(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE live in Miami on the floor of IFS Unleashed. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Had some great conversations. Have more great conversations coming your way. I have two guests joining me. Please welcome Martin Schirmer, the President of Enterprise Service Management, IFS Assyst. And Parminder Khosa, the Senior IT Manager at Parexel. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. >> Lovely to be here. >> It's good to be here. >> Martin, talk to me a little bit... tell the audience a little bit about Assyst so that that get that context before we start asking questions. >> Yeah. Absolutely. So IFS Assyst is a recent acquisition. It's an acquisition we made about a year ago. And fundamentally, it's a platform that takes care of IT service management, enterprise service management and IT operations management. So think of it, of managing sort of the ERP for IT and then broadening that out into the sort of enterprise where you're driving enterprise use cases for all lines of businesses like HR, finance, facilities, so on and so forth. >> Got it. And then Parminder, give the audience just a little bit of a flavor of Parexel, who you guys are, what you do. >> Sure. >> Maybe the impact that you make. >> Yeah, so Parexel is a clinical research organization. And what that means is that we manage drug trials for big pharmaceutical companies. So we're a big company. We're 25,000 people. We have offices in 150 locations all the way from Japan and the east through to the West Coast of the USA. >> Big company. >> Yeah, we are. We are a lot of people. >> And let's start chatting now Martin with some of the questions that you have so we get the understanding of how IFS and Parexel are working together. >> Yeah. Absolutely. I suppose... I mean the first thing is and thank you for traveling here all the way from the UK. (Lisa chuckles) Appreciate it and great energy and vibe. So just what the first question I had really was, you're customer of ours for the last 15 years plus. Maybe just give the audience a bit of context into your journey and how you've evolved from the sort of early years to where you're going into the future. >> Sure. So our history, I was part of a company that Parexel acquired that was already using Assyst. And as Parexel acquired us, they were in the process of also buying Assyst. So it became a kind of natural fit where I carried on with Assyst. And we started relatively small, sort of just the service desktop. And throughout the ongoing 15 years or so, we've just grown and expanded into kind of being a critical tool for Parexel right now. >> Okay, that's fantastic. I mean part of that journey, I know you started in sort of the more they call a ticketing space or IT service management space. Expand a little bit how you've expanded out of that and really moved into the enterprise. >> Sure. So yeah. So when we first rolled Assyst out, it was as I say, purely IT. And eventually we reached out to other business units to say asking questions like, Are you managing your workload through email? Are you managing your workload through Excel spreadsheets? In which case, if you are, we've got a solution for you that will make it a much better experience for your customers. They're all internal. It'll make it much easier for you because you will have official tracking going on through our system. I'll make it better for your management because we can drive metrics from all of the data that we're getting. So if you imagine finance we're getting, kind of 200 miles a day because of the size of our company. And they were just working through them one by one responding, and they becomes just a mess. So we developed forms for them to say, "Okay, Larry raise all your requests here. We will pick it up. We will manage it. We will communicate with you. And once the piece of work that you've asked for is done, we will let you know." And as we go through that process, we'll make it better for us because as I say we're getting those metrics. And we'll make it better for you because we can spot where our gaps are. If a request is taking three days, and of that three days, two days is waiting for someone on our end to respond to you or is waiting for us waiting for a customer to respond, we can iron those out and make it a much better experience for everyone. >> That's fantastic. It's really music to my ears because we always pushing the industry to say move away from just the IT side and really get into the enterprise. And it sounds like you've really gotten a lot of sort of productivity and efficiency gains out of that. >> Definitely, definitely. And it becomes kind of a happy circle. So the finance guys will work with the procurement guys. And they also look... Well, we're doing all of our work through Assyst now. So procurement's a little turnaround. So, well we're using this big spreadsheet to manage all of ours. Can we do the same? And they'll reach out to us and we'll say, "Of course we can. What is your process?" For example, they will say, okay, if someone asks for a new laptop, we need to get the approval from their line manager, from the supplier. We need to do our own internal work and then we will send it out. So imagine if you're doing that in a an email chain. It just becomes chaos. >> Yeah. >> So we will build all of that out for them. And then procurement will talk to HR and it just becomes a snowball. And before you know it, we are doing about 4,000 tickets per day in our Assyst system. And of those, 50% perhaps maybe more than 50% now will be non IT related. >> Oh, that's fantastic. Really music to my ears. And it really breaking down the boundaries or silos within an organization. It's really good. Let the teams work together. Right? >> Definitely. And that's one of the key things that we've learned is that we have to engage completely with our business partners. And our business partners are becoming more and more IT literate as well. So for example, we had a recent big HR solution provided to us. And as part of that, we know there are going to be questions, and queries and perhaps even issues to do with our HR system. So we have to work with us guys, the Assyst front end, the IT HR guys who look after the databases, all of the technology in the background. Then there'll be IT HR who are Workday experts. And then kind of not necessarily at the bottom of the chain will be the HR people themselves who are in their own way, experts in their area, experts in IT in a certain way. So all of those people have to work together. We become the front end, but we have to work with all of those parts of the business. >> That's really great. It's basically what you just said is taking business, IT processes and underpinning solutions. Effectively digital transformation, right? >> Exactly. Yeah. So HR is a great example. They used to have paper flying around with leave request, with sickness requests, with all of those kind of issues. And you said, well if you have an issue with your HR system, you can't raise a leave request, or you can't raise a sickness request, tell us. We will take care of it. We will fix it for you. We will give you the instructions. And we will get rid of all of that paper. >> That's brilliant. Just sort of turning the attention. And all of that, how do you drive the sort of, we'll talk about the autonomous enterprise. How do you drive automation in that process? >> Yeah. Of course, we have to map all of those processes out. Because we're not the experts in HR or procurement or whatever the business area may be. We have to really dig into their work methods, their working areas. What is necessary for them? What is a must have? What is a like to have? What is we don't really need? So we really drive into that processes. Once we've got those, we will automate them. We will build them out in Assyst with the process designer. It's very intuitive now. The latest version is really good to work with. We will do some pretty clever stuff in there. We'll say, okay the manager approval. If the manager is not there, then escalate it to the next person. Then we go to HR and say, okay HR have taken two days to do this. We're not particularly okay with that. So we will escalate it to the next person. And all of that process is completely automated, completely in Assyst. >> Brilliant. I mean obviously, we have a codeless workflow engine with a designer. And if you look at one of the trends from post covid is a war in talent in particular developers. The IDC says there's going to be around 4 million shortage of developers. What is your view on, how easy... Do I need developers? Is it easy, is it difficult to do these workflow extensions and automations? >> Definitely not, no. So the two key areas that you mentioned that with the customizer to develop the forms to make them available to our end users, drag and drop. Really easy to do. You can put some nice filters in there. You can put some nice variables in there. You can drive intelligent drive the forms from there as well. So if option A is correct, then don't show me option B, show me option C. And all of that is codeless, entirely codeless. I don't need to type any code. And when we move on to a process designer that hooks in nicely with the form customizer because we can say, "Okay, if option B on that form is selected, then runs this process." And all of that process is entirely codeless as well. Drag and drop. Creates some tasks. Create some decisions. >> Fantastic. >> Brilliant. >> Sounds really good. Switching gears a little bit. You spoke about experience, and that's also obviously very topical post, well, Covid becoming a remote workforce. Clearly, we need to be digitally connected to our business and organization because the hybrid