(upbeat music) >> We're back with Charley Dublin. He's the Vice President of Product Management at Acquia. Great to see you, Charley welcome to theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you Dave. >> Acquia, tell us about the company. >> Sure, so Acquia is the largest and best provider of Drupal hosting capabilities. We rank number two in the digital experience platform space, just behind Adobe. Very strong business growing well and innovating every day. >> Drupal open source, super deep high quality content management system. And more experience, you call it an experience platform. >> An experience platform, open, flexible. We want our customers to have choice the ability to solve their problems how they want leveraging the power of the open source community. >> What were the big challenges? Just describe your, kind of the business drivers. We're going to talk about StormForge but the things that you were facing some of the challenges that's kind of led you to StormForge. >> Sure, so our objective first is to provide the best experience with Drupal. So that entails lots of capabilities around ease of use for Drupal itself. But that has to run on a world class platform. It has to be the most performance. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run Drupal. And so that involves the ability to support thousands of different kinds of modules that come out of the community. We want our customers to have choice with Drupal and to be able to support those choices on our platform. >> So optionality is key. Sometimes that creates other challenges. Like you've got one of everything. How do you deal with that challenge? >> That's a great question. Every strength is a form of weakness. And so our objective is really first to provide that choice but to do it in a cost efficient way. So we try to provide reference architectures for customers, opinionation for our customers to standardize take out some of the complexity that they might have if everything were a snowflake. But our objective is really to support their needs and err on the side of that flexibility. >> So you guys had to go through a major replatforming effort around containers and Kubernetes can you talk about that and what role StormForge played? >> Sure, so tied to the last point, our objective is to provide customers the highest performance, most secure platform. The entire industry of course is moving to Kubernetes and leveraging containers. We are a large consumer of AWS Services and are undergoing a major replatforming away from Legacy AWS towards Kubernetes and containers. And so that major replatforming effort is intending to enable customers to run applications how they want to and the power of Kubernetes and containers is to support that. And so we looked at StormForge as a way for us to right size resource capacity to support our customer's applications. >> I love it, AWS is now Legacy. But Andy Jassy one time said that if they had to redo Amazon they'd it in Lambda using serverless and so, it's been around a long time now. Okay so what were the outcomes that you were seeking? Was it, better management, cost reduction and how'd that go? >> Our customers run a wide range of applications. We support customers leveraging Drupal in every industry. Globally we do business in 30 different countries. And so what you have is a very wide range of applications and consumer and consumption models. And so we felt that leveraging StormForge would put us in a position where we'd be able to right size resource to those different kinds of applications. Essentially let the platform align to how customers wanted to operate their applications. And so StormForge's capability in conjunction with Kubernetes and containers really puts us in a position where customers are able to get the performance that they want, and when they need it on demand. A lot of the auto scaling capabilities that you get from Kubernetes and containers supports that. And so it really enables customers to run their applications how they want to functionally, as well as from a performance perspective. >> So this move toward containers and microservices sort of modern application development coincides with a modern platform like StormForge. And so there are, I'm sure there are alternatives out there, why StormForge? Maybe you could explain a little bit more about why, from your perspective what it does and why you chose them. >> So we leverage AWS in many respects in terms of the underlying platform, but we are a very strong DIY for how that platform supports Drupal applications. We view our expertise as being the best of Drupal. And so we felt like for us to true really maximize Kubernetes and containers and the power of those underlying technologies. On the one hand allows us to automate more and do more for customers. On the other side of it, it puts a tremendous burden on the level of expertise in order to do that well for every customer every day at scale. And so that at scale part of that was the challenge. And so we leverage StormForge to enable us to rightsize applications for performance, provide us cost benefits, allocate what you need when you need it for our customers. And that at scale piece is a critical part. We could do elements of it internally. We tried to do elements of that internally, but as you start getting to scale from, a few apps to hundreds of apps to certainly across our fleet of tens of thousands of applications, you really need something that leverages machine learning. You really need a technology that's integrated well within AWS and StormForge provided that solution. >> Make sure I got this right. So it sounds like you sort of from a skill standpoint transitioned or applied your skills from turning knobs if you will, to automation and scale. >> Correct. >> And what was that like? Was the team leaning into that, loving it? Was it a, a challenging thing for you guys to get there? >> That's a good question. The benefit in the way that StormForge applies it. So they leverage machine learning to enable us to make better decisions. So we still have the control elements, but we have much greater insight into what that would mean ahead of time before customers would be affected. So we still have the knobs we need, but we're able to do it at scale. And then from the automation point, it allows us to focus our deep expertise on making Drupal and the core hosting platform capabilities awesome. Sort of the stuff and resource allocation resource consumption. That's an enabler we can outsource that to StormForge >> This is not batch it's, you're basically doing this in sort of near realtime Optimize Live, is the capability, maybe you can describe what it is. >> So Optimize Live is new, we're in testing with that. We've done extensive testing with StormForge on the core call it decision making logic that allows for the right sizing of consumption and resources for our customer application. So that has already been tested. So the core engine's been tested. Optimize Live allows us to do that in real time to make policy decisions across our fleet on what's the right trade off between performance cost, other parameters. Again, it informs our decision making and our management of our platform. That would be very, very difficult otherwise. Without StormForge we'd have to do massive data aggregation. We'd have to have machine learning and additional infrastructure to manage to derive this information, and, and, and. And that is not our core business. We don't want to be doing that. We want insights to manage our platform to enable customers and StormForge for provides that. >> So it's kind of human in the loop thing. Hey, here's what like our recommendation or here's some options that you might want to, here's a path that you want to go down, but it's not taking that action for you necessarily. You don't want that. You want to make sure that the experts are have a hand in it still, is that correct? >> Correct, you still want the experts to have a hand in it but you don't want them to have a hand in it on each individual app. You need that, that machine learning capability that insight that allows you to do that at scale. >> So if you had to step back and think about your relationship with StormForge what was the business impact of bringing them in? >> First, from a time to market perspective we're able to get to market with a higher performing more cost effective solution earlier. So there's that benefit. Second benefit to the earlier point is that we're able to make resource allocation decisions focused on where our core competency is, not into the guts of Kubernetes containers and the like. Third is that the machine learning talent that StormForge brings to the table is world class. I've run machine learning teams, data science teams and would put them in the top 1% of any team that I've worked with in terms of their expertise. The logic and decision making and insights is outstanding. So we can get to the best decision, the optimal decision much more quickly. And then when you accompany that with the newer product in Optimize Live with that automation component you mentioned, all the better. So we're able to make decisions quicker, get it implemented in our platform and realize the benefits. What customers get from that is much better performance of their applications. More real time, higher, able to scale more dynamically. What we get is resource efficiency and our network and platform efficiency. We're not over allocating a capacity that costs us more money than we should. We're under allocating capacity that could have a lower performance solution for our customers. >> So that puts money in your pocket and your customers are happier. So there are higher renewal rates, less churn, high air prices over time as you add more capabilities. >> That's correct. >> What's it like, new application approach, Kubernetes containers, fine. Okay I need a modern platform but it's a relatively new company StormForge. What's it like working with them? >> Their talent level is world class. I wasn't familiar with them when I joined Acquia came to know them and been very impressed. There's many other providers in the market that will speak to some similar capabilities and will make many claims. But from our assessment our view is that they're the right partner for us, they're the right size, they're flexible, excellent team. They've evolved their technology roadmap very quickly. They deliver on their promises and commits a very good team to work with. So I've been very impressed for such an early stage company to deliver and to support our business so rapidly. So I think that's a strength. And then I think again the quality that people that's been manifested in the product itself, it's a high quality product. I think it's unique to the market. >> So Napoleon Hill famous writer, thinker, he wrote "Think and Grow Rich." If you haven't read it, check it out. One of his concepts is this a lever, small lever can move a big rock. It can be very powerful. Do you see StormForge as having that kind of effect on your business that change on your business? >> I do. Like I said, I think the engagement with them has proven, and this isn't, debatable based on the results that we've had with them. We ran that team through the ringer to validate the technology. Again, we'd heard lots of promises from other companies. Ran that team through the ringer with extensive testing across many customers, large and small, many use cases, to really stress test their capabilities. And they came out well ahead of any metric we put forth even well ahead of claims that they had coming into the engagement. They exceeded that. And so that's why I'm here. Why I'm an advocate. Why I think they're an outstanding company with a tremendous amount of potential. >> Thinking about, what can you tell us about where you want to take the company and the partnership with StormForge. >> I think the main next step is for us to engage with StormForge to drive automation drive decisioning, as we expand and move more and more customers over to our new platform. We're going to uncover use cases, different challenges as we go. So I think the, it's a learning process for both both sides, but I think the it's been successful so far and has a lot potential. >> Sounds like you had a great business and a great new partnership. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, appreciate your time. >> My pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, you're global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back with Charley Dublin. He's the Vice President of Product Management at Acquia. Great to see you, Charley welcome to theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you Dave. >> Acquia, tell us about the company. >> Sure, so Acquia is the largest and best provider of Drupal hosting capabilities. We rank number two in the digital experience platform space, just behind Adobe. Very strong business growing well and innovating every day. >> Drupal open source, super deep high quality content management system. And more experience, you call it an experience platform. >> An experience platform, open, flexible. We want our customers to have choice the ability to solve their problems how they want leveraging the power of the open source community. >> What were the big challenges? Just describe your, kind of the business drivers. We're going to talk about StormForge but the things that you were facing some of the challenges that's kind of led you to StormForge. >> Sure, so our objective first is to provide the best experience with Drupal. So that entails lots of capabilities around ease of use for Drupal itself. But that has to run on a world class platform. It has to be the most performance. