So when we started to introduced the best practices for a net promoter system overall, it was an easy grasp, I think, for employees to start looking at how is it that I'm going to be able to help overall? Because I think they're all out there trying to help each other. >> Right, well its funny, right? Because there's kind of two dynamics. There's a great dynamic of helping a teammate right? And this goes back to military rule and you fight for the person that you're with, and not necessarily some great cause or old white guys that are back thousands of miles away. But it's different in terms of getting bad news up to the boss. That's a really hard problem, and nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, and in fact, a lot of times, the bad news doesn't get up. >> Exactly. >> So how do you enable people to actually share the real bad news that they might be uncomfortable or not necessarily even addressable. >> Yeah, so what we did was we introduced our employees to the concept of elevations, and so what they do is they input an issue where they're struggling with helping out the customer. There's a barrier to them to be able to deliver the service we're expecting. And what happens is once that gets input, then that actually goes up into the region, we take a look at it and say "We can't really do anything with it here, but we can bump it up to the next level." That eventually gets to a point, especially in the case of employee tools, for example, where is has to go all the way up to the headquarters and there's a team that's ready and waiting for that to happen. So, when you tell them, "Hey, there's something broken here", they have to come back and respond within two weeks. They have to be able to get back with that employee to say "Here is what we're going to do about that" or maybe put on a map to say that we're going to eventually fix that. That communication goes directly back to the person who actually inputted. So, its a direct communication between the employee who's having the issue and the software developer who may actually own that tool. >> So it goes directly-- is it a special type of ticket, if you will? >> Exactly. >> That I want a post knowing that this is a-- I've decided its a high enough priority that I'm going to take the risk, and take the personal risk or professional risk to go ahead and escalate that up the chain of command? >> Right, so what I'm so proud about is we've gone back to the team and said "Give be your number one barrier that's holding you back?" . So they work it out amongst their peers about what they think should be the top issue. Then they get everybody else to watch that issue. Once you get a number of watchers on it, it becomes elevated into the company where it becomes a big issue, and its like Hey, there's a lot of people that look at this issue, want it resolved, and so as soon as they put that in, they assign it to the area that responsible, and that is a direction communication, because as soon as they comment, anybody who's watching that elevation gets an email in their inbox with the actual comment from the person who owns it. So, its a nice targeted communication for issues that they're having. >> So, is there any fanfare when there some big one that gets voted by the broader group that "Oh my gosh, this was a really big deal."? >> So recently, we had something that came up with our Xfinity Home, and so, as you probably know, we have the ability to have security where you can actually look at your cameras on your mobile app. And one of our technicians said "Hey guys, I'm hearing this from the customer.". So what they do is they come back in and they have a huddle with their team and have the discussion, and then that manager takes that and puts it into the system. What happened was it went straight back up to the person, they actually did a software update on it, And then our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience out of our corporate headquarters said "Hey guys, congratulations, that's fantastic! This got fixed!". Then that communication went directly back to the person who input it, so it's just a celebratory moment when you can be able to get that direct feedback from the customer, comes up through the employee. The employee's owning it as an issue that they can't solve personally, but they know to get it to the right people. >> Right. So you've talked a lot earlier today about employee tools, and so, you know, as you clearly there's something that you think is a great investment, how should people think about investment in employee tools actually manifesting itself in better customer experience with the company? >> Exactly. We actually had an elevation that was associated with that, where the employee was using a tool in the home, and when he was trying to check the health of the system, they found that there was a piece of the tool that was breaking off. And so, again, they took it back to the owner of that tool, and they worked with the manufacturer to go back and redesign that tool, so that meant that the customer was able to get better service, because of their tools aren't working, that's what they depend on to be able to serve our customers. >> Right. >> And so, it's key that we take care of them. >> So, just curious, to kind of wrap it up, what has the focus on the NPS, both the score as well as the process, you know, kind of, what's happened from then? Not only the, you know, the direct result in terms of changing in the score and execution details, but more kind of the second order and unintended consequences of that focus? >> Yeah so we've definitely seen our net promoter score increase year over year, so that's very exciting, and we're celebrating that, and we're not there yet, so we still have a ways to go. But the other thing that we're seeing is that the employees are feeling empowered. They're feeling like that they can bring back issues, but something that they share with everybody, they feel like they have a sense of "I can help direct where we need to focus our time and make sure that those issues are being addressed". So, we have an employee survey. It's actually called the ENPS, so actually, we send that out every other month, and ask for employees, you know, "How do you feel about the workplace?", "Are you motivated?". We have some of the highest scores of any company of employees that are motivated because we have set up this system to basically come back and say "Let us know where you need help", and we're coming back in and helping. So, I'm excited about it. >> Great, alright Kristy, well we need to have another followup conversation about NPS another time-- >> Definitely! >> --I need to get educated, but thanks for spending a few minutes, and inviting us to attend today's event. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Alright, she's Kristy, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>>live from Miami, Florida. It's the Q covering. IBM is data in a I forum brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to the port of Miami, Everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the IBM data and a I form. Rob Thomas is here. He's the general manager for data in A I and I'd be great to see again. >>Right. Great to see you here in Miami. Beautiful week here on the beach area. It's >>nice. Yeah. This is quite an event. I mean, I had thought it was gonna be, like, roughly 1000 people. It's over. Sold or 17. More than 1700 people here. This is a learning event, right? I mean, people here, they're here to absorb best practice, you know, learn technical hands on presentations. Tell us a little bit more about how this event has evolved. >>It started as a really small training event, like you said, which goes back five years. And what we saw those people, they weren't looking for the normal kind of conference. They wanted to be hands on. They want to build something. They want to come here and leave with something they didn't have when they arrived. So started as a little small builder conference and now somehow continues to grow every year, which were very thankful for. And we continue to kind of expand at sessions. We've had to add hotels this year, so it's really taken off >>you and your title has two of the three superpowers data. And of course, Cloud is the third superpower, which is part of IBMs portfolio. But people want to apply those superpowers, and you use that metaphor in your your keynote today to really transform their business. But you pointed out that only about a eyes only 4 to 10% penetrated within organizations, and you talked about some of the barriers that, but this is a real appetite toe. Learn isn't there. >>There is. Let's go talk about the superpower for a bit. A. I does give employees superpowers because they can do things now. They couldn't do before, but you think about superheroes. They all have an origin story. They always have somewhere where they started and applying a I an organization. It's actually not about doing something completely different. It's about extenuating. What you already d'oh doing something massively better. That's kind of in your DNA already. So we're encouraging all of our clients this week like use the time to understand what you're great at, what your value proposition is. And then how do you use a I to accentuate that? Because your superpower is only gonna last if it's starts with who you are as a company or as a >>person who was your favorite superhero is a kid. Let's see. I was >>kind of into the whole Hall of Justice. Super Superman, that kind of thing. That was probably my cartoon. >>I was a Batman guy. And the reason I love that movie because all the combination of tech, it's kind of reminds me, is what's happening here today. In the marketplace, people are taking data. They're taking a I. They're applying machine intelligence to that data to create new insights, which they couldn't have before. But to your point, there's a There's an issue with the quality of data and and there's a there's a skills gap as well. So let's let's start with the data quality problem described that problem and how are you guys attacking it? >>You're a I is only as good as your data. I'd say that's the fundamental problem and organization we worked with. 80% of the projects get slowed down or they get stopped because the company has a date. A problem. That's why we introduce this idea of the A i ladder, which is all of the steps that a company has to think about for how they get to a level of data maturity that supports a I. So how they collect their data, organize their data, analyze their data and ultimately begin to infuse a I into business processes soap. Every organization needs to climb that ladder, and they're all different spots. So for someone might be, we gotta focus on organization a data catalogue. For others, it might be we got do a better job of data collection data management. That's for every organization to figure out. But you need a methodical approach to how you attack the data problem. >>So I wanna ask you about the Aye aye ladder so you could have these verbs, the verbs overlay on building blocks. I went back to some of my notes in the original Ai ai ladder conversation that you introduced a while back. It was data and information architecture at the at the base and then building on that analytics machine learning. Aye, aye, aye. And then now you've added the verbs, collect, organized, analyze and infused. Should we think of this as a maturity model or building blocks and verbs that you can apply depending on where you are in that maturity model, >>I would think of it as building blocks and the methodology, which is you got to decide. Do wish we focus on our data collection and doing that right? Is that our weakness or is a data organization or is it the sexy stuff? The Aye. Aye. The data science stuff. We just This is just a tool to help organizations organize themselves on what's important. I asked every company I visit. Do you have a date? A strategy? You wouldn't believe the looks you get when you ask that question, you get either. Well, she's got one. He's got one. So we got seven or you get No, we've never had one. Or Hey, we just hired a CDO. So we hope to have one. But we use the eye ladder just as a tool to encourage companies to think about your data strategy >>should do you think in the context I want follow up on that data strategy because you see a lot of tactical data strategies? Well, we use Data Thio for this initiative of that initiative. Maybe in sales or marketing, or maybe in R and D. Increasingly, our organization's developing. And should they develop a holistic data strategy, or should they trying to just get kind of quick wins? What are you seeing in the marketplace? >>It depends on where you are in your maturity cycle. I do think it behooves every company to say We understand where we are and we understand where we want to go. That could be the high level data strategy. What are our focus and priorities gonna be? Once you understand focus and priorities, the best way to get things into production is through a bunch of small experiments to your point. So I don't think it's an either or, but I think it's really valuable tohave an overarching data strategy, and I recommended companies think about a hub and spokes model for this. Have a centralized chief date officer, but your business units also need a cheap date officer. So