workforce, as we all know, is here to stay. And that employee experience is fundamental because it is their sort of channel to the engagement of the organization. Of course, that has retention impacts and productivity impact. So just from your perspective, how was Covid, from your perspective, and how easy or difficult was it to get your employees engaged and productive and working? >> Yeah. And for us, it's a double edged sword Covid was. Because of the nature of our business. We do covid stuff. We do drug stuff. So we may have issues with some trials that are related to that. So we need to escalate those. We need to be aware of them and move them to the top of the chain as soon as possible. And then Assyst becomes a source of truth. Everybody knows that if I've got an issue with the current environment that we're living in, I can raise it in Assyst. And everybody knows that's where that information is. There's no need to have huge conference calls or huge email chains to try and follow those around. So with our Assyst platform, with our employees as well, everybody knew that this is where the source of truth was. We didn't have any dropouts. We didn't have any concerns with our system or performance. We knew it was there. We had to do some work like, as I say, around covid issues just to make sure they get pushed up to the top of the chain. But otherwise, we were fine. And great credit to our IT operations team as well who managed that pretty much seamlessly. >> That's brilliant. That's good news. >> Yeah. >> It really is. Just taking a little bit further and talking a little bit about what next. My team has been, I know, talking to your team about the whole area of asset management. Maybe talk to us a little bit about that journey. >> Sure, sure. So we're an ITOM customer as well. So all of our hardware data is stored within the ITOM platform. So we've pushed out the agents to all of our end user machines, so 25,000 agents. And we're in the process of integrating that into our Assyst platform to make that the single source of truth. And that part of that we're working on the software asset management side as well. So we've got a really good idea of where our software assets are. It comes to all license auditing, we know exactly how much we've got there. And the more complex side of it is of course server. So software management management as well. So we're in the process of getting all of that data as well. So once we've done all that, there is other all as the next step. The next step will be to perhaps do monitoring or pushing out software using the ITOM platform and getting rid of some of the disparate systems that we have right now. >> Well that's good news. And I think I saw a study. I think, every single person as an employee carries around 15 or 20 assets with him at any one time. Be it from a PC, phone, physical software licenses, so on and so forth. In that context, I can imagine the business case around it. >> Definitely. Yeah. And every, again, we map every user to their assets and (indistinct) their assets. And again Assyst as a source of truth for that. So if you want to look at my record, so, all right. Pam's got a laptop. He's got a mobile phone. We're thinking about giving him a tablet, but we'll find out. That he's in the process of getting a tablet as well. So I can have a look at my user record and know exactly what I've got with all of the asset tags and the various links that it has to the software pieces so it becomes a big tree of my assets. >> That's wonderful. Just the question I had was, we spoke about breaking down silos and the enterprise use cases and the effect that has. Do you envisage that Assyst can really get to being enterprisewide as, when I say enterprisewide, everybody in the organization effectively using this tool as their sort of source of experience, and level of automation of process? >> Definitely, definitely. As I say, we're getting... We're really pushing to get to that. As I say, 4,000 tickets a day with a user base of 25,000 kind of means that everybody will interact with the system perhaps every two weeks or so. So we're getting to that point and with the new functionality that's coming out with the Assyst product, with the team's integration, and the bot and everything that will bring to us because we are a big. We use teams. We use bots. We use that kind of technology. It will just fit in seamlessly. And trying to break down the silos, as I say finance, procurement, all of the big beasts within our company already are using the Assyst tool. And we want to bring in more and more of those processes as we mature. >> Brilliant. I think Omnichannel's critical. We want to connect from any device from anywhere. It's just the way we work. So I think that's critical. Teams is of course a a tool that most of us have become too familiar with. >> Yup. (chuckles) >> To be fair. (chuckles) It's better to be here in person finally, right? >> Yeah. >> So I think, that's all exciting news. And it's really fantastic. >> Great. >> So I suppose maybe in the time that we have left, what's next? >> What's next for us is that we're in the process of migrating our solution to the cloud, to the IFS cloud. That will open up a huge new user base for us. If we think all of our customers, all of our people who work on studies will have the ability to connect to Assyst and ask questions. That's a lot of it is just ask a question, or raise an issue or ask for something. So we're talking, it could be expanded by hundreds of thousands of new users that will meet more people on the backend to manage those requests as well. So yeah. It's just going to get bigger and bigger. And as you say, with the CMDB work that we're doing as well, that's another big ongoing stream for us. >> It's great because as you know, with Assyst we have a disruptive licensing model. >> Yeah. >> We have a t-shirt size pricing. All you can need based a number of employees. So there's no barriers to entry for you. >> There really is. And that really helps us because as I said initially, particularly when finance came on board and now they're expanding, there is no cost implication for it. The more that we use it, the better it is for. The more bang for buck that we get. >> Yep. That's our mantra. Enterprise users, right? For the price of a cup of coffee, for the price of a user. That's our mantra. >> I love it. You guys have done such a great job of articulating the synergies in the relationship that IFS Assyst has with Paraxel. You talked about the great outcomes that you're achieving. And it's all about Martin, I know, from IFS Assyst perspective, it's all about helping customers achieve those outcomes and those moments of service that are so critical to your customers on the other end staying with you, doing more business. Whether it's the end user customer, whether it's the actual employee. You talked a lot about the customer experience, the employee experience, and what you guys are doing together to enable that. And I always think that the employee experience and the customer experience are like this. They're inextricably linked. You can't, you shouldn't. Otherwise you're going to have problems. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's actually a study on that saying that, 70% of customers generally don't feel they get what they want from organizations. >> 70. Wow! >> And if you take that one step further to what you said, the interconnectivity between customer employee, employee shops on Amazon, right? It's on those websites. So you can't be rolling out and digitally connect to the employee with something that is clunky and has the wrong experience. Like I said, it really affects that level of engagement the employee has with the company which happens to be largely these days remote. >> It does. Last question Martin, is for you. Talk to us about what's next for IFS Assyst. Obviously, we're back in person. There's a lot of momentum about the company. I was talking with Darren, the growth and first half was great. He kind of gave us some teaser about second half, but what's next from your perspective? >> Yeah. So what's next for us is achieving our goal. We are here to disrupt the industry. It's an industry that's dominated by one player and a fair amount of legacy players. We've disrupted the business model as I've told you. We here to do more because it's a simple thing. And that's the word simple. We want to keep things simple. We're going to keep engineering and driving our product forward, right? We've made sure that our platform is up there with the best. Yeah. We've just been certified by pink. Pink is a verification of ITIL four they call it. So it's a body. And the top level is you can get 20 out of 20. We got 17 out of 20. There's only one other vendor that has more than us and it's only by little. And after it's a big white space, the next one is 14. So we on the right track. We are going to of course drive and capture the market. So watch this space. We here to grow. >> We will watch this space. Congratulations on being that disrupter. >> Thank you. >> Parminder great work with what you guys are doing. You did a great job of articulating, as I said, the customers tour here. We appreciate your insights, your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Pleasure. >> All right, my pleasure. >> Thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live from Miami on the show floor of IFS Unleashed. We'll be back after a short break.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicone Valley Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here at our Palo Alto CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great conversation here with Matt Cain, CEO of Couchbase. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. >> John, thanks for having me here. >> So it's great to have you on because we've been following Couchbase really from the beginning but in 2011 that was the big movement with Couchbase and Membase coming together. Since then quite a tear. Couple of things, one from a business standpoint, good mix of you guys. And then you've got the cloud trend just absolute change the game with scale. So enterprise is now a reeling, cloud is there, the roll of data's changed. Now data's now a part of everything. This has been a big part of the successful companies in this next cloud 2.0 or this next shift. Give us an update on Couchbase. What's going on with the company? You've been the CEO for a couple of years, what's new? >> Yeah, so I'm 2 1/2 years in, John. It's been a great ride so far. Let's talk a little bit about how successful the company is and then we'll spend some time on the market. We just finished the first half of our fiscal year and the business is on a phenomenal trajectory. We're up 70% year on year. Average contract values up 50%. Total contract value up over 100%. We now call 30% of the Fortune 100 customers. So in terms of business success we're really proud of what we're able to do and the problems that we're solving for our customers. The backdrop, and what we're so excited about is the market transition that we're participating in. And it's our belief at Couchbase that the world of databases represents the single biggest market transition that's going to occur in technology over the next couple years. And I think there are two fundamental drivers behind that transition which you talked about. One of them is a technology disruption and the other is business disruption. On the business side we believe deeply in digital transformation or the fourth industrial revolution. And we spend our time going around the world talking to enterprise customers and everyone of 'em is figuring out how to use technology to get closer to their customers and change their business. In order to do that they need to build next generation applications that change our customer experience as both professionals and our personal lives. To enable that though, you need a completely different approach to the database. And how you manage the underlying data to enable those experiences and Couchbase sits at the intersection of those two transitions. >> Want to get into some of the database software dynamics from being a software company, a database company. You guys are, you're on a good wave, you've got a good surfboard as we say in California. But the couple of things I want to get your thoughts on, you see the database market like the oracles of the world. The database that rules the world, that's changed. Now there's multiple databases out there. Different needs for different workloads. And then you've got open-source. So you've got the two things going on I want to get your reaction to. One is the changing landscape of the database market. And two, the impact of open-source because both have been changing and growing and evolving. What's your reaction to those two dynamics? >> So let's talk databases first. I think to reflect on databases one needs to think about the applications that those databases have been architected to support. And if you look at legacy solutions, legacy systems, it was really built on relational technology. And the applications those were optimized for and have been really running for the last many decades were big monolithic applications. And I like to say the implementation of one of those at a large financial firm in New York probably wasn't much different than a consumer company in Seattle. That is changing now in the world of microservices and customer experiences and applications demand a different type of database. And so as we think about what is an application literally everything that we do between the human world and the digital world goes via an application. Whether it's our, you know, checking our banking statements, how we engage with our health care provider, how we travel, how we buy things, whether we're in a store or we're doing it from the comfort of our home. Everything is via an application and what we've come to expect is I want that application to work my way which is different than your way. Well that's a very different thing than legacy applications that were built for CRM or ERP and so databases are going through this big transformation because of that business transition that I talked about where we as consumer are demanding different ways of engaging. And if you look at enterprise success in digital transformation it's very tied to the experiences that they're creating which necessitate a database that is capable of handling those. So we're seeing a massive shift in database technologies or proliferation of new companies that are supporting next generation applications. With respect to open-source, when I talk to enterprises they want the flexibility of a new way of acquiring technology. And people are very used to, "I want to examine things "in the way I want to learn about it. "And I want to play with technology "to make sure that it's going to meet my needs." In the case of databases, does it have the scale and performance? Does it have the usability? And so as an open-source company we want to enable our application developers, our enterprise architects, our dev-ops teams to use the technology and see what's it like. And I think enterprises really appreciate that model. So I think open-source is not only unique to databases, it's how enterprises want to-- >> And certainly is growing and changing as well. So you mentioned open-source and databases. I want to get your thoughts on the cloud impact because if you look at the success of Amazon which I call them the leaders and they won the cloud 1.0 game, or the first inning, or the first game of the double header as some say. APIs led itself well to decoupling and creating highly cohesive workloads. Using APIs and (mumbles). There you got to store data in the databases. You might have one workload with one database and another workload using other databases. So have you have a diverse database landscape. >> For sure. >> So that's kind of out there. So if that's the case how do I as an enterprise deal with this because now I'm thinking, "Okay, I want to stitch it all together. "I got to maintain security. "Now I'm dealing with multiple clouds." It's become a discussion and design point for dealing with all these new dimensions. What's the mind of the customer in all this? >> Yeah, and on top of that I want to do it without dramatically increasing my total cost of ownership. And so I talk a lot to enterprises that represent that very challenge. What they say is I have to change the customer experience. In order to do that I need to understand who they are. What are their preferences? What inventory do I have as an organization? What do I have in physical locations? What we talk about is different data silos. And the reality is data has been in those silos for a long time and in some cases it's not coming out anytime soon. So one of the new approaches with data platforms is how do I take advantage of existing investment and infrastructure and layer in new technology platforms that can sit between the application and the legacy systems? And then you can suck that data into a data store that is helping feed the applications on a real time basis whether that's in the cloud or out to the edge. And Couchbase is one of the examples of a database that can handle that but can handle it at scale unlike any other company on the planet. So when we talk to customers it's how do you extract all that different information which has rich potential if they application logic can present it in a way that's customized but do that in a way that's constantly on, available from anywhere in the network topology and reliable. So it is a challenge and it's one of the greatest computer science challenges in the enterprise right now. >> On that point I want to ask you, what's the number one story or trend that people should be paying attention to? >> Yeah, so you asked a question on cloud, which I think is fundamental, and enterprise is like pay as you go models and utilization based economics which make complete sense. A lot of the architecture therefor is being driven in a centralized manor. So bring information into centralized cloud take advantage of bundling effects. I believe that one of the best kept secrets if you will or biggest trends that people aren't spending as much time on is edge. If you think about us in this studio right now there isn't a cloud sitting behind us and yet you're working on your machine, I was on my device a moment ago and I'm expecting real time information across all my applications. We are constantly manipulating, moving, accessing data and we expect to be able to do that at all times. Well in order to do that at the scale in which we're talking you have to have database technology at the edge. And by definition if you're expecting a roundtrip of data processing, which you're potentially doing, is increasing latency. And that's if you have a reliable connection. If you don't have a reliable connection you're dead in the water with it with that application. So if you think about the future of healthcare, if you think about next generation retail, if you think about connected homes and connected cars, the reality is we're going to expect massive processing of data out at the edge. And I think data platform companies have to be mindful of what they're architecting for. Now Couchbase is uniquely positioned in NoSQL databases that we can run in any public cloud and we can run that same platform out to the edge and orchestrate the movement of applications and data between every point of the network