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run Drupal. And so that involves the ability to support thousands of different kinds of modules that come out of the community. We want our customers to have choice with Drupal and to be able to support those choices on our platform. >> So optionality is key. Sometimes that creates other challenges. Like you've got one of everything. How do you deal with that challenge? >> That's a great question. Every strength is a form of weakness. And so our objective is really first to provide that choice but to do it in a cost efficient way. So we try to provide reference architectures for customers, opinionation for our customers to standardize take out some of the complexity that they might have if everything were a snowflake. But our objective is really to support their needs and err on the side of that flexibility. >> So you guys had to go through a major replatforming effort around containers and Kubernetes can you talk about that and what role StormForge played? >> Sure, so tied to the last point, our objective is to provide customers the highest performance, most secure platform. The entire industry of course is moving to Kubernetes and leveraging containers. We are a large consumer of AWS Services and are undergoing a major replatforming away from Legacy AWS towards Kubernetes and containers. And so that major replatforming effort is intending to enable customers to run applications how they want to and the power of Kubernetes and containers is to support that. And so we looked at StormForge as a way for us to right size resource capacity to support our customer's applications. >> I love it, AWS is now Legacy. But Andy Jassy one time said that if they had to redo Amazon they'd it in Lambda using serverless and so, it's been around a long time now. Okay so what were the outcomes that you were seeking? Was it, better management, cost reduction and how'd that go? >> Our customers run a wide range of applications. We support customers leveraging Drupal in every industry. Globally we do business in 30 different countries. And so what you have is a very wide range of applications and consumer and consumption models. And so we felt that leveraging StormForge would put us in a position where we'd be able to right size resource to those different kinds of applications. Essentially let the platform align to how customers wanted to operate their applications. And so StormForge's capability in conjunction with Kubernetes and containers really puts us in a position where customers are able to get the performance that they want, and when they need it on demand. A lot of the auto scaling capabilities that you get from Kubernetes and containers supports that. And so it really enables customers to run their applications how they want to functionally, as well as from a performance perspective. >> So this move toward containers and microservices sort of modern application development coincides with a modern platform like StormForge. And so there are, I'm sure there are alternatives out there, why StormForge? Maybe you could explain a little bit more about why, from your perspective what it does and why you chose them. >> So we leverage AWS in many respects in terms of the underlying platform, but we are a very strong DIY for how that platform supports Drupal applications. We view our expertise as being the best of Drupal. And so we felt like for us to true really maximize Kubernetes and containers and the power of those underlying technologies. On the one hand allows us to automate more and do more for customers. On the other side of it, it puts a tremendous burden on the level of expertise in order to do that well for every customer every day at scale. And so that at scale part of that was the challenge. And so we leverage StormForge to enable us to rightsize applications for performance, provide us cost benefits, allocate what you need when you need it for our customers. And that at scale piece is a critical part. We could do elements of it internally. We tried to do elements of that internally, but as you start getting to scale from, a few apps to hundreds of apps to certainly across our fleet of tens of thousands of applications, you really need something that leverages machine learning. You really need a technology that's integrated well within AWS and StormForge provided that solution. >> Make sure I got this right. So it sounds like you sort of from a skill standpoint transitioned or applied your skills from turning knobs if you will, to automation and scale. >> Correct. >> And what was that like? Was the team leaning into that, loving it? Was it a, a challenging thing for you guys to get there? >> That's a good question. The benefit in the way that StormForge applies it. So they leverage machine learning to enable us to make better decisions. So we still have the control elements, but we have much greater insight into what that would mean ahead of time before customers would be affected. So we still have the knobs we need, but we're able to do it at scale. And then from the automation point, it allows us to focus our deep expertise on making Drupal and the core hosting platform capabilities awesome. Sort of the stuff and resource allocation resource consumption. That's an enabler we can outsource that to StormForge >> This is not batch it's, you're basically doing this in sort of near realtime Optimize Live, is the capability, maybe you can describe what it is. >> So Optimize Live is new, we're in testing with that. We've done extensive testing with StormForge on the core call it decision making logic that allows for the right sizing of consumption and resources for our customer application. So that has already been tested. So the core engine's been tested. Optimize Live allows us to do that in real time to make policy decisions across our fleet on what's the right trade off between performance cost, other parameters. Again, it informs our decision making and our management of our platform. That would be very, very difficult otherwise. Without StormForge we'd have to do massive data aggregation. We'd have to have machine learning and additional infrastructure to manage to derive this information, and, and, and. And that is not our core business. We don't want to be doing that. We want insights to manage our platform to enable customers and StormForge for provides that. >> So it's kind of human in the loop thing. Hey, here's what like our recommendation or here's some options that you might want to, here's a path that you want to go down, but it's not taking that action for you necessarily. You don't want that. You want to make sure that the experts are have a hand in it still, is that correct? >> Correct, you still want the experts to have a hand in it but you don't want them to have a hand in it on each individual app. You need that, that machine learning capability that insight that allows you to do that at scale. >> So if you had to step back and think about your relationship with StormForge what was the business impact of bringing them in? >> First, from a time to market perspective we're able to get to market with a higher performing more cost effective solution earlier. So there's that benefit. Second benefit to the earlier point is that we're able to make resource allocation decisions focused on where our core competency is, not into the guts of Kubernetes containers and the like. Third is that the machine learning talent that StormForge brings to the table is world class. I've run machine learning teams, data science teams and would put them in the top 1% of any team that I've worked with in terms of their expertise. The logic and decision making and insights is outstanding. So we can get to the best decision, the optimal decision much more quickly. And then when you accompany that with the newer product in Optimize Live with that automation component you mentioned, all the better. So we're able to make decisions quicker, get it implemented in our platform and realize the benefits. What customers get from that is much better performance of their applications. More real time, higher, able to scale more dynamically. What we get is resource efficiency and our network and platform efficiency. We're not over allocating a capacity that costs us more money than we should. We're under allocating capacity that could have a lower performance solution for our customers. >> So that puts money in your pocket and your customers are happier. So there are higher renewal rates, less churn, high air prices over time as you add more capabilities. >> That's correct. >> What's it like, new application approach, Kubernetes containers, fine. Okay I need a modern platform but it's a relatively new company StormForge. What's it like working with them? >> Their talent level is world class. I wasn't familiar with them when I joined Acquia came to know them and been very impressed. There's many other providers in the market that will speak to some similar capabilities and will make many claims. But from our assessment our view is that they're the right partner for us, they're the right size, they're flexible, excellent team. They've evolved their technology roadmap very quickly. They deliver on their promises and commits a very good team to work with. So I've been very impressed for such an early stage company to deliver and to support our business so rapidly. So I think that's a strength. And then I think again the quality that people that's been manifested in the product itself, it's a high quality product. I think it's unique to the market. >> So Napoleon Hill famous writer, thinker, he wrote "Think and Grow Rich." If you haven't read it, check it out. One of his concepts is this a lever, small lever can move a big rock. It can be very powerful. Do you see StormForge as having that kind of effect on your business that change on your business? >> I do. Like I said, I think the engagement with them has proven, and this isn't, debatable based on the results that we've had with them. We ran that team through the ringer to validate the technology. Again, we'd heard lots of promises from other companies. Ran that team through the ringer with extensive testing across many customers, large and small, many use cases, to really stress test their capabilities. And they came out well ahead of any metric we put forth even well ahead of claims that they had coming into the engagement. They exceeded that. And so that's why I'm here. Why I'm an advocate. Why I think they're an outstanding company with a tremendous amount of potential. >> Thinking about, what can you tell us about where you want to take the company and the partnership with StormForge. >> I think the main next step is for us to engage with StormForge to drive automation drive decisioning, as we expand and move more and more customers over to our new platform. We're going to uncover use cases, different challenges as we go. So I think the, it's a learning process for both both sides, but I think the it's been successful so far and has a lot potential. >> Sounds like you had a great business and a great new partnership. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, appreciate your time. >> My pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, you're global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> People hate to be sold, but they love to buy. We become what we think about, think, and grow rich. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive. The world is replete with time-tested advice and motivational ideas for aspiring salespeople, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, and many others have all published classics with guidance that when followed closely, almost always leads to success. More modern personalities have emerged in the internet era, like Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and Angela Duckworth. But for the most part, they've continued to rely on book publishing, seminars, and high value consulting to peddle their insights and inspire action. Welcome to this video exclusive on theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Mark Roberge, who is one of the Managing Directors at Stage 2 Capital, and Paul Fifield, who's the CEO and Co-Founder of Sales Impact Academy. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to see you. >> You too Dave and thanks. >> All right, let's get right into it. Paul, you guys are announcing today a $4 million financing round. It comprises $3 million in a seed round led by Stage 2 and a million dollar in debt financing. So, first of all, congratulations. Paul, why did you start Sales Impact Academy? >> Cool, well, I think my background is sort of two times CRO, so I've built two reasonably successful companies. Built a hundred plus person teams. And so I've got kind of this firsthand experience of having to learn literally everything on the job whilst delivering these very kind of rapid, like achieving these very rapid growth targets. And so when I came out of those two journeys, I literally just started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London where I now live. I spend a bunch of time over in New York, and literally started this because I wanted to sort of kind of give back, but just really wanted to start helping people who were just really, really struggling in high pressure environments. And that's both leadership from sense of revenue leadership people, right down to sort of frontline SDRs. And I think as I started just doing this voluntary teaching, I kind of realized that actually the sort of global education system has done is a massive, massive disservice, right? I actually call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years, where higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. And the knock-on consequences of that have been absolutely disastrous for our profession. Partly that the profession is seen as a bit sort of embarrassing to be a part of. You kind of like go get a sales job if you can't get a degree. But more than that, the core fundamental within revenue teams and within sales people is now completely lacking 'cause there's no structured formal kind of like learning out there. So that's really the problem we're trying to solve on the kind of like the skill side. >> Great. Okay. And mark, always good to have you on, and I got to ask you. So even though, I know this is the wheelhouse for you and your partners, and of course, you've got a deep bench of LPs, but lay out the investment thesis here. What's the core problem that you saw and how are you looking at the market? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. So this one was a special one for me. We've spoken in the past. I mean, just personally I've always had a similar passion to Paul that it's amazing how important sales execution is to all companies, nevermind just the startup ecosystem. And I've always personally been motivated by anything that can help the startup ecosystem increase their success. Part of why I teach at Harvard and try to change some of the stuff that Paul's talking about, which is like, it's amazing how little education is done around sales. But in this particular one, not only personally was I excited about, but from a fun perspective, we've got to look at the economic outcomes. And we've been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack. It's evolved a ton in the last couple of decades. We've gone from the late '90s where every sales VP was just, they had a thing called the CRM that none of their reps even used, right? And we've come so far in 20 years, we've got all these amazing tools that help us cold call, that help us send emails efficiently and automatically and track everything, but nothing's really happened on the education side. And that's really the enormous gap that we've seen is, these organizations being much more proactive around adopting technology that can prove sales execution, but nothing on the education side. And the other piece that we saw is, it's almost like all these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen sales people to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach salespeople sales 101. Like how to find a champion, how to develop a budget, how to develop sense of urgency. And what Paul and team can do in the first phase of essay, is can sort of centralize that, so that all of these organizations can benefit from the best content and the best instructors for their team. >> So Paul, exactly, thank you, mark. Exactly what do you guys do? What do you sell? I'm curious, is this sort of, I'm thinking in my head, is this E-learning, is it really part of the sales stack? Maybe you could help us understand that better. >> Well, I think this problem of having to upscale teams has been around like forever. And kind of going back to the kind of education problem, it's what's wild is that we would never accept this of our lawyers, our accountants, or HR professionals. Imagine like someone in your finance team arriving on day one and they're searching YouTube to try and work out how to like put a balance sheet together. So it's a chronic, chronic problem. And so the way that we're addressing this, and I think the problem is well understood, but there's always been a terrible market, sort of product market fit for how the problem gets solved. So as mark was saying, typically it's in-house revenue leaders who themselves have got massive gaps in their knowledge, hack together some internal learning that is just pretty poor, 'cause it's not really their skillset. The other alternative is bringing in really expensive consultants, but they're consultants with a very single worldview and the complexity of a modern revenue organization is very, very high these days. And so one consultant is not going to really kind of like cover every topic you need. And then there's the kind of like fairly old fashioned sales training companies that just come in, one big hit, super expensive and then sort of leave again. So the sort of product market fit to solve, has always been a bit pretty bad. So what we've done is we've created a subscription model. We've essentially productized skills development. The way that we've done that is we teach live instruction. So one of the big challenges Andreessen Horowitz put a post out around this so quite recently, one of the big problems of online learning is that this kind of huge repository of online learning, which puts all the onus on the learner to have the discipline to go through these courses and consume them in an on-demand way is actually they're pretty ineffective. We see sort of completion rates of like 7 to 8%. So we've always gone from a live instruction model. So the sort of ingredients are the absolute very best people in the world in their very specific skill teaching live classes just two hours per week. So we're not overwhelming the learners who are already in work, and they have targets, and they've got a lot of pressure. And we have courses that last maybe four to like 12 hours over two to sort of six to seven weeks. So highly practical live instruction. We have 70, 80, sometimes even 90% completion rates of the sort of live class experience, and then teams then rapidly put that best practice into practice and see amazing results in things like top of funnel, or conversion, or retention. >> So live is compulsory and I presume on-demand? If you want to refresh you have an on demand option? >> Yeah, everything's recorded, so you can kind of catch up on a class if you've missed it, But that live instruction is powerful because it's kind of in your calendar, right? So you show up. But the really powerful thing, actually, is that entire teams within companies can actually learn at exactly the same pace. So we teach it eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM in the UK, and 5:00 PM Europe. So your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert, like a Mark, or like a Kevin Dorsey, or like Greg Holmes from Zoom. And you're learning from these incredible people. Class finishes, teams can come back together, talk about this incredible best practice they've just learned, and then immediately put it into practice. And that's where we're seeing these incredible, kind of almost instant impact on performance at real scale. >> So, Mark, in thinking about your investment, you must've been thinking about, okay, how do we scale this thing? You've got an instructor component, you've got this live piece. How are you thinking about that at scale? >> Yeah, there's a lot of different business model options there. And I actually think multiple of them are achievable in the longer term. That's something we've been working with Paul quite a bit, is like, they're all quite compelling. So just trying to think about which two to start with. But I think you've seen a lot of this in education models today. Is a mixture of on-demand with prerecorded. And so I think that will be the starting point. And I think from a scalability standpoint, we were also, we don't always try to do this with our investments, but clearly our LP base or limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient to at least the first cycle of this business. You know, our VC firm's backed by over 250 CRO CMOs heads of customer success, all of which are prospective instructors, prospective content developers, and prospective customers. So that was a little nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one. >> And what's in it for them? I mean, they get paid. Obviously, you have a stake in the game, but what's in it for the instructors. They get paid on a sort of a per course basis? How does that model work? >> Yeah, we have a development fee for each kind of hour of teaching that gets created So we've mapped out a pretty significant curriculum. And we have about 250 hours of life teaching now already written. We actually think it's going to be about 3000 hours of learning before you get even close to a complete curriculum for every aspect of a revenue organization from revenue operations, to customer success, to marketing, to sales, to leadership, and management. But we have a development fee per class, and we have a teaching fee as well. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think you guys, it's really an underserved market, and then when you think about it, most organizations, they just don't invest in training. And so, I mean, I would think you'd want to take it, I don't know what the right number is, 5, 10% of your sales budget and actually put it on this and the return would be enormous. How do you guys think about the market size? Like I said before, is it E-learning, is it part of the CRM stack? How do you size this market? >> Well, I think for us it's service to people. A highly skilled sales rep with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet would do really well, okay? You don't need this world-class tech stack to do well in sales. You need the skills to be able to do the job. But the reverse, that's not true, right? An unskilled person with a world-class tech stack won't do well. And so fundamentally, the skill level of your team is the number one most important thing to get right to be successful in revenue. But as I said before, the product market for it to solve that problem, has been pretty terrible. So we see ourselves 100%. And so if you're looking at like a com, you look at Gong, who we've just signed as a customer, which is fantastic. Gong has a technology that helps salespeople do better through call recording. You have Outreach, who is also a customer. They have technologies that help SDRs be more efficient in outreach. And now you have Sales Impact Academy, and we help with skills development of your team, of the entirety of your revenue function. So we absolutely see ourselves as a key part of that stack. In terms of the TAM, 60 million people in sales are on, according to LinkedIn. You're probably talking 150 million people in go to market to include all of the different roles. 