strategy and one place execution in another. There's a best practice to going about this >>the next you ask the question. What is a I? You get that question a lot, and you said it's about predicting, automating and optimizing. Can we unpack that a little bit? What's behind those three items? >>People? People overreact a hype on topics like II. And they think, Well, I'm not ready for robots or I'm not ready for self driving Vehicles like those Mayor may not happen. Don't know. But a eyes. Let's think more basic it's about can we make better predictions of the business? Every company wants to see a future. They want the proverbial crystal ball. A. I helped you make better predictions. If you have the data to do that, it helps you automate tasks, automate the things that you don't want to do. There's a lot of work that has to happen every day that nobody really wants to do you software to automate that there's about optimization. How do you optimize processes to drive greater productivity? So this is not black magic. This is not some far off thing. We're talking about basics better predictions, better automation, better optimization. >>Now interestingly, use the term black magic because because a lot of a I is black box and IBM is always made a point of we're trying to make a I transparent. You talk a lot about taking the bias out, or at least understanding when bias makes sense. When it doesn't make sense, Talk about the black box problem and how you're addressing. >>That starts with one simple idea. A eyes, not magic. I say that over and over again. This is just computer science. Then you have to look at what are the components inside the proverbial black box. With Watson, we have a few things. We've got tools for clients that want to build their own. Aye, aye, to think of it as a tool box you can choose. Do you want a hammer and you want a screwdriver? You wanna nail you go build your own, aye, aye. Using Watson. We also have applications, so it's basically an end user application that puts a I into practice things like Watson assistant to virtually no create a virtual agent for customer service or Watson Discovery or things like open pages with Watson for governance, risk and compliance. So, aye, aye, for Watson is about tools. You want to build your own applications if you want to consume an application, but we've also got in bed today. I capability so you can pick up Watson and put it inside of any software product in the >>world. He also mentioned that Watson was built with a lot of of of, of open source components, which a lot of people might not know. What's behind Watson. >>85% of the work that happens and Watson today is open source. Most people don't know that it's Python. It's our it's deploying into tensorflow. What we've done, where we focused our efforts, is how do you make a I easier to use? So we've introduced Auto Way. I had to watch the studio, So if you're building models and python, you can use auto. I tow automate things like feature engineering algorithm, selection, the kind of thing that's hard for a lot of data scientists. So we're not trying to create our own language. We're using open source, but then we make that better so that a data scientist could do their job better >>so again come back to a adoption. We talked about three things. Quality, trust and skills. We talked about the data quality piece we talked about the black box, you know, challenge. It's not about skills you mention. There's a 250,000 person Gap data science skills. How is IBM approaching how our customers and IBM approaching closing that gap? >>So think of that. But this in basic economic terms. So we have a supply demand mismatch. Massive demand for data scientists, not enough supply. The way that we address that is twofold. One is we've created a team called Data Science Elite. They've done a lot of work for the clients that were on stage with me, who helped a client get to their first big win with a I. It's that simple. We go in for 4 to 6 weeks. It's an elite team. It's not a long project we're gonna get you do for your success. Second piece is the other way to solve demand and supply mismatch is through automation. So I talked about auto. Aye, aye. But we also do things like using a eye for building data catalogs, metadata creation data matching so making that data prep process automated through A. I can also help that supply demand. Miss Max. The way that you solve this is we put skills on the field, help clients, and we do a lot of automation in software. That's how we can help clients navigate this. So the >>data science elite team. I love that concept because way first picked up on a couple of years ago. At least it's one of the best freebies in the business. But of course you're doing it with the customers that you want to have deeper relationships with, and I'm sure it leads toe follow on business. What are some of the things that you're most proud of from the data science elite team that you might be able to share with us? >>The clients stories are amazing. I talked in the keynote about origin stories, Roll Bank of Scotland, automating 40% of their customer service. Now customer SATs going up 20% because they put their customer service reps on those hardest problems. That's data science, a lead helping them get to a first success. Now they scale it out at Wonderman Thompson on stage, part of big W P p big advertising agency. They're using a I to comb through customer records they're using auto Way I. That's the data science elite team that went in for literally four weeks and gave them the confidence that they could then do this on their own. Once we left, we got countless examples where this team has gone in for very short periods of time. And clients don't talk about this because they have to talk about it cause they're like, we can't believe what this team did. So we're really excited by the >>interesting thing about the RVs example to me, Rob was that you basically applied a I to remove a lot of these mundane tasks that weren't really driving value for the organization. And an R B s was able to shift the skill sets. It's a more strategic areas. We always talk about that, but But I love the example C. Can you talk a little bit more about really, where, where that ship was, What what did they will go from and what did they apply to and how it impacted their businesses? A improvement? I think it was 20% improvement in NPS but >>realizes the inquiry's they had coming in were two categories. There were ones that were really easy. There were when they were really hard and they were spreading those equally among their employees. So what you get is a lot of unhappy customers. And then once they said, we can automate all the easy stuff, we can put all of our people in the hardest things customer sat shot through the roof. Now what is a virtual agent do? Let's decompose that a bit. We have a thing called intent classifications as part of Watson assistant, which is, it's a model that understands customer a tent, and it's trained based on the data from Royal Bank of Scotland. So this model, after 30 days is not very good. After 90 days, it's really good. After 180 days, it's excellent, because at the core of this is we understand the intent of customers engaging with them. We use natural language processing. It really becomes a virtual agent that's done all in software, and you can only do that with things like a I. >>And what is the role of the human element in that? How does it interact with that virtual agent. Is it a Is it sort of unattended agent or is it unattended? What is that like? >>So it's two pieces. So for the easiest stuff no humans needed, we just go do that in software for the harder stuff. We've now given the RVs, customer service agents, superpowers because they've got Watson assistant at their fingertips. The hardest thing for a customer service agent is only finding the right data to solve a problem. Watson Discovery is embedded and Watson assistant so they can basically comb through all the data in the bank to answer a question. So we're giving their employees superpowers. So on one hand, it's augmenting the humans. In another case, we're just automating the stuff the humans don't want to do in the first place. >>I'm gonna shift gears a little bit. Talk about, uh, red hat in open shift. Obviously huge acquisition last year. $34 billion Next chapter, kind of in IBM strategy. A couple of things you're doing with open shift. Watson is now available on open shifts. So that means you're bringing Watson to the data. I want to talk about that and then cloudpack for data also on open shifts. So what has that Red had acquisition done for? You obviously know a lot about M and A but now you're in the position of you've got to take advantage of that. And you are taking advantage of this. So give us an update on what you're doing there. >>So look at the cloud market for a moment. You've got around $600 million of opportunity of traditional I t. On premise, you got another 600 billion. That's public clouds, dedicated clouds. And you got about 400 billion. That's private cloud. So the cloud market is fragmented between public, private and traditional. I t. The opportunity we saw was, if we can help clients integrate across all of those clouds, that's a great opportunity for us. What red at open shift is It's a liberator. It says right. Your application once deployed them anywhere because you build them on red hot, open shift. Now we've brought cloudpack for data. Our data platform on the red hot open shift certified on that Watson now runs on red had open shift. What that means is you could have the best data platform. The best Aye, Aye. And you can run it on Google. Eight of us, Azure, Your own private cloud. You get the best, Aye. Aye. With Watson from IBM and run it in any of those places. So the >>reason why that's so powerful because you're able to bring those capabilities to the data without having to move the date around It was Jennifer showed an example or no, maybe was tail >>whenever he was showing Burt analyzing the data. >>And so the beauty of that is I don't have to move any any data, talk about the importance of not having Thio move that data. And I want I want to understand what the client prerequisite is. They really take advantage of that. This one >>of the greatest inventions out of IBM research in the last 10 years, that hasn't gotten a lot attention, which is data virtualization. Data federation. Traditional federation's been around forever. The issue is it doesn't perform our data virtualization performance 500% faster than anything else in the market. So what Jennifer showed that demo was I'm training a model, and I'm gonna virtualized a data set from Red shift on AWS and on premise repositories a my sequel database. We don't have to move the data. We just virtualized those data sets into cloudpack for data and then we can train the model in one place like this is actually breaking down data silos that exist in every organization. And it's really unique. >>It was a very cool demo because what she did is she was pulling data from different data stores doing joins. It was a health care application, really trying to understand where the bias was peeling the onion, right? You know, it is it is bias, sometimes biases. Okay, you just got to know whether or not it's actionable. And so that was that was very cool without having to move any of the data. What is the prerequisite for clients? What do they have to do to take advantage of this? >>Start using cloudpack for data. We've got something on the Web called cloudpack experiences. Anybody can go try this in less than two minutes. I just say go try it. Because cloudpack for data will just insert right onto any public cloud you're running or in your private cloud environment. You just point to the sources and it will instantly begin to start to create what we call scheme a folding. So a skiing version of the schema from your source writing compact for data. This is like instant access to your data. >>It sounds like magic. OK, last question. One of the big takeaways You want people to leave this event with? >>We are trying to inspire clients to give a I shot. Adoption is 4 to 10% for what is the largest economic opportunity we will ever see in our lives. That's not an acceptable rate of adoption. So we're encouraging everybody Go try things. Don't do one, eh? I experiment. Do Ah, 100. Aye, aye. Experiments in the next year. If you do, 150 of them probably won't work. This is where you have to change the cultural idea. Ask that comes into it, be prepared that half of them are gonna work. But then for the 52 that do work, then you double down. Then you triple down. Everybody will be successful. They I if they had this iterative mindset >>and with cloud it's very inexpensive to actually do those experiments. Rob Thomas. Thanks so much for coming on. The Cuban great to see you. Great to see you. All right, Keep right, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, we'll hear from Miami at the IBM A I A data form right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Boomi World 19, brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, with John Furrier. We are in Washington D.C. at Boomi 19. This is our second day of coverage and John and I are very excited to welcome one of Boomi's customers, we have Olive Perrins, head of In Home Experience at Sky. Olive, it's