topology. And that's when our enterprises say, "Wow, this is game changing technology "that allows me to serve my customers "the way they want to be served." >> Most people might not know this about you, and I'm going to put you on the spot here, is that you had almost a 10 year run at Cisco. >> Yeah, that's right. >> From the 2000 timeframe. Those were the years that Cisco was cutting its teeth into going from running the internet routes to building application layers and staring see... And the debate at that time was should Cisco move up the stack. I'm sure you were involved in a lot of those conversations. They never did and they're kind of staying in their swim lane. But the network is the network and we're in a distributed network with the cloud, so the question is what is the edge now? So is the edge just the network edge? Is it the persons body? Is it the wearable? How do you guys define the edge? >> I think the edge is constantly being pushed further and further, right? One of the things that we talk a lot about is mobile devices, right? If we think about the device that we as humans ultimately touch at the end where we're not dependent on sensors and things, it is our mobile devices and we all know the impact that's had. I'd be willing to bet you that cup of coffee that you have Couchbase database running in your mobile device because we can actually embed it inside the application and allow the application architect to determine how much data you want to use. But the way we've architected things is we think for the future. This isn't just mobile devices, this is the ability to put things directly into sensors. And if we think about how applications are working the amount of data that you can draw with machine learning algorithms, which we've enabled in our latest release, imagine a world where we're embedding a database instance inside of a sensor. So companies aren't quite there today, but we're not that far off where that's going to be the case. >> Well I bring up the Cisco example because you obviously at that time the challenge was moving packets around from point A to point B. You mentioned storage, you store things from here to there. Move packets around in point A to point B. That's the general construct. But when we think about data they're not packets you're talking about sometimes megabytes and betabytes of data. So the general theme is don't move data around the network. How does that impact your business? How does that impact a customer? Because okay they maybe have campuses or wide area networks or SD-WAN, whatever they got. They still want a instrument, they still want to run compute at the edge, but moving the data around has become persona non gratae in **. So how do people get around that? What's the design point? >> So you and I remember these examples when we use to go into conference rooms and ask for ethernet cables, right? The days of what is my wifi connectivity weren't there yet. If we think about that philosophical challenge that was I'm used to a certain experience with connectivity, how do I enable that same connectivity and performance as I get further and further away from the central topology? And so what we did at Cisco is put more and more sophistication into branch routing and make sure that we had reliability and performance between all points of the topology. The reality is if you were to take that same design approach to databases, what you end up with is that centralized cloud model which a lot of companies have chosen. The problem with it occurs when you're running truly business critical applications that demand real-time performance and processing of massive applications. And so-- >> Like what, retail? >> Yeah. So at Couchbase what we've decided to do is take the data logic where the data resides. So we actually now call four of the top 10 retailers in the world customers. And what they are doing is changing our experience as consumers. Omnichannel. When I walk into a store, imagine if you're at a do-it-yourself retailer, somethings popped off the back of your washing machine and you say, "I don't know how old the washing machine is. "I don't know what the part is." Go into one of these mega stores that we know, with the application now via Couchbase in a mobile phone I could take a picture of that. With machine learning algorithms I'm now running technology to say, "Do I have this in inventory?" "What is it compatible with?" "Oh, and it happens to be on aisle 5." Or, "We don't have it and we're going to ship it out." I mean that's game-changing stuff. Well to enable that use case I need to understand who you are. I need to know what you've bought before. I need to understand our product catalog, what things are compatible with. You're literally storing, in that case, three or four billion instances in a data store that you need to access on a real-time basis. >> In milliseconds. >> In less than 2 1/2 second millisecond response rates. To make the challenge even more exciting, those customers come to us and they say, "Well what if there's a hurricane?" "What if there is no internet connectivity?" "What if I don't have a cellular connection?" I still want my users to have a great customer experience. Well now all of a sudden that isn't an extension of a cloud, that becomes it's own cloud. Now to orchestrate the movement of information and applications from that point and have consistency across all your other stores, you need to figure out orchestrating applications, orchestrating massive amounts of data, having consistency. And so the way to do it, bring the data logic where the data resides and then really understand how applications want to move things around. >> So first of all, my database antenna goes up. The comparison of the old days was you had to go to a database, run packets across the network, access the database, do a lookup, send it back and then go back again. >> Right, right. And that's not possible. That's interesting modern approach. But you also mentioned all that complexity that's involved in that. Okay, no power or no connectivity you have to have an almost a private cloud instance right there. I mean this is complex. >> Very complex. >> And this is some of the kinds of things we saw with the recent Jedi proposal that Amazon and Microsoft fought over. Microsoft won to deal with the battle fields. All this complexity where there's no bandwidth, you got to have the data stored locally, it's got to use the back hall properly. So there's a lot of things going on in the system. There's a lot to keep track of. How do you guys manage that from a product standpoint because there's somethings are out of your control. >> Yeah. >> How does Couchbase make that scale work? >> So that's a great question. Let me again complete the problem statement which is databases need to account for all that complexity but application developers and dev-ops teams don't want to deal with the specifics of a database. And so when we're selling into enterprises at this magnitude we need to be very relevant to application developers where they want speed and agility and familiarity of tools they know and yet we need to have the robustness and completeness of a platform that can literally run business critical applications. And so part of the power of Couchbase is that we engineer with extreme elegance, that we put a lot of that sophistication into the database and our job is to write the code that manages that complexity. But what we also do is we go to enterprise and we say we give you the full power of this NoSQL engine that is in memory, shared nothing, scale out, highest performance on the planet but we allow you all the power and familiarity of the language you know which is SQL. You've got this, I'm sure back to your database education you were familiar with, SQLs a programing language, well there's an entire world of database people and architects that understand that as an interface. So how do I account for that complexity but then go to you and say, "You know that language "that you've been speaking the whole time "talking to your old database? "Well you can speak with that same language "on your new database." And that's how you can really break through enabling customers to modernize their applications with all this complexity but do so in a way that they're comfortable with and is aligned to the skills that they-- >> So you extract away the interface, or language NoSQL I know there are others and modernize onto the covers? >> Correct. >> And at scale? >> At the highest scale. >> All right, I got to ask you about multi-cloud because multi-cloud is something that we were talking before we came on camera around cloud sprawl, inheriting clouds, M&A. Companies have multiple clouds they're dealing with but no one's, well my opinion, no one's architecting to build the best multi-cloud system. They're dealing with multi-clouds and design point which you mentioned which is interesting. I want to get your thoughts on this because you're hearing a lot of multi-cloud buzz. And it's a reality but it's also a challenge for application developers. And I want to get your thoughts on this. How should people thinking about multi-cloud in your opinion? >> Yeah, so my perspective starts with what we hear from our customers. And our customers say for truly business critical applications that they are running their business on, whether it's core booking engines, customer platforms, the touchpoint between users and stores, they say, "Look, I need to design a system "that's reliable and higher performing "and public cloud is a reality. "At the same time I have legacy data center on-prem, "I've got things out at the edge," and so they have to architect a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and distributed environment. And so depending