50% of the world's companies are B2B. The TAM is huge. But what blows my mind, and this kind of goes back to this why the global education system has overlooked this because essentially if half the world's companies are B2B, that's probably a proxy for the half of the world's GDP, Half of the world's economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world's companies, and they don't really know what they're doing, (laughs) which is absolutely staggering. And if we can solve that in a meaningfully meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous. >> So, Mark, no lack of TAM. I know that you guys at Stage 2, you're also very much focused on the metrics. You have a fundamental philosophy that your product market fit and retention should come before hyper growth. So what were the metrics that enticed you to make this investment? >> Yeah, it's a good question, Dave, 'cause that's where we always look first, which I think is a little different than most early stage investors. There's a big, I guess, meme, triple, triple, double, double that's popular in Silicon Valley these days, which refers to triple your revenue in year one, triple your revenue in year two, double in year three, and four, and five. And that type of a hyper growth is critical, but it's often jumped too quickly in our opinion. That there's a premature victory called on product market fit, which kills a larger percentage of businesses than is necessary. And so with all our investments, we look very heavily first at user engagement, any early indicators of user retention. And the numbers were just off the charts for SIA in terms of the customers, in terms of the NPS scores that they were getting on their sessions, in terms of the completion rate on their courses, in terms of the customers that started with a couple of seats and expanded to more seats once they got a taste of the program. So that's where we look first as a strong foundation to build a scalable business, and it was off the charts positive for SIA. >> So how about the competition? If I Google sales training software, I'll get like dozens of companies. Lessonly, and MindTickle, or Brainshark will come up, that's not really a fit. So how do you think about the competition? How are you different? >> Yeah, well, one thing we try and avoid is any reference to sales training, 'cause that really sort of speaks to this very old kind of fashioned way of doing this. And I actually think that from a pure pedagogy perspective, so from a pure learning design perspective, the old fashioned way of doing sales training was pull a whole team off site, usually in a really terrible hotel with no windows for a day or two. And that's it, that's your learning experience. And that's not how human beings learn, right? So just even if the content was fantastic, the learning experience was so terrible, it was just very kind of ineffective. So we sort of avoid kind of like sales training, The likes of MindTickle, we're actually talking to them at the moment about a partnership there. They're a platform play, and we're certainly building a platform, but we're very much about the live instruction and creating the biggest curriculum and the broadest curriculum on the internet, in the world, basically, for revenue teams. So the competition is kind of interesting 'cause there is not really a direct subscription-based live like learning offering out there. There's some similar ish companies. I honestly think at the moment it's kind of status quo. We're genuinely creating a new category of in-work learning for revenue teams. And so we're in this kind of semi and sort of evangelical sort of phase. So really, status quo is one of the biggest sort of competitors. But if you think about some of those old, old fashioned sort of Miller Heimans, and then perhaps even like Sandlers, there's an analogy perhaps here, which is kind of interesting, which is a little bit like Siebel and Salesforce in the sort of late '90s, where in Siebel you have this kind of old way of doing things. It was a little bit ineffective. It was really expensive. Not accessible to a huge space of the market. And Salesforce came along and said, "Hey, we're going to create this cool thing. It's going to be through the browser, it's going to be accessible to everyone, and it's going to be really, really effective." And so there's some really kind of interesting parallels almost between like Siebel and Salesforce and what we're doing to completely kind of upend the sort of the old fashioned way of delivering sort of sales training, if you like. >> And your target customer profile is, you're selling to teams, right? B2B teams, right? It's not for individuals. Is that correct, Paul? >> Currently. Yeah, yeah. So currently we've got a big foothold in series A to series B. So broadly speaking out, our target market currently is really fast growth technology companies. That's the sector that we're really focusing on. We've got a very good strong foothold in series A series B companies. We've now won some much larger later stage companies. We've actually even won a couple of corporates, I can't say names yet, but names that are very, very, very familiar and we're incredibly excited by them, which could end up being thousand plus seat deals 'cause we do this on a per seat basis. But yeah, very much at the moment it's fast growth tech companies, and we're sort of moving up the chain towards enterprise. >> And how do you deal with the sort of maturity curve, if you will, of your students? You've got some that are brand new, just fresh out of school. You've got others that are more seasoned. What do you do, pop them into different points of the curriculum? How do you handle it? >> Yeah we have, I'll say we have about 30 courses right now. We have about another 15 in development where post this fundraise, we want to be able to get to around about 20 courses that we're developing every quarter and getting out to market. So we're literally, we've sort of identified about 20 to 25 key roles across everything within revenue. That's, let's say revenue ops, customer success, account management, sales, engineering, all these different kinds of roles. And we are literally plotting the sort of skills development for these individuals over multiple, multiple years. And I think what we've never ceases to amaze me is actually the breadth of learning in revenue is absolutely enormous. And what kind of just makes you laugh is, this is all of this knowledge that we're now creating it's what companies just hope that their teams somehow acquire through osmosis, through blogs, through events. And it's just kind of crazy that there is... It's absolutely insane that we don't already exist, basically. >> And if I understand it correctly, just from looking at your website, you've got the entry level package. I think it's up to 15 seats, and then you scale up from there, correct? Is it sort of as a seat-based license model? >> Yeah, it's a seat-based model, as Mark mentioned. In some cases we sell, let's say 20 or $30,000 deal out the gate and that's most of the team. That will be maybe a series A, series B deal, but then we've got these land and expand models that are working tremendously well. We have seven, eight customers in Q1 that have doubled their spend Q2. That's the impact that they're seeing. And our net revenue retention number for Q2 is looking like it's going to be 177% to think exceeds companies like Snowflakes. Well, our underlying retention metrics, because people are seeing this incredible impact on teams and performance, is really, really strong. >> That's a nice metric compare with Snowflake (Paul laughs) It's all right. (Dave and Paul laugh) >> So, Mark, this is a larger investment for Stage 2 You guys have been growing and sort of upping your game. And maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we're in the middle of Fund II right now. So, Fund I was in 2018. We were doing smaller checks. It was our first time out of the gate. The mission has really taken of, our LP base has really taken off. And so this deal looks a lot like more like our second fund. We'll actually make an announcement in a few weeks now that we've closed that out. But it's a much larger fund and our first investments should be in that 2 to $3 million range. >> Hey, Paul, what are you going to do with the money? What are the use of funds? >> Put it on black, (chuckles) we're going to like- (Dave laughs) >> Saratoga is open. (laughs) (Mark laughs) >> We're going to, look, the curriculum development for us is absolutely everything, but we're also going to be investing in building our own technology platform as well. And there are some other really important aspects to the kind of overall offering. We're looking at building an assessment tool so we can actually kind of like start to assess skills across teams. We certify every course has an exam, so we want to get more robust around the certification as well, because we're hoping that our certification becomes the global standard in understanding for the first time in the industry what individual competencies and skills people have, which will be huge. So we have a broad range of things that we want to start initiating now. But I just wanted to quickly say Stage 2 has been nothing short of incredible in every kind of which way. Of course, this investment, the fit is kind of insane, but the LPs have been extraordinary in helping. We've got a huge number of them are now customers very quickly. Mark and the team are helping enormously on our own kind of like go to market and metrics. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've raised over 100 million myself in venture capital. I've never known a venture capital firm with such value add like ever, or even heard of other people getting the kind of value add that we're getting. So I just wanted to a quick shout out for Stage 2. >> Quite a testimony of you guys. Definitely Stage 2 punches above its weight. Guys, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on. Good luck and we'll be watching. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.

>> Live from Toronto Canada, it's The Cube, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello, everyone welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in conjunction with the Blockchain futurist happening this week it's run. I'm John Fourier, my cohost Dave Vellante, we're here with Cube alumni, Bradley Rotter, pioneer Blockchain investor, seasoned pro was there in the early days as an investor in hedge funds, continuing to understand the impacts of cryptocurrency, and its impact for investors, and long on many of the crypto. Made some great predictions on The Cube last time at Polycon in the Bahamas. Bradley, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thank you, good to see both of you. >> Good to have you back. >> So I want to just get this out there because you have an interesting background, you're in the cutting edge, on the front lines, but you also have a history. You were early before the hedge fund craze, as a pioneer than. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that and than how it connects to today, and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. >> I actually had begun trading commodity futures contracts when I was 15. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is a small state in the Midwest. >> I've heard of it. >> And I was in charge of >> Was it a test market? (laughing) >> I was in charge of hedging our one corn contract so I learned learned the mechanisms of the market. It was great experience. I traded commodities all the way through college. I got to go to West Point as undergrad. And I raced back to Chicago as soon as I could to go to the University of Chicago because that's where commodities were trading. So I'd go to night school at night at the University of Chicago and listen to Nobel laureates talk about the official market theory and during the day I was trading on the floor of the the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Grown men yelling, kicking, screaming, shoving and spitting, it was fabulous. (laughing) >> Sounds like Blockchain today. (laughing) >> So is that what the dynamic is, obviously we've seen the revolution, certainly of capital formation, capital deployment, efficiency, liquidity all those things are happening, how does that connect today? What's your vision of today's market? Obviously lost thirty billion dollars in value over the past 24 hours as of today and we've taken a little bit of a haircut, significant haircut, since you came on The Cube, and you actually were first to predict around February, was a February? >> February, yeah. >> You kind of called the market at that time, so props to that, >> Yup. >> Hope you're on the right >> Thank you. >> side of those shorts >> Thank you. >> But what's going on? What is happening in the capital markets, liquidity, why are the prices dropping? What's the shift? So just a recap, at the time in February, you said look I'm on short term bear, on Bitcoin, and may be other crypto because all the money that's been made. the people who made it didn't think they had to pay taxes. And now they're realizing, and you were right on. You said up and up through sort of tax season it's going to be soft and then it's going to come back and it's exactly what happened. Now it's flipped again, so your thoughts? >> So my epiphany was I woke up in the middle of the night and said oh my God, I've been to this rodeo before. I was trading utility tokens twenty years ago when they were called something else, IRUs, do you remember that term? IRU was the indefeasible right to use a strand of fiber, and as the internet started kicking off people were crazy about laying bandwidth. Firms like Global Crossing we're laying cable all over the ocean floors and they laid too much cable and the cable became dark, the fiber became dark, and firms like Global Crossing, Enron, Enron went under really as a result of that miss allocation. And so it occurred to me these utility tokens now are very similar in characteristic except to produce a utility token you don't have to rent a boat and lay cable on the ocean floor in order to produce one of these utility tokens, that everybody's buying, I mean it takes literally minutes to produce a token. So in a nutshell it's too many damn tokens. It was like the peak of the internet, which we were all involved in. It occurred to me then in January of 2000 the market was demanding internet shares and the market was really good at producing internet shares, too many of them, and it went down. So I think we're in a similar situation with cryptocurrency, the Wall Street did come in, there were a hundred plus hedge funds of all shapes and sizes scrambling and buying crypto in the fall of last year. It's kind of like Napoleon's reason for attacking Russia, seemed like a good idea at the time. (laughing) And so we're now in a corrective phase but literally there's been too many tokens. There are