great to have you here. >> Hi, lovely to be here, it's a fantastic event. >> It is, we saw you onstage yesterday so we're very pleased to have you join us on theCUBE, so I think a lot of folks know about Sky. Everybody, I shouldn't say everybody on the planet, but most of us have an ISP. We have cable services. So, we're all customers of Sky or some of Sky's peers across the globe, so, we all kind of understand that. You guys have built something very cool with Boomi, ‘Future Assurance View’ tool, and when you taught that, when you showed me this before we went live, (exclaims) bring that to the U.S. because whenever there is a problem with our internet, I mean people, we just stop, right? >> Yeah. >> So, talk to us about what Sky has built with Boomi and some of the great things that it is enabling. >> Sure, so I think we always had amazing diagnostic information and we had lots of data. What we never did was connect at that and did data-driven decisioning. So, for us, Boomi was there to connect all of the sources together with the, over six million routers out in the field, and live on demand for a customer, check everything, all of the, telemetry data from their hubs, from their line and make sure that line is connected, it's fast enough, it compares well to their neighbors, it's stable, it's not retraining, it's as good as the line can be, and the wifi to every device in the home is good. If not, it simply decides which engineer it needs to fix this and dispatches the job. >> And you started this initially in a reactive mode to start, okay, there's faults here. Talk to us about that migration, we'll say transformation, since we're here, the transformation from reactive to proactive and then unveiling what you guys are doing with predictive. >> Yeah so, I think when we started, we set ourselves this big game of getting to 69% digital first. We were around 25% before we lunged, and to be honest, most of that 25%, it was to find the telephone number in digital rather than do anything. We're now at 87% and as you can imagine, the amount of data logs that creates, about 300,000 customers a week running the tool, has now led us to know which outcome is most reliable and really optimize our decisions. So, then we started to think, "Okay, well it's great that we're fixing "these issues, but we probably have "a lot of customers in pain." Who we're not getting to because they're not calling us or visiting the tool. Why don't we go proactive and then go predictive. Find who's going to be faulty tomorrow and intervene before it happens. So, we've taken all of the intelligence in Boomi and codified it into an algorithm, and every night, it runs and predicts who'll be healthy or unhealthy a signal tomorrow, and then, anyone who needs an engineer, we dispatch it and it just fixes it free of charge before the customer even knows it's broken. >> And was this, I'm just envisioning of the recent issues I've had with ISPs, ah, I need this. Was this driven by, you said initially, just a couple of years ago, only a quarter of your customers were, only a quarter of them were starting their search digitally and now it's up to 87% in just a two year period. What you've done to be, to go from reactive to proactive to predictive, was that driven by customer demand saying, we want, I don't even want to have to call in. I want to be able to get to you from any channel, or was it more driven by you guys suddenly having a massive increase in data, and saying, "We've got a lot more information. "If we can connect it together and unlock the value, "the services we deliver can become predictive." >> I think it was a blend of both, truthfully. So, once you ultimately master the cost per consumer, you've got a really good data model that says, given this fault, then send this engineer and we know, we'll fix it and they'll be happy. I think at that point, you start to say well, where are the other costs to the business? And ultimately that comes from churn and attracting new customers. So, it just feels right to spend more upfront on engineers to save churn later and keep a really healthy and happy base. >> You know, one of the great things about In Home Experience is obviously wifi 'cause it goes down whenever you're on screens, calls. So, the operational side to totally get the efficiencies and the savings that probably comes with that, but people are working at home more, you've seen virtual, so, there's a real need for reliability at home, but also it brings up the data and the security questions 'cause now you got wifi light-bulbs, you got, everything's wifi. So, you know, the In Home Experience now has people maybe working at home. >> Yeah. >> Home and pleasure, security, malware, all these things are cutting-edge data problems. How do you guys view that? What's the internal thinking around how to protect the home and. >> So, I guess the first thing that we needed to be really clear on is traditionally, in an ISP world, you are risk averse and you said our demarkation is where the line enters the home. That's no longer acceptable in today's age. Every time Facebook goes down, our help contacts increase by 30% and so, we know that our demarkation isn't the device, it's not the application on the device, it's the consumer themselves. It's their understanding and as an ISP, it's our job to educate, support and handhold. So, everything that we can do to make our hub smart enough that they're plug and play, and everything that we can do to predict what customers need in IOT and security, and build that in its source, it's the right thing to do. You'll have healthier happier customers in the longterm. >> And parents also want to turn the wifi off when the kids aren't doing their homework. You know, these policy kind of user experienced things are kind of, I mean, as an example, we have kids, but you know. >> We just launched a remote control for the internet, so you can control what your kids have access to anywhere, in or out of the home on any device. >> And you guys have just in this last couple of years, where mostly it's been going from reactive to proactive, you said predictive was launched recently, but even in that two years, your NPS Net Promoter score has gone up 20%, so, can you imagine in the next year or probably last, the impact that you're going to have because customers are getting what they want, and they probably, some of them don't even know it, if they don't know they have a problem, but Sky has identified it. I can only imagine that the churn numbers will go down and the NPS will even continue to rise. >> Exactly, and that's precisely what this is about, it's the happier the base is, the more stable. In the end, you're going to spend more on engineers and less on churn. That is the perfect balance, it really is. >> And in terms of spend, let's talk about the cost savings, dramatic cost savings. The first year alone, you saved a six million pounds? And the second year? >> Six million pounds and on track for similar this year. >> That's transformative to the business. >> It absolutely is, yeah. I think what it has allowed us to do is really knuckle down to watch at our budget bate, and get stability around that. So, now we've given the business some controls and dials, and they know what they can pull to control costs. >> What's next? What are you guys working on next 'cause obviously, that's good in return, you're reinvesting, it's more data, it's more things to do, it's got remote control internet. What are other things you guys looking at operationally to get into to innovate on? >> So, I think there's a real need for speed, for us it's about investing in fiber. We're putting all of our customers on a high fiber diet right now (laughs). So, it's dark fiber, faster fiber, one gig connections, and then on the wifi side, it's giving guarantees, so, it's no longer acceptable to have a router squirting out wifi. What we're now doing is guaranteeing you will have wifi of the best quality anywhere in your home to support any device, and we're putting our money where our mouth is and sending wifi heat mapping engineers with pods to get your house up and sorted right first time. Beyond that, I think it's very much going into the world of IOT, smart sensors, cameras and with that, of course, data. It means IP storage, backup for your cameras. >> One of the interesting (mumbles) trends we've been covering is automation. You're saying RPA, for instance, is a hot sector, observability on the data side, so this Cloud has, but you've mentioned the demark has changed to the user, so, you got wearables, I mean, if you've got gamers in the house, they're going to look at ping times. The kids know what ping times are. So, you're going to have all the speed issues. So, what's that going to look like for you guys as you think about more speed, more data, more people wanting custom services. Is there automation involved? I mean, where do you guys see the automation low-hanging fruit and where's the vision go? >> So, for me, it's not necessarily about automation, it's about personalization. We already have that data. We already use that data. Is it relevant to every customer? I'm sure my mum wouldn't want to know about ping, she wants to know if it's broken. So, I think for us, it's matching what's your intent and have we serviced that in an outcome, and right now, that's exactly where we're going with conversational AI, and then, really starting to consider, have we achieved your goal? RPA has a place, but I think right now, it's less about the generic quality of service and more about targeting your individual consumer needs in the home. >> I love that personalization angle because I think we sometimes in this digital age, personalization is lost. Sometimes we do that of our own, if we're going you know, on Door Dash or something to, instead of going to a restaurant. We want, I think we want a mix of both, but that personalization where something like wifi comes into play, like you were saying, when Facebook goes down, 38% spike in people calling and going, "Hey, there's a problem here." Whether or not it's Sky's problem or not. So, when we look at this demand for personalization, peoples' levels of frustration with, if there is an issue, you guys have resolved that, obviously, but in terms of what Boomi and Excentra announced yesterday with conversational AI. >> Yes. >> Really really exciting stuff there. You guys said, you and I were chatting before we went live, that there was a purposeful decision at Sky to not start this digital transformation with AI. Now, you're ready to take this on. Tell us about that decision and how you're now, really have the foundation with which to actually do it, conversationally, and make it personal. >> Yeah, and I think so much time goes into training bots and I really think that it needs to be authentic. You don't need to feel like you're talking to a human. It's okay that you know you're talking to a virtual machine, but that first interaction needs to be meaningful and helpful or you'll quickly stop engaging with it. So, I think for us, it was about define what does good quality look like? What might be the things that go wrong with Broadband? Ultimately, it really is only slow, not working at all or dropping lots outside the home or inside the home, and really it's about saying, what might be the problems we know about? Eliminate those and there's only a finite number of alternative problems left that we can really start to train a model on our learnings to date. So, I think having excluded all of the weird wonderful edge cases and dispatches, there's less there to worry about, but it's higher value for the consumer, and I think on the personalization angle, the key for us is understanding, are you tech-avoidant? Are you tech-savvy? Where are you on that scale? And which channel should we serve you up those steps in and how complicated or handholding should those steps be? And I think that's, for us, where conversational AI comes in. It's personalization, the number of steps, the type of steps and the channel that it's best served in. There is no point having Siri guide you through really complicated hands and knees wiring stuff. That's best done with some images sent through WhatsApp, for example. >> So, you guys will have the data to be able to determine, not just maybe knowing, why is this person calling in or why are they engaging with a chat bot? But to understand, what's that persons' preferred method of communication. There's that whole consumerization effect and that demand of the consumer of, you know, your mom and my mom-- >> And my handholding. >> Exactly, would have different levels. So, you're going to have enough of that quality data to really deliver the personalized experience way beyond knowing what boxes I have installed, what routers I have, what version, but also, my level of technology understanding. That's pretty cool. >> Exactly that. Exactly that, that's the destination for this year, absolutely. >> Well, sign me up. Bring this over to the U.S. And before we go, I want to note that that Sky and Boomi together, your design won the Best Enterprise Project at the UK National Technology Awards recently. >> It did, it did. >> Congratulations. >> What an honor. Thank you, it was a great night. >> Exactly, well, Olive, it's been great having you on theCUBE sharing with us what Sky is doing to really deliver a personalized experience going from reactive to proactive to predictive, awesome stuff, thank you. >> Exactly. Thank you, pleasure. >> Ours, too. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 19. (electronic upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We here have Dave Nuti, who is the Head of Channels for Open Systems. Open Systems just recently launched their partner network in 2019. Dave, welcome to theCUBE conversation. >> Thank you John, good to be here. >> So, security obviously is the hottest area we've been covering it like a blanket these days. It's only getting better and stronger in terms of number of players and options for customers. But that's also a double-edged sword. There's more options, more for customers. And security problems aren't going away. They're just getting more compounded. It's complicated global marketplace, global scale, regional clouds on-premise, no surface area. We've had these conversations with you guys a lot and it's super important, but opportunity to deliver solutions with channel partners has become a huge thing at Amazon re:Inforce, we had a big conversation what that even looks like. It's a new market opportunity for security players. You guys are forging there. Tell us about your partner's channel, just launched, give us a quick overview. >> Yeah I have a growing smile as you talk about the complexity of the space and how difficult it can be because we're the ones that eliminate that complexity, make it very simple. And for our partners that we've been engaging with, I joined the company just over a year ago and we began laying the groundwork of transitioning from a direct sales model to a partner only model and you fast forward to where we are today, we've already made that 180 degree turn and are working exclusively through partners throughout North America and executing around the world in that way. What's exciting for the partners is that they have a new supplier in the portfolio in the form of Open Systems that while it is a new name to them, is anything but new in experience and execution. It might arguably be one of the more seasoned suppliers in their entire portfolio they have today and it is opening doors and breaking down barriers to entry in a number of security categories that for years they've been on the outside looking in trying to figure out, how can I participate in these areas and how can I really unify a conversation around value for my customers that I am the trusted advisor to? And those are the exciting networks of hundreds and thousands of trusted advisors out there that we're engaging with today. >> You know, the security space is interesting. It's changing a lot, it's not just the one supplier, multiple suppliers, there are now hundreds and thousands of suppliers of something, the security market. There's a lot of venture capital being funded for startups, you got customers spending money so there's a lot of spend and activity flow and money flow and huge value creation opportunity. Yet customers are also looking at the cloud technologies as a disruptive enabler of how to deal with new things but also they're looking at their supplier relationships right now, they're evaluating you know, who do I want to do business with, they don't want to get another tool, they don't want to new thing. They don't want to get more and more sprawl. You guys have been Open System and been very successful with word of mouth customer growth. The CEO talked about that in the last interview, it's like you guys have been getting a lot of wins. Classic word of mouth, good product offerings. So you have success on the product side. As you go into the channel and enable the people in front of the customers every day to bring a solution to the table, what's the value proposition to the partners? Because they're fighting to be relevant, they want to be in front of the customers. The customers want their partners as well. So the opportunity for the people in front of your customers for the channel is big. What's the value proposition? >> Well establishing trust with the channel is critical. For years they've had solutions that roll into the portfolio that were written in a conference room a year and a half ago and they're only selling off of PowerPoint slides and now you're coming in with Open Systems and you have 20 years of experience accumulated, maturity and automation into a platform that they rarely see that type of door opened up for them. So when they lean in and they really start asking questions about Open Systems, we really check off boxes in a fantastic way for our partners. You talk about vendor sprawl and complexity and it all boils back, you're exactly correct, to the embracing of the cloud and that diversity of application origin, the diversity of the users trying to access those corporate resources, wherever they happen to be hosted and how do I unify a strategy and it's resulted in what is not uncommon having to engage 30, 40, 50, different vendors and then trying to unify that environment, let alone the problem that you can't hire the people to go and do it anyway. There's a negative unemployment issue in IT security categories today. So you know, there's a very, very fortune few that have the ability, the bench, the depth, the resource to do that and then an even fewer number of people who can lead an enterprise down that path and then you turn the corner and where usually there's this tug of war between agility and security. If I'm really agile, it means I'm compromising security. Or if I'm super secure, I'm going to be as slow as a sloth in doing anything. And then you have Open Systems sitting in the middle who says, that's not necessarily the case. You can have world class deployment in an agile platform where all that complexity and service chaining unification is handled for you and that really, that is mind boggling and I'll tell you, it's a whole lot of fun to demonstrate it. >> You know, Dave, we talked a lot of customers and user customers through our media business, CIOs, and now CISOs and they're all kind of working together. They have partners, they have partners they've worked with for many, many years from the old days of buying servers and rack and stacking 'em to software to applications but now the touch points for services are those traditional suppliers, application developers, but security's being bolted in everywhere, so almost all services need security, that's essentially what the main message with cloud is. So that gives the service opportunities for you guys but partners to enable you guys in there. As a partner, if I'm a partner of Open Systems, what do I get? 'Cause I want to make my, I want to keep my customer. I want to deliver security. What do I talk to my customer, what's the pitch that I can give as a partner to customer to ensure that they're going to get what they need from Open Systems? >> What I tell our partners is that we should be the services conversation that you lead with. There are a lot of other options out there and even if you don't mention it by name, if you approach the conversation in an open way with a customer with the mindfulness of the wide net of capabilities and value that you're able to execute on with Open Systems, it gives you your strongest footing. One of the big problems and you mentioned it, is that so often for years these technology conversations have been siloed and isolated and that always creates problems. I talked to a partner who works their way downstream on an SD-WAN conversation and at the very end they say, "This looks great, we just have "to get it passed by our security team." And the wind falls out of everybody's sails because that should've been part of the conversation all along or vice versa, starting from a security conversation and now I've got to get the network team to sign off on it. Open Systems really comes with a model that says all those viewpoints need to be in the room at the same time. That's how you execute and that's how you unify an environment so that you're not running into those bottlenecks later on. It's just madness, it needs to be simpler. >> We were talking before we came on camera about what it means to be disruptive and valuable to partners and to customers and you mentioned convergence of capabilities and manage services. What do you mean by that? I get convergence of services, we talk about that all the time from industrial IoT, we've been doing some segments on that to manage services, people get what that means. What do you mean by convergence of services and and manage services with respect to security and Open Systems? >> Absolutely. I mean convergences, we all carry one in our pocket so how many people carry a separate GPS device with a separate digital camera with a separate phone and a separate- Converging technologies just simplifies my environment and often times is a viewpoint of I'm compromising in certain areas that if I break everything out myself I can probably do it better off myself. And in some cases that's absolutely true. When you look at how Open Systems has taken a very diverse set of services and network and security categories and unified it into a single platform, we've taken, if you will, we've taken that stack of boxes and turned it into one by building a main services platform that's delivered as a service but what we've layered on top of it is the ability to manage it for our customers and I talk about modern managed services. It's very different. Before maintainence services was, I'm just too incapable to do something myself so I need somebody else to do it. When I talk to a partner, I like pointing out that I don't try to find somebody too dumb to do the things we do and they have to rely upon us. No, our best customers are very forward-leaning 'cause they realize that the automation that we've accumulated over 20 years that we're 85 to 90% of our detected incidents are handled by AI automation and Machine Learning and that type of monitoring automation that we have at the edge and the engine and the team of 115 level three plus engineers that are executing on our customer's behalf is we're force multiplier for our end customers to an ability that they will never achieve on their own, they'll never build that on their own. Those are the two, I think two of the biggest pillars in disruption are convergence and managed services and they are two enormous check boxes for Open Systems where it's hard to find someone more experienced in that than the team at Open Systems. >> And those are realities that the customers are dealing with but also the other reality on top of that to make it even more complicated and better for you guys and partners is you have more surface area to deal with. So the AI and the automation really play into the hands of, on the delivery side, so if I'm a partner, I'm standing up Open Systems, it's working. >> So you can't just develop that in a conference room. That's something that's accumulated over time, that's what comes with experience. And I usually really lean heavily into our maturity and our experience. We're in 183 countries with customers today. We have a 98% retention rate, a 58 NPS score. When I show the monitoring portals, the visibility tools, the maturity, and what has been developed isn't just Open Systems, you know, stubbornly telling the world what they need and should be doing. It's actually a very aggressive two way conversation with our existing customers and their guidance telling us, this is what we want, what we need to see, what we need to be able to pull and what we need your help in enforcing. I met with a customer in Pacific Northwest and he dropped a line on me that was terrific. He said, "I'm looking for a partner "that can tell us the questions we should be asking "that we haven't and the technologies "we should be evaluating that we haven't looked at yet." And I told him I was going to steal that line and I'm using it here today. Because that is an absolutely brilliant description of exactly the type of customer experience that we expect to deliver from Open Systems to our customers. >> So if I'm rep, I'm a person who's got a portfolio of customers and I want to bring Open Systems to the table, take me through that. I mean, am I asking the questions, what are some of those questions I should be asking, what's my engagement posture look like to my customer? >> That's a great question. I've been to a number of events and sat through kind of advanced training seminars and at the beginning of a seminar, you have somebody on stage saying, talk about security categories. If you talk about security, then you have a pathway to sell anything else on there. And then at the end of the event, all the SD-WAN guys were sitting on the stage saying, "Talk about SD-WAN, it's the glue "that holds everything together and if you can sell SD-WAN, "it'll give you pathway to everything else." And meanwhile I'm in the back of the room smiling just wondering, what if you didn't have to pick? What if you could just have a wide open conversation with your customer around application origins and remote users and how you're unifying security and application performance and routing intelligence for any application origin to any type of user trying to access it, how are you addressing that? And that's really at the core of what Open Systems has developed for its clients is that type of agility