on the layer of the stack that you're in I think the cloud companies would talk about their multi-cloud strategy. I come at it a different way which is how do we build a data platform that supports the applications that demand a hybrid multi-cloud environment? And so when we have a certain application that's running on-prem, how do we alive for a reliable failover instance to be running in a public cloud? To me that is truly fulfilling on the demands that enterprises have. And so I think multi-cloud is a strategy of all enterprises. Giving the flexibility with things like Kubernetes to avoid cloud lock in. Making sure your system can handle migration of workloads and active, active, active, passive scenario. I think that's our approach to multi-cloud. >> It's interesting, again back to this Jedi thing which was front and center in the news. Kind of speaks to the modern era of what the needs are. The Department of Defense has a multi-cloud strategy, they have multiple clouds, and well turns out Microsoft might be the sole source. But their idea was it's okay to have a sole source cloud for a workload but still deal within a multi-cloud framework. What's your thoughts on this? Some people are saying, "Hey, if you've got a workload "that runs great on cloud, do it." >> Yeah. I don't want to make that decision for the enterprise, I want them to determine what the best instance is based on the application that they're enabling. So I ask all my enterprise customers, "How many applications do you have in your environment?" Thousands of applications. It would be wrong for me to go dictate and say, "Well I have the answer "for every one of those applications." Instead we want to build a sophisticated platform that says look, if these are the requirements, the performance requirements, run your database in this instance and you determine if that's the best for you. If you have a legacy application that needs an underlying mainframe or relational database, that's fine. We're not asking you to forklift upgrade that. Put the database in there that's going to give you the performance and requirements you want. And so again, it's where do application developers want to stand up their application for the best performance? I'll tell you what, in the 2 1/2 years I've been at Couchbase I've sat down with Fortune 100 CIOs that have absolutely told me, "Here is our cloud strategy "with public cloud vendor number one." Come back two years later and they said, "We have shifted for X, Y, and Z reason "and we are going to public cloud vendor number two." If we had chosen one specific deployment and not given thought to how enterprises are eventually going to want to have that flexibility we would be having a very different conversation. And so when we talk about we're enterprise class, multi-cloud to edge, NoSQL database, it's giving enterprises this flexibility at a database-- >> So on that example of I went with cloud number one and then moved to cloud number two, was that a I'm stopping with cloud one going to cloud two or I'm going to move a little bit to cloud two or both? >> I think it varies depending on the CIO that you're talking to. It could be they didn't handle GDPR the way I wanted to or it could be they're not deployed in a certain geographic reason. It could be-- >> Capabilities issue. >> Capabilities. Could be business relationship. You know, I have a particular commercial relationship over here therefor I have an incentive to move here. Some of 'em have dual strategies, so I think it's very dangerous for companies like us to try to-- >> Beauty's in the eye of the beholder as I always say with cloud. You pick your cloud based on what you're trying to do. Final question, security obviously, cloud security you're seeing. Amazon just had a recent even called re:Inforce which was I think the first cloud security show, RSA, there's a bunch of other shows that go on, they're all different. But security clearly is being baked in everywhere. Kind of like data, kind of horizontally embedded, need real time, you need a lot of complexity involved. They want to make it easier. What's your view on how security is playing out for Couchbase? >> Look, it's a paramount design principle for us. And we think that to build a database for business critical applications you need to have reliability, you need to have performance, you need to have scalability, you have to have security. So it's part of how we think about every component from cloud to edge and everything in between. How do we have encryption? How do we have multi-factor authentication? How do we ensure that not just securing the data itself, but how do we give the operational controls to the database teams to orchestrate the movement of data and synchronize it in a reliable way. So absolutely important to us because it's important to our customers. >> Awesome. Matt Cain, CEO of Couchbase here inside theCUBE for CUBE conversation. Matt, I want to give you a chance to get the plug in for the company. Give the pitch if I'm a customer or prospect. Hey Couchbase I heard a little buzz. You guys got momentum going on, got good references. What's the pitch to me? >> Yeah so look, Couchbase is the only company on the planet that can make the following claim. We bring the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL in one elegant solution from the public cloud to the edge. So let me walk through that. Our architecture was enabled for the highest performance in the world. Billions of documents. We have a customer who on a daily basis is running 8 million operations per second with less than two millisecond response time. Their business is running on Couchbase. You can't do that if you have the best data schema, the architecture for scalability, scale out, do that at high total cost of ownership. At the same time we want to bring the familiarity of programing languages that people know so that application developers don't have a big barrier to entry in deploying Couchbase. And that's where we've uniquely enabled the SQL query language for both query's, our operational analytics capability, that combination is extremely powerful. To be able to run in anyone of the public clouds, which we do via the marketplace or customers bring in their own nodes to their instances knowing that that's a changing thing per our conversation. But having a seamless integrated platform where you can run the same query in the public cloud as you can at the edge and then synchronizing that back together, that is a very powerful thing. One elegant platform we have, you know, we're a multi-model database. We can run a key-value cache, we can run a JSON database. We give you advanced querying, we give you indexing. To do that in one integrated platform no one else has thought about that and future proof their solution. Let me give you an example of how that all wraps up. One of the more innovative industries right now believe it or not, are cruise lines. And so we talk about digital transformation which is by definition customer experience. Well if you're in the cruise line business, if you're not creating a great customer experience, it's not like airline travel where you've got to get from point A to point B so you chose the best. This is I'm opting for an experience if this isn't great. so one of the most leading edge cruise lines out there has deployed Couchbase and they give every passenger a wearable. That wearable now fundamentally changes the interface between me as a passenger and the physical boat, the digital services, and the other people on the ship. And this is in a world... It's a floating device. There is no cloud, there is no cellular connections. So let's say we happen to be on the same ship. We end up at sports bar after we drop our family off, maybe we're talking databases, maybe we're talking something else. And we have beer, we have a second beer, what we don't know is that this cruise line is using our device. They know who we are, they know where we are, they're using geospatial technology back in e-commerce. They have a hypothesis that we're now friends, right? Or at least maybe we want to see each other again. Unbeknownst to us the next day we get a promotion that says 50% off at the sports bar for the next game. Wow that's great, I'm going to go. And then I run into you and it's like, "Wow, what are the chances that I run into you?" Well the chances in the old world very slim. The chances in new world very good. If I had little kids the digital content in the cabin is different. If there's a movie getting out how it navigates me around the ship is different. All of this is empowered by massive amounts of data processing, data collection and they've embedded that now in a device. Now if you're in that business and now you've got weeks worth of information on what we like, ship comes back to shore, how do you take all that information, extract it back to a cloud, improve the algorithm, start to offer different shipping option. They're literally changing the physical display of the boats to optimize customer experience. So think about that. Power of processing massive amounts of information in real time. If I'm getting a promotion and it's too late and I miss a game, does me no good. The combination of all those different data silos, right? Doing that where application developers can be agile and swift and make changes in an innovative way and stay ahead of their competition. Cloud to edge. Right? I mean that's literally a ship comes back, it goes to cloud, it enables it in this consistent... We're the only company on the planet that can do that. >> Lot of complexity involved. >> Yeah. >> Awesome. Quick plug. Are you guys hiring? What's going on with the company? What are you looking for? >> As quickly as possible. Based on our conversation