so many tokens that we as humans can't even deal with that. >> And the outlook, what's the outlook for you? I mean, I'll see there's some systemic things going to be flushed out, but you long on certain areas? What do you what do you see as a bright light at the end of the tunnel or sort right in front of you? What's happening from a market that you're excited about? >> At a macro scale I think it's apparent that the internet deserves its own currency, of course it does and there will be an internet currency. The trick is which currency shall that be? Bitcoin was was a brilliant construct, the the inventor of Bitcoin should get a Nobel Prize, and I hope she does. (laughing) >> 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. (laughing) >> I got that from you actually. (laughing) But it may not be Bitcoin and that's why we have to be a little sanguine here. You know, people got a little bit too optimistic, Bitcoin's going to a hundred grand, no it's going to five hundred grand. I mean, those are all red flags based on my experience of trading on the floor and investing in hedge funds. Bitcoin, I think I'm disappointed in Bitcoins adoption, you know it's still very difficult to use Bitcoin and I was hoping by now that that would be a different scenario but it really isn't. Very few people use Bitcoin in their daily lives. I do, I've been paying my son his allowance for years in Bitcoin. Son of a bitch is rich now. (laughing) >> Damn, so on terms of like the long game, you seeing the developers adopted a theory and that was classic, you know the decentralized applications. We're here at a Cloud Blockchain kind of convergence conference where developers mattered on the Cloud. You saw a great developer, stakeholders with Amazon, Cloud native, certainly there's a lot of developers trying to make things easier, faster, smarter, with crypto. >> Yup. >> So, but all at the same time it's hard for developers. Hearing things like EOS coming on, trying to get developers. So there's a race for developer adoption, this is a major factor in some of the success and price drops too. Your thoughts on, you know the impact, has that changed anything? I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. >> Yup. Yeah well, that was that was fairly predictable and I've talked about that at number of talks I've given. There's only one thing that all of these ICOs have had in common, they're long Ethereum. They own Ethereum, and many of those projects, even out the the few ICO projects that I've selectively been advising I begged them to do once they raised their money in Ethereum is to convert it into cash. I said you're not in the Ethereum business, you're in whatever business that you're in. Many of them ported on to that stake, again caught up in the excitement about the the potential price appreciation but they lost track of what business they were really in. They were speculating in Ethereum. Yeah, I said they might as well been speculating in Apple stock. >> They could have done better then Ethereum. >> Much better. >> Too much supply, too many damn tokens, and they're easy to make. That's the issue. >> Yeah. >> And you've got lots of people making them. When one of the first guys I met in this space was Vitalik Buterin, he was 18 at the time and I remember meeting him I thought, this is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. It was a really fun meeting. I remember when the meeting ended and I walked away I was about 35 feet away and he LinkedIn with me. Which I thought was cute. >> That's awesome, talk about what you're investing-- >> But, now there's probably a thousand Vitalik Buterin's in the space. Many of them are at this conference. >> And a lot of people have plans. >> Super smart, great ideas, and boom, token. >> And they're producing new tokens. They're all better improved, they're borrowing the best attributes of each but we've got too many damn tokens. It's hard for us humans to be able to keep track of that. It's almost like requiring a complicated new browser download for every website you went to. We just can't do that. >> Is the analog, you remember the dot com days, you referred to it earlier, there was quality, and the quality lasted, sustained, you know, the Amazon's, the eBay's, the PayPal's, etc, are there analogs in this market, in your view, can you sniff out the sort of quality? >> There are definitely analogs, I think, but I think one of the greatest metrics that we can we can look at is that utility token being utilized? Not many of them are being utilized. I was giving a talk last month, 350 people in the audience, and I said show of hands, how many people have used a utility token this year? One hand went up. I go, Ethereum? Ethereum. Will we be using utility tokens in the future? Of course we will but it's going to have to get a whole lot easier for us humans to be able to deal with them, and understand them, and not lose them, that's the big issue. This is just as much a cybersecurity play as it is a digital currency play. >> Elaborate on that, that thought, why is more cyber security playing? >> Well, I've had an extensive background in cyber security as an investor, my mantra since 9/11 has been to invest in catalyze companies that impact the security of the homeland. A wide variety of security plays but primarily, cyber security. It occurred to me that the most valuable data in the world used to be in the Pentagon. That's no longer the case. Two reasons basically, one, the data has already been stolen. (laughing) Not funny. Two, if you steal the plans for the next generation F39 Joint Strike Force fighter, good for you, there's only two buyers. (laughing) The most valuable data in the world today, as we sit here, is a Bitcoin private key, and they're coming for them. Prominent Bitcoin holders are being hunted, kidnapped, extorted, I mean it's a rather extraordinary thing. So the cybersecurity aspect of if all of our assets are going to be digitized you better damn well keep those keys secure and so that's why I've been focused on the cybersecurity aspect. Rivets, one of the ICOs that I invested in is developing software that turns on the power of the hardware TPM, trusted execution environment, that's already on your phone. It's a place to hold keys in hardware. So that becomes fundamentally important in holding your keys. >> I mean certainly we heard stories about kidnapping that private key, I mean still how do you protect that? That's a good question, that's a really interesting question. Is it like consensus, do you have multiple people involved, do you get beaten up until you hand over your private key? >> It's been happening. It's been happening. >> What about the security token versus utility tokens? A lot of tokens now, so there's yeah, too many tokens on the utility side, but now there's a surge towards security tokens, and Greg Bettinger wrote this morning that the market has changed over and the investor side's looking more and more like traditional in structures and companies, raising money. So security token has been a, I think relief for some people in the US for sure around investing in structures they understand. Is that a real dynamic or is that going to sustain itself? How do you see security tokens? >> And we heard in the panel this morning, you were in there, where they were predicting the future of the valuation of the security tokens by the end of the year doubling, tripling, what ever it was, but what are your thoughts? >> I think security tokens are going to be the next big thing, they have so many advantages to what we now regard as share certificates. My most exciting project is that I'm heavily involved in is a project called the Entanglement Institute. That's going to, in the process of issuing security infrastructure tokens, so our idea is a public-private partnership with the US government to build the first mega quantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. Now the private part of the public-private partnership by the issuance of tokens you have tremendous advantages to the way securities are issued now, transparency, liquidity. Infrastructure investments are not very liquid, and if they were made more liquid more people would buy them. It occurred to me it would have been a really good idea if grandpa would have invested in the Hoover Dam. Didn't have the chance. We think that there's a substantial demand of US citizens that would love to invest in our own country and would do so if it were more liquid, if it was more transparent, if the costs were less of issuing those tokens. >> More efficient, yeah. >> So you see that as a potential way to fund public infrastructure build-outs? >> It will be helpful if infrastructure is financed in the future. >> How do you see the structure on the streets, this comes up all the time, there's different answers to this. There's not like there's one, we've seen multiple but I'm putting a security token, what am i securing against, cash flow, equity, right to convert to utility tokens? So we're starting to see a variety of mechanisms, 'cause you have to investor a security outcome. >> Yeah, so as an investor, what do you look for? >> Well, I think it's almost limitless of what these smart securities, you know can be capable of, for example one of the things that were that we're talking with various parts of the government is thinking about the tax credit. The tax credit that have been talked about at the Trump administration, that could be really changed on its head if you were able to use smart securities, if you will. Who says that the tax credit for a certain project has to be the same as all other projects? The president has promised a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure investment program and so far he's only 1.5 trillion away from the goal. It hasn't started yet. Wilbur Ross when, in the transition team, I had seen the white paper that he had written, was suggesting an 82% tax credit for infrastructure investment. I'm going 82%, oh my God, I've never. It's an unfathomable number. If it were 82% it would be the strongest fiscal stimulus of your lifetime and it's a crazy number, it's too big. And then I started thinking about it, maybe an 82% tax credit is warranted for a critical infrastructure as important as quantum computing or cyber security. >> Cyber security. >> Exactly, very good point, and maybe the tax credit is 15% for another bridge over the Mississippi River. We already got those. So a smart infrastructure token would allow the Larry Kudlow to turn the dial and allow economic incentive to differ based on the importance of the project. >> The value of the project. >> That is a big idea. >> That is a big idea. >> That is what we're working on. >> That is a big idea, that is a smart contract, smart securities that have allocations, and efficiencies, and incentives that aren't perverse or generic. >> It aligns with the value of the society he needs, right. Talk about quantum computing more, the potential, why quantum, what attracted you to quantum? What do you see as the future of quantum computing? >> You know, you don't you don't have to own very much Bitcoin before what wakes you up in the middle of the night is quantum computing. It's a hundred million times faster than computing as we know it today. The reason that I'm involved in this project, I believe it's a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or I call it data supremacy. And right now we're lagging, the Chinese have focused on this acutely and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. And it's going to take a national initiative, it's going to take a Manhattan Project, and that's that's really what Entanglement Institute is, is a current day Manhattan Project partnering with government and three-letter agencies, private industry, we have to hunt as a pack and focus on this or we're going to be left behind. >> And that's where that's based out of. >> Newport, Rhode Island. >> And so you got some DC presence in there too? >> Yes lots of DC presence, this is being called Quantum summer in Washington DC. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that because they've been up and down the halls of Congress and DOD and other-- >> Love to introduce you to Bob Picciano, Cube alumni who heads up quantum computing for IBM, would be a great connection. They're doing trying to work their, great chips to building, open that up. Bradley thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Always great to see you, impeccable vision, you've got a great vision. I love the big ideas, smart securities, it's coming, that is, I think very clear. >> Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. The Cube coverage here live in Toronto. The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, more live coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Blockchain futurist conference. This is the first global Cloud Blockchain Summit here kicking off the whole week. Stay with us for more after this short break.