and flexibility where you're never trapped and opening up considerations around new and emerging threats and capabilities that you should be looking at where if it's not the time for you today, we've still already designed it in for you, so when you're ready it's there for you. >> Now the real question on the rep's mind, while he's asking those basic questions. How do I make money from this? Which is essentially, money making certainly is a great channel formula. It's indirect sales for you guys but also you have to have a couple table stakes. One, it's got to be a product that can be sold. The delivery has to be elegant enough where there's margin for the partner. And benefit the customer. So the money making is certainly the big part of not only trust as the supplier to the channel, but also as an engine of innovation and wealth creation. What's your pitch there, how am I making money? >> Well as a managed services model, that's always the beauty is you get to configure to the requirement of the individual customer so no one's force fed capability they don't need or an over subscription for what they might need in a year so just in case they want to, we're able to right size and deliver the capability that's specifically configured to the individual customer level but then also show them that they have a pathway to capability laid out for them and integrated and modern, we never go end of life, we never get shelved, this is something that is living, breathing, you're never buying boxes, again and service chaining and handling the complexity so we make that very simple for our partners in categories around security and SOC and manage services, and SIM, and CASB, these are things that they hear about but they don't know how to address them with their customers. And now Open Systems makes that very simple because we fully integrated the capabilities around those categories and many more into the same service-- >> So one of the psychology, I was just reading from that as a rep, if I was a rep I would be like, oh, I don't have to overplay my hand. I can get an engagement with my customer, they can get a feel for the service, grow into it because it's a managed service and go from there, it's not a big ask. >> Right. >> It's instant alignment. >> Yeah, often times what we do is a timing issue. Somebody just bought boxes in one category so fine, we'll coexist with that. We sit in parallel and in framework with current investments and subscriptions that happen to be in place but we give them a pathway that allows them to integrate it into fully unified and I like to really point this out is that, we don't go to a customer and say, "What do you need? "We'll build it for you." It's, what do you need? We've already built it, we just want to know how we configure it for you to match up to what your requirements are and maybe suggest some areas that should be a part of that consideration as well based upon 20 plus years of doing this with customers that we already have under our belt. >> Yeah, it gives them confidence that the operating model of say cloud, it's been around, it's proven and now you have a model there. Final question for you Dave is okay, my fear might be, are you going to be around tomorrow 'cause people want to know, are you going to be there for the long haul? What's your answer to that? >> We're a 30 year old security company founded out of Zurich and started in 1990 and transitioned as a service in 1999 and have grown on the backs, we're customer funded. So this is as battle-tested and bulletproof as anything that they may have in their portfolio and it shows extremely well in front of a customer. I spend more time talking to partners saying be the first one in the door to talk about Open Systems with your customer, don't let somebody else do it. Or certainly use the mindfulness of the net of capabilities of Open Systems and don't go in narrow-viewed because if somebody comes in behind you with our conversation, I don't think you're going to like what happens. >> One more question just jumped in my head, you reminded me of, we were talking before we came on camera around how channels are great leverage, great win-win, but we're in a modern area of computing, delivery of services, cloud has certainly shown that, whole nother wave coming behind it, security obviously the biggest challenge. You've been in the channel business for awhile, what's your take on what's happening in the channel business because it is changing, there's opportunities there, what's your take? >> Yeah, this is the second company I've had the opportunity to introduce into the channel and this one is a lot of fun, I'll say that. But the channel's traditionally thought of in more of a telecom space and for many of our partners, that's where they've been literally for decades in some cases is selling technology but is selling connectivity rather, networks, but what has happened is that technology has found its way into the network layer and because of cloud and SaaS app origins and remote users from coffee shops or theCUBE or our customer site accessing those applications, it's created a massive set of diversity in requirements on the IT team at the enterprise and how do you accommodate for all that? How do you keep up with it and maintain it? And now these things transition from these Capex buying boxes and maintenance agreements and rotating those out and that model is constantly being assaulted in the same way that we've seen so many services that we have come to our house. Nobody digs a well for water anymore, I've got a water company. Or makes their own electric power plant in the backyard, I've got the electric company. >> Everything's as a service. >> Absolutely. >> Dave Nuti, head of channels at Open Systems. Thanks for sharing the insight on your partner congratulations. Thanks for coming in. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here at CUBE conversation in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, coming to you live from day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy in Atlanta, Georgia. We're very pleased to welcome Citrix's Chief People Officer, Donna Kimmel, EVP-- >> Yeah. >> And Chief People Officer. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> My pleasure. It's great to be here, Lisa and Keith. Thank you. >> I was telling you before we went live, Donna, this has been a great event. This is our first day of coverage, but the keynote really kicked things off very, in a way that's so relatable, just showing workforce, and some of the stats you guys gave were staggering. The fact that power users are who enterprise software is designed for. But that's 1% of the users. >> Donna: Exactly. >> Or things like $7 trillion is wasted a year, and Keith's brought this up on a number of our interviews, of wasted productivity. There's a huge need for employee experience to become a C-level business imperative. >> Donna: Yeah. >> Talk to us about that from Citrix's point of view. >> Absolutely. Employee experience is incredibly important. When I think about the concept, it is really about people and technology together. And we can't do great things in the workplace if we don't have the right tools at our fingertips, and technology really supports that. But employee experience is also very broad. It's all encompassing. When we think about employee experience, it's everything from when somebody starts or applies to a company, what kind of experience are they having with that company? What is their interview process like? What is their pre-hire process like? What happens when they come for their onboarding? Are they experiencing the company the way that they should, and then it's about their career journey. So employee experience is incredibly important, and it's incredibly pervasive. But I think it also starts with understanding why it matters to companies. And I think when you look at why it matters to companies, companies can't be successful without people. It's people that are the one's that are driving results. It's people that are the ones that are collaborating and bringing the culture of that company to life, and it's people that are driving new product design and thinking about what customers need and putting customers first. And companies are successful because of the people within it, so we need to create experiences that make a difference. >> So as we talk about those experiences, when I think of Citrix, I think of Citrix in a traditional sense. You front end a work day. You front end HRM from SAP, those solutions. So as Citrix starts to engage more with HR directly, talk me about that value conversation Citrix is having with HR and how Citrix adds value versus a company that's specific focus is in creating HR software. >> Exactly. So we're creating software that enables employees and people in an organization, talent in an organization, to be successful to do their best work on a daily basis. So though we are not creating HR software per se, what we are creating is employee experience, and it's employee experience through the technology. So when employees have the right tools at their fingertips in a way that cuts out the continual searching, as one of the things that we talked about this morning in the keynote, was all about how much time is wasted. At least 25% of an employee's time is wasted searching or context switching between applications, not being able to use the applications to their fullest. And we recognize there's a fair amount that employees need to do that are very task-oriented. And if you can automate those and bring them to the employee in a very intelligent way, using the analytics. You also heard about that this morning as well. The analytics get to know the employee. So it's more personal. So you get what you need to at your fingertips, you can do it more quickly, more easily, and then really focus on some of the more critical things that are going to help you be successful as an employee. >> You bring up the personal aspect, and I think personalization is becoming more and more a critical element of... because as consumers we expect that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So we're starting to see the influences of the consumerization of IT, and it really is something that can be a big differentiator to attract talent and retain talent-- >> Yeah. >> Which is also a business imperative. I'm glad, though, that you brought up, hey, employee experience isn't just, okay, this intelligent experience, and I can have access to all my apps. It starts with the hiring process. >> Absolutely. >> The interviewing, the recruiting. We were talking about our different onboarding experiences, Keith and I were at lunch and how that really can set the tone-- >> Donna: Exactly. >> Of an employee with their employer, and you're right. It's not just about the technology needs to be an enabler, but it's got to start from even the recruitment. >> Exactly. >> When I step back, and I think about employee experience, it brings me back to the concepts that we've been talking about for a while now regarding the future of work. It's really about a company having the right culture, creating the right physical space and digital space, and then also, the technology that's used. And again, culture can be a real differentiator for an organization, just like we know that the talent is a differentiator for companies. But when you think about the culture, it really speaks to what's important to human beings, what's important to employees? Are they socially involved? Is their product meaningful? Is what their doing meaningful to the community, to the customers that they're serving? So are we tapping into what's meaningful to people? Are employees being given opportunities for flexibility and collaboration? Are they being given opportunities for choice? And that also brings me back to what you were talking about in terms of personalization. If we think about the workforce, right now, at least at Citrix, we have about five different generations in our workforce. And you might be able to look across all those different generations and look for trends and different ways that generations might work, but the reality is it's about the individual. It's truly about understanding that individual's choice for working anywhere, anyhow, anyway, on any device. That's what's really going to drive a difference. That becomes part of the culture. If you have the right, again, grounded values, you have the right environment that you're creating, that is part of the appeal to employees. And then you try to create the right space, and you want to create the right physical space because when employees are in the workforce, and when they come into the office, you want it to feel like a place where they can collaborate, where they can change and move, and move into private space if they need it, or quiet space if they need it, or opportunities for, as we say, collisions at the coffee machine where all of a sudden new ideas come out because you're generating thoughts and conversation. So space, physical space, and all of that movement also mimics our personal worlds, right? We get up and we move around to different kind of spaces throughout the day. We want our workspace to feel the same way. And then the other piece to that is technology. And are we creating the right technological tools that enable employees to have that