earlier and your knowledge of databases, we're looking for quota carriers and engineers. So if you want to come on over we're-- >> I was thinking about the cruise ship and having a couple of beers with you watching some sports. My (mumbles) says >> Sounds like sports-- >> "Hey John's had so many beers "why don't you hit the tables?" >> Sounds like-- >> "We'll take your money." >> Sound like more a rep than an engineer. (both laughing) >> Matt, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Matt Cain, CEO of Couchbase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We have been covering Imagine 2019 in Vegas, all day today, talking all things eCommerce, innovation, technology, the customer experience. Jeff, one of the biggest themes, I think, that we've heard today, from all of our guests, is how strong this community is, how naturally it was developed in the last ten years, and how influential it is to delivering exceptional customer experience technology. >> In fact, Jason said without the community, there would be no Magento. So it's, it's ingrained in the culture. It's ingrained in the DNA. I think, you know, doing some of the research, you know, there was people talking about the dark days of Magento, as it went into eBay, and apparently whatever that plan was, that didn't work. And then out of eBay into private equity. Out of private equity into, now, Adobe. And it sounds like the community's kind of been following along, and maybe they were holding their breath a little bit, a year ago, but it sounds like they kind of got through that, that kind of concern knothole, if you will, and kind of popped out the other side, and realized there's a whole lot of opportunity that comes to Magento, via being part of Adobe now that they didn't have before. So I think, it sounds like they're good with it, and they're ready to go, and nothing but opportunity ahead. >> Yeah, you know, I think with any acquisition, and, you know, we cover so many technology shows, and we've been part of acquisitions before at different companies. They're challenging. There's always, I think, natural trepidation. I think it's just a natural response that anybody, probably, from an executive to an individual contributor level, is going to have. But one of the things that came up so resolutely, was how organic the Magento community has been developed over time. That, like you said, as Jason was saying, without it, there is no Magento. Not only are they influential. It's very much a symbiotic relationship, that pleasantly, surprisingly, sounds like it's been integrated very nicely, into Adobe. And to your point, they now are seeing, wow, there's a tremendous amount of technology and resources that we didn't have the opportunity to leverage before. Talking about the experience, the digital experience business of Adobe's, which is growing. Grew 20% year over year, 2017 to 2018. On a very strong trajectory this year. A lot of opportunity to enable merchants of any size to have this really 360 degree of the customer experience, and manage it with analytics, and advertising, and marketing, and add the commerce piece, so that they can take that marketing interaction and actually convert it to revenue. >> Right, right. I mean, look at Adobe. I mean, they brought in Magento, which we know, late last year. They also brought in Marketo at almost about the same time, $4.7 billion. So they're making huge moves. And I think it's a pretty unique situation, where, again, they come from the creative, and now, with the data, and a sophisticated platform, and you talk about the AB testing, again. It used to be just AB, now it's AB times literally millions and millions of customized experiences delivered to the client. And then now, again, I think really an interesting point of view is where then you bring the commerce to the point of engagement rather than trying to use the engagement as a way to drive people to commerce. I mean, they seem really well positioned, I think they're going to really enjoy people like Accenture, and some of the of the other big system integrators that now are going to be, you know, behind this platform. So it seems to be a fit, a marriage made in heaven. It almost makes you wonder why Adobe was so late to have an eCommerce platform, which is the thing that kind of surprises me, I think, the most. >> Yeah, well, it also gives them the opportunity to compete with Shopify and with Salesforce Commerce, and kind of harness this brand power. But you talked about something that we've talked about all day, and that's bringing the transaction and the commerce experience to me as a consumer wherever I am, whether it's in app shopping through Instagram. Rather than, you know, delivering me a personalized experience, leveraging the power of these technologies, to understand the right things about me as a consumer, to deliver me an experience that is frictionless. It's going to allow me to have a seamless experience. We talked about that with progressive web apps, and how that's going to enable next generation shopping for merchants of all sizes to enable. Don't just engage me on my mobile, if that's where I want to be. If you don't have the opportunity to convert me seamlessly to actually transact, there's a huge adjustable market or gap in converting that to revenue, which Jason Woolsey also talked about. Kind of thinking about next steps for Adobe and what they're going to be able to do to help those merchants capture in real time, leveraging the power of technology, emerging technologies like AI, in real-time to make that shoppable moment turn into dollars for the merchant. >> Right, lot of great things. I thought it was interesting having TJ Gamble on, and talked about coopetition. Right? Coopetition is such a fundamental part of Silicon Valley and the world in which we live in. And he said, you know, if you're making fat margin, as Jeff Bezos loves to say, your margin is my opportunity. You're going to compete with Amazon, but in the meantime, you got to compete with them. So to enable integration into the Amazon platform with your Magento store, the integration into Google Shopping, integration into Instagram purchases, in app purchases, I mean, these really opening up the opportunities for these smaller retailers, mid-sized retailers, to compete in a really complicated and super hyper-competitive world. But now they can, again, focus on their brand, which we hear over and over and over, focus on their experience, focus on their community, and leverage some of this special breed technology under the covers across platform, across different modes of buying. Because the other thing we hear over and over and over is you got to give people choice. You can't say no. So if they want to buy it through Amazon, let 'em buy it through Amazon. If they want to buy it through Instagram, let 'em buy it through Instagram. If they want to come to you eCommerce site, let 'em come to your eCommerce site But, you know, in opening up all those channels for the merchant to be able to execute their transactions regardless of how the customer got to them, or how, more importantly, they got to the customer. >> And, you know, the SMB front is really key that you brought up, because, in the last year, since the acquisition was announced, about a year ago, and completed, I think in September of 2018, there was not just concern from the community, that we talked about at the beginning of this segment, but also the small and the medium business. Like, well, Adobe has a really big presence in enterprise. Is that going to be cannibalized with this acquisition of Magento, who had such a strong presence with those smaller merchants? And you mentioned some of thee things with Amazon and Google that we heard yesterday and today. I think really assuaging some of those concerns that the smaller businesses had, but also, allowing these smaller merchants to sort of level the playing field, and have access to the power of a branded Amazon storefront that allows a smaller business to get some differentiation, whereas before they didn't have that. So I think we heard a lot about that today, and how, I think, those smaller brands are probably, maybe breathing a sign of relief, that this acquisition is really going to enable them, with a lot more tools, but not at the, you know, cannibalizing what they have been doing with Magento for so long. >> Right, right. And some other fun discussions. I really enjoyed the time with Tina, talking about influencer marketing. It's amazing how that continues to evolve at a really fast pace. Right? A derivation of professional endorsement, which is something we've known ever since Joe Namath put on stockings many moons ago. But to see it go from big influencers, to micro-influencers, you know. How do you sponsor people, give them money, engage as a brand, and still maintain that they legitimately like your product, use your product. I think it's a really fascinating space to, again, to be able to purchase within that Instagram application, I think, is really interesting. And then a lot of conversations about the post transaction engagement. You know, send them not one email confirmation that your items are coming, but send them two. And really to think about lifetime value of the customer, and engaging the customer via content, and, oh, by the way, there'll be some transactions in commerce as well. I think it's really forward-looking, and really enjoyed that conversation as well. >> I did too. I didn't know the difference between an influencer and a micro-influencer, and you kind of infer based on just the name alone. But also how brands have the opportunity to leverage data, to evaluate maybe we should actually make more investments in somebody with a thousand followers, for example, than