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in San Mateo, California right at the crossroads. The building's called The Crossroads but it's right at the crossroads of 92 and 101. It's a really interesting intersection over the years as you watch these buildings that are on the corner continue to change names. I always think of the Seibel, his first building came up on this corner and we're here to see a good friend of SnapLogic and their brand new building. Gaurav Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, great to see you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So how long you been in this space? >> Gosh, it's been about a year. >> Okay. >> Although it feels longer. It's a high-growth company so these are dog years. (laughs) >> That's right. and usually, you outgrow it before you all have moved in. >> The years are short but the days are long. >> And it's right next Rakuten, I have to mention it. We all see it on the Warriors' jerseys So now we know who they are and where they are exactly. >> No they're a good outfit. We had an interesting time putting a sign up and then the people who made their sign told us all kinds of back stories. >> Oh, good, good Alright. So give us an update on SnapLogic. You guys are in a great space at a really, really good time. >> You know, things been on a roll. As you know, the mission we set out to... engage with was to bring together applications and data in the enterprise. We have some of the largest customers in high technology. Folks like Qualcomm, Workday. Some of the largest customers in pharmaceuticals. Folks like Astrazeneca, Bristol-Meyers Squibb. In retail, Denny's, Wendy's, etc. And these folks are basically bringing in new cloud applications and moving data into the cloud. And it's really fun to wire that all up for them. And there's more of it every day and now that we have this very strong install-base of customers, we're able to get more customers faster. >> Right. >> In good time. >> It's a great time and the data is moving into the cloud, and the public cloud guys are really making bigger plays into the enterprise, Microsoft and, Amazon and Google. And of course, there's IBM and lots of other clouds. But integration's always been such a pain and I finally figured out what the snap in SnapLogic means after interviewing you >> (laughs) a couple of times, right. But this whole idea of, non-developer development and you're taking that into integration which is a really interesting concept, enabled by cloud, where you can now think of snapping things together, versus coding, coding, coding. >> Yeah Cloud and A.I, right We feel that this problem has grown because of the change in the platform. The compute platform's gone to the cloud. Data's going to the cloud. There was bunch of news the other day about more and more companies moving the analytics into the cloud. And as that's happening, we feel that this approach and the question we ask ourselves when we started this company, we got into building the born in the cloud platform was, what would Apple do if they were to build an integration product? And the answer was, they would make it like the iPhone, which is easy to use, but very powerful at the same time. And if you can do that, you can bring in a massive population of users who wouldn't have been able to do things like video chat. My mom was not able to do video chat, and believe me, we tried this and every other thing possible 'till facetime came along. And now she can talk to my daughter and she can do it without help, any assistance from teenage grandchildren on that side, Right? >> Right, Right >> So what we've done with SnapLogic, is by bringing in a beautiful, powerful, sleek interface, with a lot of capability in how it connects, snaps together apps and data, we've brought in a whole genre of people who need data in the enterprise so they can serve themselves data. So if your title has analyst in it, you don't have to be programmer analyst. You could be any analyst. >> Right >> You could be a compensation analyst, a commissions analyst, a finance analyst, an HR analyst. All those people can self-serve information, knock down silos, and integrate things themselves. >> It's so interesting because we talk a lot about innovation and digital transformation, and in doing thousands of these interviews, I think the answer to innovation is actually pretty simple. You give more people access to the data. You give them more access to the tools to work with the data and then you give them the power to actually do something once they figure something out. And you guys are really right in the middle of that. So before, it was kind of >> (laughs) Yeah >> democratization of the data, democratization of the tools to work with the data, but in the API economy, you got to be able to stitch this stuff together because it's not just one application, it's not just one data source. >> Correct >> You're bringing from lots and lots of different things and that's really what you guys are taking advantage of this cloud infrastructure which has everything available, so it's there to connect, >> (laughs) Versus, silo in company one and silo in company two. So are you seeing it though, in terms of, of people enabling, kind of citizen integrators if you will, versus citizen developers. >> Yeah. Heck Yeah. So I'll give you an example. One of our large customers... Adobe Systems, right here in San Jose has been amazingly successful flagship account for us. About 800 people at Adobe come to www.snaplogic.com, every week to self-serve data. We replaced legacy products like TIBCO, informatica web methods about four years ago. They first became a customer in 2014 and usage of those products was limited to Java programmers and Sequel programmers, and that was less than 50 people. And imagine that you have about 800 people doing self-service getting information do their jobs. Now, Adobe is unique in that, it's moved the cloud in a fantastic way, or it was unique in 2014. Now everybody is emulating them and the great success that they've had. With the cloud economic model, with the cloud ID model. This is working in spades. We have customers who've come on board in Q4. We're just rounding out Q1 and in less than 60, 90 days, every time I look, 50, 100, 200 people, from each large company, whether it's a cosmetics company, pharmaceuticals company, retailer, food merchandise, are coming in and using data. >> Right >> And it's proliferating, because the more successful they are, the better they are able to do in their jobs, tell their friends about it sort-of-thing, or next cubicle over, somebody wants to use that too. It's so interesting. Adobe is such a great example, cause they did transform their business. Used to be a really expensive license. You would try to find your one friend that worked there around Christmas >> (laughs) Cause you think they got two licenses a year they can buy for a grand. Like, I need an extra one I can get from you. But they moved to a subscription model. They made a big bet. >> Yes. Yes >> And they bet on the cloud, so now if you're a subscriber, which I am, I can work on my home machine, my work machine, go to machine, machine. So, it's a really great transformation story. The other piece of it though, is just this cloud application space. There's so many cloud applications that we all work with every day whether it's Basecamp, Salesforce, Hootsuite. There's a proliferation of these things and so they're there. They've got data. So the integration opportunity is unlike anything that was ever there before. Cause there isn't just one cloud. There isn't just one cloud app. There's a lot of them. >> Yes. >> How do I bring those together to be more productive? >> So here's a stat. The average enterprise has most cloud services or SAS applications, in marketing. On the average, they have 91 marketing applications or SAS applications. >> 91. That's the average. >> 96% of them are not connected together. >> Right. >> Okay. That's just one example. Now you go to HR, stock administration. You go into sales, CRM, and all the ancillary systems around CRM. And there is this sort of massive, to us, opportunity of knocking down these silos and making things work together. You mention the API economy and whilst that's true that all these SAS applications of APIs. The problem is, most companies don't have programmers to hook up those API's. >> Right. To connect them. >> Yes, in Silicon Valley we do and maybe in Manhattan they do, but in everywhere else in the world, the self-service model, the model of being able to do it to something that is simple, yet powerful. Enterprise great >> Right. Right >> and simple, beautiful is absolutely the winning formula in our perspective. So the answer is to let these 100 applications bloom, but to keep them well behaved and orchestrated, in kind of a federated model, where security, having one view of the world, etc., is managed by SnapLogic and then various people and departments can bring in a blessed, SAS applications and then snap them in and the input and the way they connect, is done through snaps. And we've found that to be a real winning model for our customers. >> So you don't have to have like 18 screens open all with different browsers and different apps. >> Swivel chair integration is gone. Swivel chair integration is gone. >> Step above sneakernet but still not-- >> Step above but still not. And again, it may make sense in very, very specific super high-speed, like Wall Street, high frequency trading and hedge funds, but it's a minuscule minority of the overall problems that there needs to be solved. >> Right. So, it's just a huge opportunity, you just are cleaning up behind the momentum in the SAS applications, the momentum of the cloud. >> Cloud data. Cloud apps. Cloud data. And in general, if a customer's not going to the cloud, they're probably not the best for us. >> Right. >> Right. Our customers' almost always going towards the cloud, have lots of data and applications on premise. And in that hybrid spot, we have the capability to straddle that kind of architecture in a way that nobody else does. Because we have a born in the cloud platform that was designed to work in the real world, which is hybrid. >> So another interesting thing, a lot of talk about big data over the years. Now it's just kind of there. But AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence which should be automated intelligence and machine learning. There's kind of the generic, find an old, dead guy and give it a name. But we're really seeing the values that's starting to bubble up in applications. It's not, AI generically, >> Correct. >> It's how are you enabling a more efficient application, a more efficient workflow, a more efficient, get your job done, using AI. And you guys are starting to incorporate that in your integration framework. >> Yes. Yes. So we took the approach, 'doctor heal thyself.' And we're going to help our customers do better job of having AI be a game changer for them. How do we apply that to ourselves? We heard one our CIOs, CI of AstraZeneca, Dave Smoley, was handing out the Amazon Alexa Echo boxes one Christmas. About three years ago and I'm like, my gosh that's right. That was what Walt Mossberg said in his farewell column. IT is going to be everywhere and invisible at the same time. Right. >> Right. >> It'll be in the walls, so to speak. So we applied AI, starting about two years ago, actually now three, because we shipped Iris a year ago. The artificial intelligence capability inside SnapLogic has been shipping for over 12 months. Fantastic usage. But we applied to ourselves the challenge about three years ago, to use AI based on our born in the cloud platform. On the metadata that we have about people are doing. And in the sense, apply Google Autocomplete into enterprise connectivity problems. And it's been amazing. The AI as you start to snap things together, as you put one or two snaps, and you start to look for the third, it starts to get 98.7% accurate, in predicting how to connect SAS applications together. >> Right. Right. >> It's not quite autonomous integration yet but you can see where we're going with it. So it's starting to do so much value add that most of our customers, leave it on. Even the seasoned professionals who are proficient and running a center of excellence using SnapLogic, even those people choose to have sort-of this AI, on all the time helping them. And that engagement comes from the value that they're getting, as they do these things, they make less mistakes. All the choices are readily at hand and that's happening. So that's one piece of it >> Right. >> Sorry. Let me... >> It's Okay. Keep going. >> Illustrate one other thing. Napoleon famously said, "An army marches on its stomach" AI marches on data. So, what we found is the more data we've had and more customers that we've had, we move about a trillion documents for our customers worldwide, in the past 30 days. That is up from 10 million documents in 30 days, two years ago. >> Right. Right >> That more customers and more usage. In other words, they're succeeding. What we've found as we've enriched our AI with data, it's gotten better and better. And now, we're getting involved with customers' projects where they need to support data scientists, data engineering work for machine learning and that self-service intricate model is