freedom and that choice around the kinds of devices they're using and the spaces where they're working in to really be able to bring their best selves to the workplace and contribute because ultimately, we want to be part of successful organizations. So it's a combination of all of those for me in terms of the question that you were just asking. >> So you're a EVP of a nice size software company. And some of these things you've had to put into practice. Citrix is a 30-year-old company. I think I'm aging myself because I've done a few Citrix deployments early in my own career. >> Yeah. >> As you start to pivot, you're part of these executive-level conversations saying, "We're going to invest in AI, machine learning," and you look at this job market for AI, ML data scientists, it's a tight market. It's really hard to attract the talent. While Florida is lovely, it may not be the place for ML or AI talent, but more specifically, this type of talent might be spread across the world. >> Donna: That's right. >> What types of changes have you had to oversee inside of Citrix to attract and retain that talent? >> Absolutely. I think it's a great point because I think not only are we at Citrix doing it, but many other companies are looking at the same kind of question, which is where do we find the best talent, and how do we enable that talent anywhere around the world to successfully contribute to our company? And because it is so challenging to find talent, we do need to be more flexible as organizations. We need to look at distributed office locations. We need to look at opportunities for people to be able to work from their homes. We look at a total labor force, like gig workers, in addition to contractors and employee base. So our technology enables that. And I think that's one of the great selling points of having people join Citrix is you are part of the movement of helping organizations be flexible. You're part of helping to drive that kind of employee experience so you can hire anyone from anywhere around the world in order to help you achieve the business results that you're looking for. >> In the four years that you've been EVP and Chief People Officer, how have you helped this culture to evolve? As Keith mentioned, this is a 30-year-young company, and cultural change is challenging, again, but we think about it in our personal lives, change is hard. >> Donna: Yeah. >> What are some of the key strategies that you've employed to help facilitate that cultural change? >> It's a great question. When I joined about three and a half years ago, we were embarking on a transformation at the company and part of that transformation was taking a look at where we needed to evolve from a product strategy perspective and from meeting our customer needs in a very different way. And the more we got out there and listened to our customers, it helped solidify what we needed to do from a strategy perspective. What we also realized is you'll never be able to accomplish your strategy without the right people. And you need the right culture and the right set of values that are going to underpin everything you do as a company. So we took some very strong values that were already part of Citrix and kind of modernized them, brought them into words that had meaning for our employees. So we did quite a few feedback sessions, surveys, and things, and gathered. And we really focus, from a strong values perspective, on integrity, respect, curiosity, courage, and unity. And those words have incredible meaning for us in terms of what we're doing to not only transform the products and the markets that we're in, but how do we transform our own workplace to continue to drive an employee experience that lives out those values and that culture? So it underpins everything that we do. >> So let's talk about lessons that can be applied from Citrix, a big company, to smaller companies, because Citrix has customers across the spectrum from the small shop with less than 10 people, to companies with tens of thousands of people. Is employee experience something that only large companies should consider, or is this something that as entrepreneurs like myself only have a couple of employees, should I be thinking about employee experience in a specific way? >> Yeah, that's a great question. When I think about, again, why employee experience is so important, I think, first, it's because it's about people and it's about humanity, and why it matters to any business regardless of your size, is that it's about people first, and people first are going to help any business be able to achieve its goals and its results. The technology that we're creating also is what we call general purpose. It is for individuals to enable individuals to be successful in their workplace. So I do believe strongly it is for any size organization. And the principles ring true, whether you're a small business or whether you're a large business. I know my sister also has a small business, and the team members that work with her, very small business, the team members that work with her need to feel that same vibrancy of what she's trying to create for her clients. And so I think it's the same for any size business. Culture, values, grounding, experience that you can create to enable those employees to feel like they're part of what you're doing and they're part of your success. >> We talked with Simon Bray earlier, and I learned a new acronym, TOMO. >> Yeah. >> I love that. >> Yeah, it's great. >> Total Motivation. >> Exactly. >> How do you measure cultural transformation within Citrix? What are some of those key, is there an internal NPS survey, or other things that you guys do to go, we're going in the right direction here? >> We do, absolutely. It's no doubt challenging to measure. We do an employee net promoter score, and we do an engagement score. So the net promoter score that we do on a quarterly basis, and our full engagement survey, we do on an annual basis. And since we started our transformation, three and a half years ago, our net promoter score has gone up dramatically. And we are nearing the 50% mark, which is very high for employee net promoter scores. So we feel really proud about the constant movement in the right direction around that score, and the same thing with our engagement scores. And we've become certified two years in a row through Great Places To Work. So again, that movement in the right direction is telling us that our employees do feel connected to who we are, what we're doing, and that they feel part of driving those solutions and those results. >> So I was looking at some of the Citrix revenue numbers over the weekend. Looks like a lot of things are up. Subscription revenues, SAS revenue, workspace revenue, and employee satisfaction is up as well. >> Absolutely, and we're proud of all of it. We talk in a very positive way. David, our CEO, always talks about up and to the right. And we are, all of our measures have been up and to the right on a consistent basis, from an employee perspective and from a business results perspective. And it takes every single employee to be able to do that. >> What are you most excited about as we wrap up here. I know we're so early in Synergy 2019, but like I was saying, we've had such an exciting start to our time here. What are you excited about when this is all done in terms of feedback that you're hoping and expecting to hear from the employees? >> I think probably one of the most exciting things for me is to be in the field that I'm in, Human Resources, focusing on people, and focusing on talent, and recognizing that the product that we are putting out there is making a difference from an employee experience perspective. So being part of that vision, that mission I think is incredibly exciting. So we can live it internally as well as help our customers live it within their own environment. And that connection, I think, is incredibly powerful and really meaningful to be a part of. >> It can be such a differentiator as well if your customers see, ah, there's a Citrix on Citrix story. >> Donna: Absolutely. >> And you're transforming using your own technology, that's one of the best brand validations that you can get, right? >> Absolutely, it helps us tell the story with our customers, and it's a great selling point for new employees that are attracted to coming to work for us, become part of the movement and the change of really driving employee experience and driving that partnership through technology. >> Donna, it's been so great to have you on theCUBE with Keith and me-- >> Thank you. >> Helping to expand, at least my perspective of employee experience. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: Oh, likewise. For Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from our day one coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman theCUBE coming to you from Dell Technology Worlds 2019 day one, there's only about 15 thousand people here and about four thousand of Dell Technologies closest partners. We're very pleased to welcome back one of our Alumni to theCUBE, Chris McNabb the CEO of Dell Boomi. Chris thanks for joining us! >>u Lisa it's great to be here, Stu great to see you again. You know it's really exciting. >> This morning we've had such an electric day, I'd say we're half way through day one. This mornings key note kicked off with a lot of energy. First of all I have to say Michael Dell coming out to Queen music, that was for me you had me at hello. >> Yeah me too. After seeing Bohemian Rhapsody, it was the only way to go. >> He must be a fan of the movie! >> Exactly. >> Yeah Chris do you have your walk on music picked yet? >> I don't yet I'm still kind of shuffling through a couple different options. >> Okay well we can help with that, we're music fans too. >> Gotcha. >> But so much excitement, so much energy, so much collaboration across all of Dells brands, Michael saying with big energy, Boomi is leading with cloud data integration. Talk to us about what's going on at Boomi we were with you guys about five months or so ago at Boomi World, what's happening now, what's exciting you? >> So every day is exciting at Boomi we continue to grow extraordinarily rapidly across the world and we are focused on accelerating business outcomes for our customers, it is simple as that. It's why our customers stay with us we have over 97% retention rate so we're successful at doing that and when you can come in and produce wins for people, you know they have data silos all over the place, they need to be able to reconnect their systems, apps, databases, but also their processes, people and devices. And once you look at that whole landscape when you can come in and reunify that for them in a way in which they can engage customers, partners or employees in new ways, it's just a huge win and it's a pleasure to get up out of bed every morning without problem. >> Chris It's a powerful story I have to admit it took me a little while to kind of squint through and understand what Boomi did because a lot of times it's like oh it's the cool cloud native, new factor everything like that and we understand getting from the applications that I have today to you know whatever that digitalization, monetization, modernization I have is challenging and there's multiple ways to get there so if I can the thing that was exciting is we hear a lot you know let's meet you where you are and a lot of that is my applications and my processes, my work flow so to modernize and go through that digital transformation, some of it is to create brand new but a lot of that is how do I get what I have to that new multi cloud environment and that was the shout out I heard from Michael this morning about Pivotal, VMware, and Boomi as part of that spectrum to help get us there. Do I have that right? >> Yeah Stu you do, it's just listen, Hybrid IT is going to be here a really long time. People are going to try and survive a scenario where you've got 15 different apps built by 15 different vendors, you've got shadow databases, you've got all this stuff and you're like, but I've got customer data everywhere. So when you're looking for something as simple as a list of customers, what list? None of those data sources are the same, so how do you aggregate that, how do you filter that, how do you do it. So Boomi doesn't want people to just survive Hybrid IT, Boomi wants you to thrive in that environment, want you to really get going and be able to easily unite that, aggregate that, filter that as necessary. So now I have a unified data set in which I can go and engage my sales force and my customers with, and that's really where we play is trying to get it all to be reconnected or unified. >> It's essential everything is about the customer experience, Stu and I were just at a show that was all focused on CX but to have a good customer experience you have to have the right technologies enabling your own workforce to deliver what the customer needs because customer satisfaction yield business outcomes, it's a whole cycle there. >> Yeah. >> For our viewers who want a better vision of where does Boomi fit into you know, I'm a Dell EMC customer, I'm VMware customer, where does Boomi fit in and help these customers to transform that integration layer that allows them to take advantage of this exciting multi cloud world? >> Yeah so Lisa I'll just tell you a really quick story, I'll