somebody with a hundred thousand. Because the revenue attribution, or the website traffic lift that they're going to get from a micro-influencer could far outweigh the benefits, financially, than going with somebody, a celebrity or what not, that, as you said, back to, you know, Joe Namath, many decades ago. So that was interesting, but it's also a good use of using data to build brand reputation, build, increase customer lifetime value, but also get so much more targeted, and really understand how to operationalize the commerce portion of your business, and through whom, through which channels you're going to see the biggest bang for your buck. >> Yeah, it's really interesting times, you know, this idea that the apps follow you. I mean, my favorite example is Spotify. Super sophisticated app. Right? I can be listening to my phone. I get into my car. It follows me. I go into my office. It follows me on my computer. I go out on my bike. It follows me. It stays the same state. And so, for the commerce and the community to be able to follow you around is a really interesting idea. And again, it was Hillary Mason, actually, that first came up with the term that, you know, AI, and good recommendations done well are magic, and done poorly, are creepy. I think it's always going to be this interesting fine line. Again, I think the whole concept of, you know, using old data and how fast do you update it, and that's kind of the example. I've been looking at tents. I bought a tent. I don't want to see ads for tents anymore. Right? It's time to see an ad for a sleeping bag, or a camp stove. And these are really happening in real-time. You know, we've heard about Omnichannel. We've heard about 360 view of the customer, ad nauseam. You've been in this business for a long time. But it sounds like it's finally coming together, and it's finally where we have the data, we have the access to the data, the speed of the analytics, and just the raw horsepower in modeling that we can now start to apply this real-time, ML, to data, in-flight, to be able to serve up the not creepy but correct recommendations, at the right time to the right person. It's getting closer and closer to reality. >> It is getting closer, and as you were talking about that, one of the things that popped into my head is going from the creepy to the magic that is, you think, wow, is really leveraging this data and using the power of machine learning and AI, a great facilitator. Or is the bottom foundation order management? If you don't have the, or inventory management. If you don't have the inventory, it's great to have all these capabilities to transact in real time, but if you can't fulfill it, you're going to sink. >> Yeah. >> So Magento, with, you know, some of their core technology enabling this. Really enabling, not just enabling the 360 degree customer view, but being able to fulfill it. Those are table stakes, and game changers. >> Right. >> For merchants of any size. >> Right, and I think they do have to engage. I mean, they have to be brands. Right? Because a commodity item I can go get anywhere. There's got to be a reason to come. Lot of conversations, not so much here, but at the Adobe summit, in terms of the content piece, and having an ongoing dialog and an ongoing content relationship, with your client. Now you can slice and dice and serve that up lots of different ways based on who they are and the context. But if you don't have that, you can't just compete on price. You just can't compete on inventory, 'cause Amazon is going to win. Right? You can't stock, my favorite thing is, is shirt, shirt little pins in here. How do you stock those? You can't. They don't cost any money, and you don't sell that many. Amazon can. So, find you niche, you know. Engage your customers. Engage your community, and there'll be some transactions that come along with this. And I think it's really reinforced that, I think, its probably really timely for Magento to be part of Adobe, because eCommerce, just purely by itself, is going to be tougher and tougher to do unless you've got this deeper relationship with your customers, beyond simply transacting something. >> Exactly. So I enjoyed hosting, as I always do with you, Jeff. Learned a lot today, and excited to hear about what's next for this event, now that Adobe is leveraging the power of Magento. >> Well, we heard the announcements, Gary's going to make the announcement tomorrow. So hang out for the keynote tomorrow to find out more about Imagine 2020. We'll be there. >> 2020, yes. >> 2020, because we'll know everything in 2020. >> We will know. That's right. I can't wait. >> 2020 hindsight. >> I'm waiting for that. Well, Jeff, as I said, always a pleasure hosting with you. >> You too, Lisa. >> I brought the sea urchin necklace out. >> I like it. I like it. >> This is just for Jeff. It's making it's appearance on theCUBE. We want to thank you for watching, for Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, and you've been watching theCUBE live from Imagine 19 at The Wynn Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat rhythmic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman, live in Orlando at Enterprise Connect 2019. This is day three of the event. Can you hear all of that buzz behind us? It's been a very full event. 6,500 or so attendees, 140 vendors here in the Exhibitor Hall. New products, new announcements, we're very excited, speaking of new announcements, to welcome for the first time to theCUBE the CEO of Poly, Joe Burton. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thanks so much for having us, it's great. >> Our pleasure, so big news Plantronics, Polycom, rebranded as Poly this week. Big coming out part here, this is way more than a rebrand. Walk us through what you guys have just announced, and why this is so exciting for the industry? >> Well it really is an exciting time. An exciting time for all of us. About a year ago, to the day, we announced that Polycom and Plantronics were coming together as one company to provide a end-to-end set of end points for the entire UC industry. So no matter what cloud you're hooking to in the contact center, for unified communications, from the headset that rides on your body, to the desktop, to the huddle room, to the board room, we were going to provide every end point where the end user touches the Collaboration Cloud. Very, very exciting. We were really looking for the right name to take us into the future. And frankly, Plantronics is a wonderful name, but it's very 60s sounding. Formed in 1961 by a couple of airline pilots to build headsets. Polycom, also a very good name, but a little old. We were looking for something short, punchy, tight, that really talked about everything that we do. And we were thinking about going down the route of an entirely new word, going the whole way. And one day a brilliant person on the brand team walked in and said, we can do both. We can have our heritage, our history, and we can go a different direction. Poly, Greek word for many. So many kinds of communication, many people, the power of many. Many ways of interacting. You actually look at our new logo it looks very much like a Polycom speakerphone of the past, it looks like an airline propellor for Plantronics, but it's also three Ps. Plantronics and Polycom coming together to form Poly. >> Joe, I do love that because that iconic speakerphone, heck, I sold some of those back in the 90s when I worked for one of the telecommunications company. There's still one sitting in our conference room in our boss scenario office today. Plantronics, of course, so known for so many of the different devices over the year. So maybe give us a little bit as to the coming together of Plantronics and Polycom, now as Poly. What's that mean for the future as we talk proliferation in devices, the line between what consumers expect and the Enterprise Connect. That's something we've been talking about for a couple of decades now. So what is Poly, into the future? >> You bet. So you see all these amazing communications, cloud providers around. Everybody is innovating in the cloud, they want to provide this software as a service that can enable all these great communications. But at the end of the day all of that Collaboration Cloud, gets accessed through a set of devices. Every single device where the end user touches the Collaboration Cloud actually comes from Poly. Like I said, the headset, the video conferencing, the audio conferencing and beyond. So as Poly we're going to build every single device that you need to access the cloud with a management layer, where you can understand each and every device. Is it on, is it off? Firmware upgrades, security patches, but so much more. You can actually understand usage data you've never seen before. So literally, because we're writing on the person, we're in the conference room, or on the desktop, we're in the open office area. We're in a position where we can actually tell you, these devices are being utilized but not these. That corner of the building is too noisy for good collaboration. Figure out what's going on. Even though the laptops in building 32 are telling you that there's no network problem, at the ear, we're actually seeing packet loss, and here's what we think you should do about it. So we think Poly literally brings something from the human perspective to the collaboration experience that just nobody else can do. >> We've heard a lot about the human element in it. Anytime we talk about emerging technologies, AI, ML, there's always that, oh the concerns about AI taking over jobs. But thematically, at this event, we've heard that it's got to be machines and humans augmenting. Whether we're talking about call center and it's agent delivery, but that human element, that relationship