letting someone who was trying to solve a problem of, When is my Uber going to show up? So to speak. In industry X >> Right. Right. >> These kinds of hard AI problems that are predictive. That are forward changing in a sense. Those kind of problems are being solved by richer data and many of them, the projects that we're now involved in, are moving data into the cloud for data lake to then support AI machine learning efforts for our customers. >> So you jumped a little bit, I want to talk on your first point. >> Okay. Sorry >> That's okay. Which is that you're in the very fortunate position because you have all that data flow. You have the trillion documents that are changing hands every month. >> Born in the cloud platform. >> So you've got it, right? >> Got it. >> You've got the data. >> It's a virtual cycle. It's a virtual cycle. Some people call it data capitalism. I quibble with that. We're not sort-of, mining and selling people's personal data to anybody. >> Right. Right. >> But this is where, our enterprise customers' are so pleased to work with us because if we can increase productivity. If we can take the time to solution, the time to integration, forward by 10 times, we can improve the speed that by SAS application and it gets into production 10 times faster. That is such a good trade for them and for everyone else. >> Right. Right. >> And it feeds on itself. It's a virtual cycle. >> You know in the Marketo to the Salesforce integration, it's nothing. You need from company A to company B. >> I bet you somebody in this building is doing it on a different floor right now. >> Exactly. >> (laughs) >> So I think that's such an interesting thing. In the other piece that I like is how again, I like your kind of Apple analogy, is the snap packs, right. Because we live in a world, with even though there 91 on-averages, there's a number of really dominant SAS application that most people use, you can really build a group of snaps. Is snap the right noun? >> That's the right word. >> Of snaps. In a snap pack around the specific applications, then to have your AI powered by these trillion transactions that you have going through the machines, really puts you in a unique position right now. >> It does, you know. And we're very fortunate to have the kind of customer support we've had and, sort of... Customer advisory board. Big usages of our products. In which we've added so much value to our customers, that they've started collaborating with us in a sense. And are passing to us wonderful ideas about how to apply this including AI. >> Right. >> And we're not done yet. We have a vision in the future towards an autonomous integration. You should be able to say "SnapLogic, Iris, "connect my company." And it should. >> Right. Right. >> It knows what the SAS apps are by looking at your firewall, and if you're people are doing things, building pipelines, connecting your on-premise legacy applications kind of knows what they are. That day when you should be able to, in a sense, have a bot of some type powered by all this technology in a thoughtful manner. It's not that far. It's closer at hand than people might realize. >> Which is crazy science fiction compared to-- I mean, integration was always the nightmare right back in the day. >> It is. >> Integration, integration. >> But on the other hand, it is starting to have contours that are well defined. To your point, there are certain snaps that are used more. There are certain problems that are solved quite often, the quote-to-cash problem is as old as enterprise software. You do a quote in the CRM system. Your cash is in a financial system. How does that work together? These sort of problems, in a sense, are what McKinsey and others are starting to call robotic process automations. >> Right. >> In the industrial age, people... Stopped, with the industrial age, any handcrafted widget. Nuts, and bolts, and fasteners started being made on machines. You could stamp them out. You could have power driven beams, etc., etc. To make things in industrial manner. And our feeling is, some of the knowledge tasks that feel like widget manufactures. You're doing them over and over again. Or robotic, so to speak, should be automated. And integration I think, is ripe as one of those things and using the value of integration, our customers can automate a bunch of other repeatable tasks like quote-to-cash. >> Right. Right. It's interesting just when you say autonomous, I can't help but think of autonomous vehicles right, which are all the rage and also in the news. And people will say "well I like to drive "or of course we all like to drive "on Sunday down at the beach" >> Sure. Yeah. >> But we don't like to sit in traffic on the way to work. That's not driving, that's sitting in traffic on the way to work. Getting down the 101 to your exit and off again is really not that complicated, in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. >> Indeed. Indeed. >> Sets itself up. >> And there are times you don't want to. I mean one of the most pleasant headlines, most of the news is just full of bad stuff right. So and so and such and such. But one of the very pleasing headlines I saw the other day in a newspaper was, You know what's down a lot? Not bay area housing prices. >> (laughs) >> But you know what's down a lot? DUI arrests, have plummeted. Because of the benefits of Lyft and Uber. More and more people are saying, "You know, I don't have to call a black cab. "I don't need to spend a couple hundred bucks to get home. "I'm just getting a Lyft or an Uber." So the benefits of some of these are starting to appear as in plummeting DUIs. >> Right. Right >> Plummeting fatalities. From people driving while inebriated. Plunging into another car or sidewalk. >> Right. Right. >> So Yes. >> Amara's Law. He never gets enough credit. >> (laughs) >> I say it in every interview right. We overestimate in the short term and we underestimate in the long term the effects of these technologies cause we get involved-- The Gartner store. It's the hype cycle. >> Yeah, Yeah >> But I really I think Amara nailed it and over time, really significant changes start to take place. >> Indeed and we're seeing them now. >> Alright well Gaurav, great to get an update from you and a beautiful facility here. Thanks for having us on. >> Thank you, thank you. A pleasure to be here. Great to see you as well. >> Alright He's Gaurav, I'm Jeff. And you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic's headquarters Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in San Mateo, California right at the crossroads. The building's called The Crossroads but it's right at the crossroads of 92 and 101. It's a really interesting intersection over the years as you watch these buildings that are on the corner continue to change names. I always think of the Seville, his first building came up on this corner and we're here to see a good friend of SnapLogic and their brand new building. Gaurav Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, great to see you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So how long you been in this space? >> Gosh, it's been about a year. >> Okay. >> Although it feels longer. It's a high-growth company so these are dog years. (laughs) >> That's right. and usually, you outgrow it before you all have moved in. >> The years are short but the days are long. >> And it's right next Rakuten, I have to mention it. We all see it on the Warriors' jerseys So now we know who they are and where they are exactly. >> No they're a good outfit. We had an interesting time putting a sign up and then the people who made their sign told us all kinds of back stories. >> Oh, good, good Alright. So give us an update on SnapLogic. You guys are in a great space at a really, really good time. >> You know, things been on a roll. As you know, the mission we set out to... engage with was to bring together applications and data in the enterprise. We have some of the largest customers in high technology. Folks like Qualcomm, Workday. Some of the largest customers in pharmaceuticals. Folks like Astrazeneca, Bristol-Meyers Squibb. In retail, Denny's, Wendy's, etc. And these folks are basically bringing in new cloud applications and moving data into the cloud. And it's really fun to wire that all up for them. And there's more of it every day and now that we have this very strong install-base of customers, we're able to get more customers faster. >> Right. >> In good time. >> It's a great time and the data is moving into the cloud, and the public cloud guys are really making bigger plays into the enterprise, Microsoft and, Amazon and Google. And of course, there's IBM and lots of other clouds. But integration's always been such a pain and I finally figured out what the snap in SnapLogic means after interviewing you >> (laughs) a couple of times, right. But this whole idea of, non-developer development and you're taking that into integration which is a really interesting concept, enabled by cloud, where you can now think of snapping things together, versus coding, coding, coding. >> Yeah Cloud and A.I, right We feel that this problem has grown because of the change in the platform. The compute platform's gone to the cloud. Data's going to the cloud. There was bunch of news the other day about more and more companies moving the analytics into the cloud. And as that's happening, we feel that this approach and the question we ask ourselves when we started this company, we got into building the born in the cloud platform was, what would Apple do if they were to build an integration product? And the answer was, they would make it like the iPhone, which is easy to use, but very powerful at the same time. And if you can do that, you can bring in a massive population of users who wouldn't have been able to do things like video chat. My mom was not able to do video chat, and believe me, we tried this and every other thing possible 'till facetime came along. And now she can talk to my daughter and she can do it without help, any assistance from teenage grandchildren on that side, Right? >> Right, Right >> So what we've done with SnapLogic, is by bringing in a beautiful, powerful, sleek interface, with a lot of capability in how it connects, snaps together apps and data, we've brought in a whole genre of people who need data in the enterprise so they can serve themselves data. So if your title has analyst in it, you don't have to be programmer analyst. You could be any analyst. >> Right >> You could be a compensation analyst, a commissions analyst, a finance analyst, an HR analyst. All those people can self-serve information, knock down silos, and integrate things themselves. >> It's so interesting because we talk a lot about innovation and digital transformation, and in doing thousands of these interviews, I think the answer to innovation is actually pretty simple. You give more people access to the data. You give them more access to the tools to work with the data and then you give them the power to actually do something once they figure something out. And you guys are really right in the middle of that. So before, it was kind of >> (laughs) Yeah >> democratization of the data, democratization of the tools to work with the data, but in the API economy, you got to be able to stitch this stuff together because it's not just one application, it's not just one data source. >> Correct >> You're bringing from lots and lots of different things and that's really what you guys are taking advantage of this cloud infrastructure which has everything available, so it's there to connect, >> (laughs) Versus, silo in company one and silo in company two. So are you seeing it though, in terms of, of people enabling, kind of citizen integrators if you will, versus citizen developers. >> Yeah. Heck Yeah. So I'll give you an example. One of our large customers... Adobe Systems, right here in San Jose has been amazingly successful flagship account for us. About 800 people at Adobe come to www.snaplogic.com, every week to self-serve data. We replaced legacy products like DIBCO, informatica web methods about four years ago. They first became a customer in 2014 and usage of those products was limited to Java programmers and Sequel programmers, and that was less than 50 people. And imagine that you have about 800 people doing self-service getting information do their jobs. Now, Adobe is unique in that, it's moved the cloud in a fantastic way, or it was unique in 2014. Now everybody is emulating them and the great success that they've had. With the cloud economic model, with the cloud ID model. This is working in spades. We have customers who've come on board in Q4. We're just rounding out Q1 and in less than 60, 90 days, every time I look, 50, 100, 200 people, from each large company, whether it's a cosmetics company, pharmaceuticals company, retailer, food merchandise, are coming in and using data. >> Right >> And it's proliferating, because the more successful they are, the better they are able to do in their jobs, tell their friends about it sort-of-thing, or next cubicle over, somebody wants to use that too. It's so interesting. Adobe is such a great example, cause they did