tell you a personal story. When Boomi has been growing very very rapidly, 62% growth through last year alone, so we're adding people really really fast. As a result of that scale we were horrible at onboarding our new employees, we had a really bad problem, so we looked to our own platform to transform our business and our net new employees experience with that business. Long story short I didn't have people, everybody was busy, I got one of our partners to use our platform to create an entire new employee onboarding process for Boomi. Our net new employee just kind of jumped to the end of the deal, we now have a 21st century engagement mechanism for our employees, that partner of ours put that whole solution together and put it into production in four months, most importantly let's talk about business outcomes. My net new employee NPS went from minus 76, worse number I've ever heard in anything, been in IT 30 years, to plus 92, six months after it's in production we're ready to go. So now to give you a sense, people used to have to fill out a case and go to our case management, fill out a case, schedule a meeting to get a picture taken to get their security badge, now selfie, do you like it, submit, you're done. And all of that, the mobile app that tracks it and performs it, all the engagement, all the interaction with all the systems, we provision our employees across 27 different systems all instantaneous, that used to take us 60 days to get them on to all those different systems. So all of those outcomes is all done with the Boomi platform, the integration requirements, the low code, and the mobile app is all Boomi. So that's why we focus on outcomes. >> So Chris in the key note this morning, want to understand how Boomi fits into some of these environments. We saw Microsoft obviously a big push, long Dell partner, and the other one Kubernetes is the area for all the cloud native discussion and various pieces. How do those fit in to your world? >> So Stu first of all to really understand sort of the bigger picture with Dell and their transformation story right, essential hardware provider, infrastructure provider, you've got VMware and Virtustrea almost making an infrastructure as a service sort of like the bottom of a triangle. You have Pivotal cloud boundary, building applications for competitive advantage right, and then no application works without data. And when you talk about it from a platform perspective that's how I like to think about it and explain it to people that's how Dell Technologies can bring all of this to the table and focus it now on your transformation. When ti comes to the specifics around what VMware and Pivotal are doing with Kubernetes and Google and some other folks and so on, the way we distribute integrations is basically via container technologies, we've had Docker Support now Kubernetes support, so it's very native to us that's how we can manage it from one spot and yet deploy really anywhere as it runs, so there's a lot of data capabilities that really align very well with Pivotal, we also have the Pivotal Data Services Tile so if you're an application developer, you're building that really cool app and oh that's ready to go but you need data from somewhere, you click the Boomi tile it's that data services tile, you can embed it right into your code, in and out comes the data sort seamlessly for you, it's a much better experience for the developer. So all of these companies are coming together to make sure these platforms align in such a way that our transform and outcome focus for our Dell technologies customers. >> We've heard a lot of that, companies coming together. Collaboration was one of the themes I took away from this mornings key note with the guys and gals that were on stage. We've heard that from Dell Technologies, Dell EMC folks, this morning, today, yourself. That collaborative effort is really clear when you're talking to customers. Speaking of collaborating with customers on the evolution and iterations and things, what were some of the, I'm curious, the theme of Boomi world was you guys were going to reinvent iPads, about five months since, you're smiling. >> Yeah. Talk to us about how you've collaborated with some of your key customers to do that, where you are today five months after saying hey, this is what we're going to do we're going to shake this up. >> The future of iPads is extraordinarily exciting, and come to Boomi world next year and we're going to tell you a really good story. But when you talk about redefining the ion iPads, going from integration platforms of service to intelligent platforms of service, and how AIML can change this game. We brought together key partners who have had extensive experience both in AIML, a lot of big public companies that you would know, as well as our customers and now you start looking at things in combination to dramatically speed up how integrations done and who's capable of doing it. I always felt like if I could get integration down into the hands of business analyst, and down into the hands of smart people but not software engineers, leave them for the really hard technical problems, the things that push your business forward, and not hey I need a data set from HR for salary reasons or whatever. And voice and combination with AI allowing you to generate and respond to natural language, hey sales force I'd like the pipeline report for Western North America please, back comes the data set and all you have to do as a user of that is form a question and humans are awesome at that they've been doing it since they were two, and when you can start to leverage that kind of capability, AIML for natural language, you figure out how to interact with it, you get patterns on how to do that that's in our database from the thousands of people that have interacted. So when we look at the future, leveraging our partners for skills that we're not expert at yet, AIML gave us a leep, customers what is it that you need us to do first? And we're starting to bring all that together In a very very interesting way. >> Alright so Chris Boomi has it's own show, but I'm sure there's a lot of overlap between the customers here. What are some of the key objectives and what's your teams goals for this week here at Dell Technologies World? >> Well this week here you know we have a lot of customers here as well, obviously in the Boomi World show we're very specific to the user community that we've got so you get a lot of tracks about specific tips and tricks that you can have and specific ways to do things, best practices, did you know we could do this, did you know that, all that kind of things. Here it's a little bit broader picture, you're dealing with a broader audience, there's more of an awareness problem in some cases some people aren't quite sure what Boomi does and why Dell Technologies has a company like Boomi, so we're here to change that from an awareness side. Got some really cool demos in how we do that, and kind of engage, and then we have our specific customers who we can pull off to the side and talk about their specific challenges. What's next for them, what're the next transformations they want to achieve and what's the next outcome they've got in line and how can we partner with them to help them achieve that. So it's really kind of a two fold kind of a thing, our booth is awareness and is there an opportunity to work together and partners, what's the next step for us. >> One of the things I heard when you shared that Boomi's personal story, the Boomi on Boomi story was the massive impacts that you've made to just the employee onboarding process and I shouldn't say just because we all know, again we talked about customer experience a few minutes ago and that's essential for any business, but to have a good customer experience you have to have successful, enabled, productive employees on all that lines, front lines, middle lines, back lines, et cetera. When you are talking with prospects who maybe are very familiar with Dell Technologies and most of the brands, how well does that story resonate that this is really fundamental integration, especially in this big hybrid multi cloud world in which we live, to have this integration as a core enabler of digital transformation, but also of employee experience, customer experience, business outcomes. >> You know Lisa a lot of times when you talk to people, like if I were to tell you the Boomi story and we had never met it's a little hard to believe that I could do that much and have that big of an impact in four months. It's kind of like oh okay, is he selling me? So a lot of times when we meet people for the first time, if we can get them to just give us a chance, we do a lot of proof of concepts with people, we're cloud software so I can give it to you right now, I could just set you up with an account in three minutes and you're off and running. So you can play with it, you can get experienced with it, you can kind of understand how we do that. Like if we have a claim that we're six times faster than Legacy providers it's like well how do you do that? Well you get a sense of how we do that, and how leverage, meditate it, we use AI to do that, we generate things for you, et cetera. So there's a bit of a awareness and then they take that Missouri side, but can you show me, I'm not sure I believe you, show me. We do that in POC's and then we can kind of really get the ball rolling. So that tends to be the general pattern that we go through with net new customers and prospects, to try and get them exposure. >> You guys have I think it's over eight thousand, over 82 hundred customers globally, you've got some big brands, you've got Lyft, you've got Sky, Chevron, GE, one of my favorite stories from Boomi World was one of your customer award winners, Digital Angel, and how they're reinventing this smart bed technology for hospitals in the Netherlands. Something I wasn't aware of before even technology in a mattress. Talk to us about how Boomi is an enabler there. >> Well it's such a great outcome story. So the smart mattress is intended for the Geriatric Nursing Home settings, and one of the biggest most fundamental problems with health care in a geriatric setting is infection with body sores, decubs, and very simply moisture is a massive cause, lack of movement is a massive cause, and it depends a little bit on age and so on but so they install the smart mattress in all the rooms, and it records and its monitoring your breaths, your perspiration, any moisture events, your heart rate, and so on, and all this data it's just spitting out data and Boomi's there to catch it. Now what Boomi does is it sits on the mattress, and just processes data and as long as everything's fine it just sort of processes it, the minute any thresholds are met, so if you haven't moved in two hours, two hours is kind of a magic number for people if you have not moved in two hours, Boomi immediately sends up an alert in the form of a case, and this case in Tampa Bay in their service now system it shows up on their board priority one case, go get Lisa and give her a nudge, get her to move around a little bit. Same with a moisture event, that's a priority one, go dry them and so on, and they've been able to dramatically reduce the infection rate for the elderly as they reside in these nursing home settings just to be attentive, they know immediately when something needs to be done and only when it's done, you don't get the false positive. So that setting to me and what Digital Angel's doing with that mattress is changing outcomes, and then Boomi just sits on all the mattresses and communicates the individual to the common nursing setting, it's great. >> Pretty powerful stuff. >> It's awesome like I said it's fun when you can make such a big outcome change for people that who you get that kind of reduction in infections in a short period of time, it's very exhilarating. >> So Chris last thing I wanted to ask is, it's addressing people always often look at the pieces of the Dell family as independent and on their own, they've got their brand their on the banner and everything, but you know we talked to Rory about and we saw on the stage this morning a lot of how the pieces are really working together from the top strategy all the way down to the field, how they're working together, give us your perspective as one of the CEO's in the Dell family as to how that's moving. >> Stu I refer to it for folks as our unfair competitive advantage, it's as simple as that. The horse power, the just sheer sort of economy's of scale, and the technical ability, the innovation and the customer first perspective that all these business bring together, as we come together and work together, we have an ability to change customers lives forever in combination and I haven't met a leader of a business that has said well wait a minute, where's my piece of the puzzle, where is this, how do I win, there are no I's when we come together. Rory running the Virtustream business and we're talking about Boomi now runs on Virtustream and as you move mission critical applications how can you get Boomi there so people can share the SAP data that's there now in Virtustream, into other parts of the organization. Talked about the Pivotal Tile, I've got some work going on with Sanjay at VMware, and it's never I, it's always how do we do more for our customers and when we do that and then you put the Dell go to market field behind it, I don't know how many there are 20, 30 thousand sales makers in Dell technologies alone doesn't include VMware and the rest of us, it's an extraordinarily powerful ecosystem that is focused on one thing, customer results. And I'll tell you it couldn't be better, as a leader of a business within there, it literally couldn't be better. >> Wow Chris that is outstanding thank you so much for sharing your perspectives -- >> My pleasure. >> And what's going on with Boomi, we look forward to seeing you at Boomi World 2019. >> Lisa I can't wait, Stu I hope you can make it this time. But thank you very much I really appreciate you having me one. >> Oh our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching us live in Vegas, day one of Dell Technology World's 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are theCUBE. We are in the Enterprise Connect 2019 show, in Five9's booth. Welcoming to theCUBE, for the first time, we've got Kara Longo Korte, Director of Product Management from TetraVX. Kara, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me! >> You've been in the unified communications space for a while. You guys, TetraVX, have been to this event before, but there's been this massive evolution in enterprise communications and collaborations. I think they were talking this morning in the keynote about this is the biggest ever Enterprise Connect. 