transform their business. Used to be a really expensive license. You would try to find your one friend that worked there around Christmas >> (laughs) Cause you think they got two licenses a year they can buy for a grand. Like, I need an extra one I can get from you. But they moved to a subscription model. They made a big bet. >> Yes. Yes >> And they bet on the cloud, so now if you're a subscriber, which I am, I can work on my home machine, my work machine, go to machine, machine. So, it's a really great transformation story. The other piece of it though, is just this cloud application space. There's so many cloud applications that we all work with every day whether it's Basecamp, Salesforce, Hootsuite. There's a proliferation of these things and so they're there. They've got data. So the integration opportunity is unlike anything that was ever there before. Cause there isn't just one cloud. There isn't just one cloud app. There's a lot of them. >> Yes. >> How do I bring those together to be more productive? >> So here's a stat. The average enterprise has most cloud services or SAS applications, in marketing. On the average, they have 91 marketing applications or SAS applications. >> 91. That's the average. >> 96% of them are not connected together. >> Right. >> Okay. That's just one example. Now you go to HR, stock administration. You go into sales, CRM, and all the ancillary systems around CRM. And there is this sort of massive, to us, opportunity of knocking down these silos and making things work together. You mention the API economy and whilst that's true that all these SAS applications of APIs. The problem is, most companies don't have programmers to hook up those API's. >> Right. To connect them. >> Yes, in Silicon Valley we do and maybe in Manhattan they do, but in everywhere else in the world, the self-service model, the model of being able to do it to something that is simple, yet powerful. Enterprise great >> Right. Right >> and simple, beautiful is absolutely the winning formula in our perspective. So the answer is to let these 100 applications bloom, but to keep them well behaved and orchestrated, in kind of a federated model, where security, having one view of the world, etc., is managed by SnapLogic and then various people and departments can bring in a blessed, SAS applications and then snap them in and the input and the way they connect, is done through snaps. And we've found that to be a real winning model for our customers. >> So you don't have to have like 18 screens open all with different browsers and different apps. >> Swivel chair integration is gone. Swivel chair integration is gone. >> Step above sneakernet but still not-- >> Step above but still not. And again, it may make sense in very, very specific super high-speed, like Wall Street, high frequency trading and hedge funds, but it's a minuscule minority of the overall problems that there needs to be solved. >> Right. So, it's just a huge opportunity, you just are cleaning up behind the momentum in the SAS applications, the momentum of the cloud. >> Cloud data. Cloud apps. Cloud data. And in general, if a customer's not going to the cloud, they're probably not the best for us. >> Right. >> Right. Our customers' almost always going towards the cloud, have lots of data and applications on premise. And in that hybrid spot, we have the capability to straddle that kind of architecture in a way that nobody else does. Because we have a born in the cloud platform that was designed to work in the real world, which is hybrid. So another interesting thing, a lot of talk about big data over the years. Now it's just kind of there. But AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence which should be automated intelligence and machine learning. There's kind of the generic, find an old, dead guy and give it a name. But we're really seeing the values that's starting to bubble up in applications. It's not, AI generically, >> Correct. >> It's how are you enabling a more efficient application, a more efficient workflow, a more efficient, get your job done, using AI. And you guys are starting to incorporate that in your integration framework. >> Yes. Yes. So we took the approach, 'doctor heal thyself.' And we're going to help our customers do better job of having AI be a game changer for them. How do we apply that to ourselves? We heard one our CIOs, CI of AstraZeneca, Dave Smoley, was handing out the Amazon Alexa Echo boxes one Christmas. About three years ago and I'm like, my gosh that's right. That was what Walt Mossberg said in his farewell column. IT is going to be everywhere and invisible at the same time. Right. >> Right. >> It'll be in the walls, so to speak. So we applied AI, starting about two years ago, actually now three, because we shipped iris a year ago. The artificial intelligence capability inside SnapLogic has been shipping for over 12 months. Fantastic usage. But we applied to ourselves the challenge about three years ago, to use AI based on our born in the cloud platform. On the metadata that we have about people are doing. And in the sense, apply Google Autocomplete into enterprise connectivity problems. And it's been amazing. The AI as you start to snap things together, as you put one or two snaps, and you start to look for the third, it starts to get 98.7% accurate, in predicting how to connect SAS applications together. >> Right. Right. >> It's not quite autonomous integration yet but you can see where we're going with it. So it's starting to do so much value add that most of our customers, leave it on. Even the seasoned professionals who are proficient and running a center of excellence using SnapLogic, even those people choose to have sort-of this AI, on all the time helping them. And that engagement comes from the value that they're getting, as they do these things, they make less mistakes. All the choices are readily at hand and that's happening. So that's one piece of it >> Right. >> Sorry. Let me... >> It's Okay. Keep going. >> Illustrate one other thing. Napoleon famously said, "An army marches on it's stomach" AI marches on data. So, what we found is the more data we've had and more customers that we've had, we move about a trillion documents for our customers worldwide, in the past 30 days. That is up from 10 million documents in 30 days, two years ago. >> Right. Right >> That more customers and more usage. In other words, they're succeeding. What we've found as we've enriched our AI with data, it's gotten better and better. And now, we're getting involved with customers' projects where they need to support data scientists, data engineering work for machine learning and that self-service intricate model is letting someone who was trying to solve a problem of, When is my Uber going to show up? So to speak. In industry X >> Right. Right. >> These kinds of hard AI problems that are predictive. That are forward changing in a sense. Those kind of problems are being solved by richer data and many of them, the projects that we're now involved in, are moving data into the cloud for data lake to then support AI machine learning efforts for our customers. >> So you jumped a little bit, I want to talk on your first point. >> Okay. Sorry >> That's okay. Which is that you're in the very fortunate position because you have all that data flow. You have the trillion documents that are changing hands every month. >> Born in the cloud platform. >> So you've got it, right? >> Got it. >> You've got the data. >> It's a virtual cycle. It's a virtual cycle. Some people call it data capitalism. I quibble with that. We're not sort-of, mining and selling people's personal data to anybody. >> Right. Right. >> But this is where, our enterprise customers' are so pleased to work with us because if we can increase productivity. If we can take the time to solution, the time to integration, forward by 10 times, we can improve the speed that by SAS application and it gets into production 10 times faster. That is such a good trade for them and for everyone else. >> Right. Right. >> And it feeds on itself. It's a virtual cycle. >> You know in the Marketo to the Salesforce integration, it's nothing. You need from company A to company B. >> I bet you somebody in this building is doing it on a different floor right now. >> Exactly. >> (laughs) >> So I think that's such an interesting thing. In the other piece that I like is how again, I like your kind of Apple analogy, is the snap packs, right. Because we live in a world, with even though there 91 on-averages, there's a number of really dominant SAS application that most people use, you can really build a group of snaps. Is snap the right noun? >> That's the right word. >> Of snaps. In a snap pack around the specific applications, then to have your AI powered by these trillion transactions that you have going through the machines, really puts you in a unique position right now. >> It does, you know. And we're very fortunate to have the kind of customer support we've had and, sort of... Customer advisory board. Big usages of our products. In which we've added so much value to our customers, that they've started collaborating with us in a sense. And are passing to us wonderful ideas about how to apply this including AI. >> Right. >> And we're not done yet. We have a vision in the future towards an autonomous integration. You should be able to say "SnapLogic, Iris, "connect my company." And it should. >> Right. Right. >> It knows what the SAS apps are by looking at your firewall, and if you're people are doing things, building pipelines, connecting your on-premise legacy applications kind of knows what they are. That day when you should be able to, in a sense, have a bot of some type powered by all this technology in a thoughtful manner. It's not that far. It's closer at hand than people might realize. >> Which is crazy science fiction compared to-- I mean, integration was always the nightmare right back in the day. >> It is. >> Integration, integration. >> But on the other hand, it is starting to have contours that are well defined. To your point, there are certain snaps that are used more. There are certain problems that are solved quite often, the quote-to-cash problem is as old as enterprise software. You do a quote in the CRM system. Your cash is in a financial system. How does that work together? These sort of problems, in a sense, are what McKinsey and others are starting to call robotic process automations. >> Right. >> In the industrial age, people... Stopped, with the industrial age, any handcrafted widget. Nuts, and bolts, and fasteners started being made on machines. You could stamp them out. You could have power driven beams, etc., etc. To make things in industrial manner. And our feeling is, some of the knowledge tasks that feel like widget manufactures. You're doing them over and over again. Or robotic, so to speak, should be automated. And integration I think, is ripe as one of those things and using the value of integration, our customers can automate a bunch of other repeatable tasks like quote-to-cash. >> Right. Right. It's interesting just when you say autonomous, I can't help but think of autonomous vehicles right, which are all the rage and also in the news. And people will say "well I like to drive "or of course we all like to drive "on Sunday down at the beach" >> Sure. Yeah. >> But we don't like to sit in traffic on the way to work. That's not driving, that's sitting in traffic on the way to work. Getting down the 101 to your exit and off again is really not that complicated, in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. >> Indeed. Indeed. >> Sets itself up. >> And there are times you don't want to. I mean one of the most pleasant headlines, most of the news is just full of bad stuff right. So and so and such and such. But one of the very pleasing headlines I saw the other day in a newspaper was, You know what's down a lot? Not bay area housing prices. >> (laughs) >> But you know what's down a lot? DUI arrests, have plummeted. Because of the benefits of Lyft and Uber. More and more people are saying, "You know, I don't have to call a black cab. "I don't need to spend a couple hundred bucks to get home. "I'm just getting a Lyft or an Uber." So the benefits of some of these are starting to appear as in plummeting DUIs. >> Right. Right >> Plummeting fatalities. From people driving while inebriated. Plunging into another car or sidewalk. >> Right. Right. >> So Yes. >> Amara's Law. He never gets enough credit. >> (laughs) >> I say it in every interview right. We overestimate in the short term and we underestimate in the long term the effects of these technologies cause we get involved-- The Gartner store. It's the hype cycle. >> Yeah, Yeah >> But I really I think Amara nailed it and over time, really significant changes start to take place. >> Indeed and we're seeing them now. >> Alright well Gaurav, great to get an update from you and a beautiful facility here. Thanks for having us on. >> Thank you, thank you. A pleasure to be here. Great to see you as well. >> Alright He's Gaurav, I'm Jeff. And you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic's headquarters Thanks for watching. (techno music)