6,500 attendees, about 140 vendors exhibiting here behind us. Give us a little bit of a viewpoint of what TetraVX does for unified communications and how your helping customers to be able to utilize that for internal and external communications. >> Okay. TetraVX has been in this space, as you said, for a really long time and we've gone through the evolution. So we've been a Cisco partner. We've been a Microsoft partner. And then we've recently started our own version of unified communications which we call our NVX product. What I think is really exciting about us, is that we don't have a horse in the race. So we're able to help an organization figure out what's right for them. Whether it's Cisco, or Skype, or whether it's our product, or whether it's a hybrid, we can offer what's best for them. So that's what I think is kind of exciting about us. >> Alright, so, unified communications. We've been talking about some of the integration points with the contact a contact center, some of the broader communication trends. Maybe help expand on something you said, you don't have a horse in the race, but what are some of the key partnerships and what's exciting you at the show here so far? >> Yeah, so you touched on one of my favorite partners, truly, Five9. They're our contact center partner. We work with them directly, and you're starting to see a little bit of a blur between unified communications and contact center, and organizations not really knowing what they need. We've got a long history with them and we partner well with them. So Five9 is definitely a partner I'd mention. >> Well, you talk about it. It's an interesting dynamic, because there is some overlap, but there's some swim lanes as to where you play and where you don't and what environment. Maybe you could bring us in to TetraVX. Who is your typical customer, whether it's vertical or a buyer? Who is it that TetraVX normally starts with? >> Yeah, so it truly is all over the place, because it depends on the product, which of course, is based on their needs. But an organization might have a large contact center, so they're using Five9, let's say, and then they have unified communications need for their headquarter employees. So that's where we might come in to play. And then we have an integration with Five9, so we can make that seamless. So as a person in the organization, I don't know what platforms run, and I don't care, and I don't want to care. But it seems like we're all able to talk to each other seamlessly. >> Let's talk about that seamless word, because we hear it a lot. It's used in marketing a lot and it's obviously the goal to ensure that these communications at the right team internally can communicate with each other. For example, the contact center folks can get the content that they need to deliver through whatever channel. But let's talk about that. What are some of the things that entail making those internal comms really seamless and adopted by the internal users? >> I'd say there's probably two big things. One is around the user experience. So as a user, there are so many different platforms for me to communicate with. Am I chatting, am I making a phone call, et cetera? We really want to make it where an organization provides something for their employees to go to one place to do it all. I want it to be crystal clear, even if I, in my own mind, am trying to figure out which channel I want to pursue, that I've got that opportunity to have that one place to go. I think that other piece, though, is change communication. As an organization, when they roll out a new solution, or as a solution has new features and functions, telling the organization, telling people why they should care, and that leads to adoption. Because you can have the best product in the world, but if you don't make it personal for the end user, it's destined to fail, right? >> Yeah. The role of mobile has really transformed a lot of what's going on. I as an end user consumer, have certain expectations of what's happening with communication. How's that blurring into the enterprise? How do you look at that boundary between personal communication and enterprise where unified communication plays? >> Well, as the consumer, you're bringing those expectations with you to work, right? And you're not really going to be satisfied if you take something and as a consumer have an expectation, and then your organization provides something that's crummy, right? And I think we're seeing, and you've seen all these reports, where it says people are leaving organizations because they're confused about communications. They're being provided tools that they feel are subpar, which prevents them from being able to do their job. So I think the perspective of being able to support what a consumer wants in their workplace is critical. >> And how does a company turn that into competitive advantage? >> You've got to focus on what the consumer needs, and we know some of the things that, let's say an Apple or an Android platform are doing, and then taking that through, because if an organization has employees that are mobile users, you've got to support that. Some are using IP phones, you've got to support that. I mean you've really got to support the whole gambit in whatever way a person wants to communicate. >> Can you talk us through where some of the collaboration changes are impacting your customers and your product line? When I walk around the show floor, when I go to the keynote, some of the traditional, okay, wait, I think I've got this category at Enterprise Connect and this category, they all seem to interplay today when I listen to a Microsoft or an Amazon or Cisco today. >> Yeah, I mean they're blurring, right? I think years ago you saw everybody wanted best in breed. And that got too complex. So everybody swung the pendulum back to I want one vendor. And now we're swinging it back a little bit to I want best in breed, but I want to have that single user experience. So I think that's where integrations are coming in to play. You can integrate all these disparate solutions and provide that single user experience, and that's what users want. >> Yeah, just following up on that, we throw out words like platforms and marketplaces, where is it today? Is it just if I choose a big vendor I expect that they're going to be able to integrate and I force them to have APIs and work with everything else? Or is it more of an enterprise marketplace where I can go and choose my pieces? Is it on me or is it on the vendors? How does it all end up working together? >> I think it's on the right partner, right? The right partner is going to provide you either all those integrations, or the opportunity to integrate with them, because maybe that is on the organization side to do it. It's really picking the partner that's going to work with you to do that. >> Let's talk about security. As customers are moving to the cloud with respect to unified communications, is security taking a backseat to some of the other top of line priorities? Or where is that in the customer conversation? >> I think it's important. It's always going to be important. I think, back to the consumer aspect, I as a consumer have certain expectations. So that's got to be the lowest bar, right? Protect me as the end user. Organizations have their own security measures, and you got to figure out how to play with both of those. >> Kara, any guidance you can give? We hear often technology is the easy part of rolling this out. Organizationally we heard in the customer panel this morning it's like, well, when you ask your users how they want to be trained, it's everything from send my YouTube videos to I want white glove service and somebody to walk through it. And most companies don't have the resources to be able to do that. Any guidance and help you give as to how companies can really modernize their communications and help their productivity? >> I think user adoption is the key, right? I think one aspect is an organization's own culture. They know their culture like nobody else. Do the users want to be bombarded with emails? Do they want a Webex? Do they want a table tent in the cafeteria? What's the right mix there? I think again, partnering with an organization to make sure that they're going to be able to provide those services or have those artifacts already available to them so they can mix and match to what their organization needs is critical. >> What are some of the things you're finding in terms of how companies are measuring adoption and its resulting impact on, say, new revenues streams, new products, new services? >> Usage is always important, right? Are they using the tool or the applications? That's always one great measure. Adoption, I think adoption can be viral, right? If I'm telling my friends I really like something, or I'm saying I can't do my job because something's impeding me, those are some more of the softer metrics, but that's the stuff you've got to pay attention to, because that becomes the canary in the coal mine. >> Kara, I'm curious, do you have metrics of when you roll out a solution? Is there a way you're measuring that? The hero figures that the organization can come and say my NPS went up or my employee satisfaction got better? How is success measured with your customer base? >> A number of different ways. Also depends on the organization. Right back to culture. So usage, obviously, is key. Having those lighthouse customers that will go to bat for you and talk about it. Having partners that will speak about you and that will refer you time and time again. I think those are all great metrics. >> What are some of the things that are going to be coming out that people can learn about in the TetraVX booth here at Enterprise Connect? >> We have different solutions. I mentioned before that we don't have a horse in the race. So you can come see the different solutions we have and our unique approach to figuring out what's right for an organization. We have a monitoring tool that's pretty cool, and what's neat about it is it doesn't just monitor, it makes recommendations about what to do about issues. And then some of our partnerships as well. I think those are all great things to come learn about in our booth. >> And something I want to point out as well, is that I always pay attention to, and theCUBE does as well, is the number of females that are highlighted at events. And this event, Enterprise Connect, 50% of the keynotes are females, which is great. You, yourself, recently won a Stevie Award for women in business. Congratulations about that. >> Thank you! >> I'd just love to get your perspective on how does TetraVX support women in technology and advancing in their careers? >> I mean, TetraVX truly does support women in technology, or women in the workplace for sure. We have a number of different women on our leadership, which I think speaks volumes to the organization. At our organization we even have a women in business program that we work together. And sometimes it's social stuff. And sometimes it's supporting people in different ways. It really is a truly supportive organization that I am thrilled to be a part of. >> Awesome. Last question for you since we're half-way through day two at Enterprise Connect 19, what are some of the things that you've heard and seen so far that excite you about the continued evolution of enterprise comms? >> I think continuing to support end users on their collaboration journey, but I think there's really the recognition of the end consumer. I'm bringing my consumer expectations. Hey Mr. Company, what are you doing about that? Are you giving me those tools? And not just number of tools, but tools that really are ones that help me get my job done. >> Absolutely. Well, Kara, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE. Again congratulations on your Stevie Award, and we appreciate your time! >> Thank you! >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (energetic music)