point, that voice, is really resounding at this event. It's absolutely hot again, still critical, whatever you want to call it. >> You're absolutely right. So what we're seeing very much when we look at AI and ML in our devices we're not in anyway seeing something that takes a job as much as helps you be your best self. What if you could be on your game, in the zone, instead of an hour or two a day but two, three, four times that much? And we think with some of the coaching we can do, using some of these AI and ML techniques. Through our devices, we can just help you be the best you can be all the time. >> Joe, at this show, we know it's a complex ecosystem. Something that I heard over and over again though, in the keynotes, is you've got a lot of partnerships. I heard many companies talking about, oh, and here's Poly devices. Heard it in the Microsoft keynote. We're here in the Five9 booth, we understand the partnership there. Talk about some of those partnerships, some of the news that was announced beyond just the company rebranding. >> Absolutely. Partnerships are our life blood. The reason we can be a great partner to so many companies is because, frankly, we don't compete against them for the cloud. We said we're going to do the user experience, we're going to be the end point. The management of the end point. But we've announced a lot of exciting things. Of course, Microsoft's a great partner to us. Zoom, and others, are a great partner. We announced this week a partnership with Google around Google Voice where we're the first and only certified Google Voice set of phones, at this point. Great announcements with Amazon around Chime and Alexa for business. Both in our trio speakerphones but also in the headsets. So I can actually touch the button and access Alexa straight through the headsets as well. And then of course companies like Five9 that are just an amazing, amazing partner to us. They have such an incredible product. Our headsets are on the vast mass majority of their agents. And when we look ahead at some of the unique analytics that we can do out of our headsets, some of the things they're trying to do, we just see an unbeatable combination with so many of these companies. >> What have been some of the feedback that you've heard from some of your customers and partners? This week, with such big news coming out and you mentioned a big spectrum-- >> Yeah. >> Of very big partners. Tell us about some of the feedbacks that you're getting from customers. >> Well I have to say, it has really been a thrilling week. The rebranding of the company as Poly, we had done all the research, we thought it was the right thing to do, the right name, the right heritage, plus being fresh. But it has been just overwhelmingly, you nailed it. I think from our customers and partners just a real excitement that they knew that Plantronics and Polycom were a premier end point provider, maybe the premier. But to see us partnered with so many of the cloud providers, as the predominant partner they're just seeing us in a whole new light, it's fantastic. >> Joe, one of the things we've been looking at is how Omnichannel's been changing over time. We talked about this show used to be VoiceCon. >> Yup. >> And a few years ago voice was a little bit lower on people's radar, but today a lot of voice, a lot of video. Of course it plays right into your heritage at the company. I'd love to hear what you're hearing from your customers as to the trends of the importance of voice and the ever growing importance of video. >> I think you nailed it in many ways, Stu. I think everybody has figured out that if voice isn't perfect the collaboration session isn't perfect. Even in a video conferencing call, we can put up with the video pixelating a little bit, as long as the voice is excellent. If the voice goes down, you don't have a session. So voice has to be fantastic. The end point plays a huge part in that. Working very carefully with our partners to make sure voice is absolute, is just fantastic. One of the other things on video that I think is really interesting is, we are really moving to, I guess I would say, a post speeds and feeds world. A few years ago all we heard is, are you VGA, are you force F? To use old words. Are you 1080p, are you 4K? Our product that won best of show yesterday in the product category, the Polycom Studio, a brand new video product for The Huddle Room. Really fascinating. Incredible good video, dead simple to use. I've probably been involved in 60 or 100 demos down here in the booth and done dozens of briefings on it. Nobody has asked me, what's the resolution of the camera? (Stu chuckling) What codec does it use? We've moved into a world of, it looks excellent, tell me about ease of use, tell me about the training. So I really think we're moving to a different world with that consumer expectation you talked about earlier of don't really care about those specifications anymore, it has to just work. >> That's a theme also Joe that we've heard from every guest that we've had on, as well as on the main stage. That that's what consumers, we are so demanding, we are so empowered, we have all this information and we expect that, to transact business as simply as we do things if we're buying something on Amazon or downloading something from Spotify, that simplicity is key. People say, it just has to work. Not so easy to be able to deliver, but it sounds like what you're saying is, people in your booth are getting it and it's so obvious to them that some of those speeds and feeds they just don't matter because it's so effective. >> Well you're absolutely right, the only thing I would disagree on is how hard it is. It really is just a matter of pivoting the company. So this has been a huge part of the Poly story. A couple of years ago as we were starting this journey of Plantronics and then as we brought Polycom in to form Poly we've really turned it on it's head. I mean our product managers, our engineers, we've got them out there with users, we ask users, not leading questions, but just in your wildest dreams, how do you see this working? Show me how you would do this as a consumer and we'll add the absolute minimum pieces in to add enterprise reliability, enterprise security, privacy, et cetera, et cetera. But we're really starting from that end user perspective and absolutely delighting them. And then adding what IT wants as opposed to the other way around which is where I think this industry was stuck for 10 or 15 years. >> Alright. So Joe, as a public company, I'm not going to ask too much but if we look down the road what should we be looking now that you've got the full resources together, you've got the rebranding, what should we expect as industry watchers to see from Poly kind of the next six to 12 months? >> So I think you'll see three or four things. We've talked about it publicly before. Number one, you'll see us just finish refreshing the product portfolio so every single product has the Poly look, has the Poly name, very consumer friendly, consumer forward, a consumer forward design and simplicity. So, best products across the board on the hardware side. Incredible ability to manage the products where you can understand every single one of them and then bringing those analytics and AI type functionality to these products that make the user their best self. That don't do weird things for them, that are a little scary, but really, really, really just anticipate their needs, help them do exactly what they want and you'll see even deeper and more partnerships. We are a partner company, we're going to live and die by partnerships, and we're going to be the best at it. >> Well Joe thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE. Again, congratulations on a momentous week with the launch of Poly, we look forward to hearing great news to come in the future. >> Fantastic, thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. >> Yup. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> [Narrator] From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (mellow electronic music) Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston area studio. Gonna be having a different conversation today. We often talk about cloud and data and all the various technologies, and we're gonna talk about a different application of them in the customer experience base. And to help me to do that, thought leader in the space, Steve Papas, who's the senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Panviva. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, this is great. >> I go back in my roots, and my first job out of school, the company I started with, put everybody into customer support. There's no better way to kinda understand how something works and how people interact with technology as well as the product than taking those phone calls when something goes wrong in customer support. So I have a little bit of experience in the CX space, as I believe you call it these days. You know, watch from the technology space, the call centers, and all those kind, but, maybe start us out, when you say CX here in 2019, what's the scope, what are we talking about that, and we'll go from there. >> That's a great place to start, Stu, 'cause really when we're talking about customer experience, or CX as it's being known, we're really talking about what is the customer's experience when they're interacting with our organization or they're even transacting with our organization. So if you think about it, there's probably the three things that they could do with a company. They can either interact with them and get some information, maybe they're checking on a rate for a mortgage or looking for a car loan or getting claim information from their health insurer, or they're transacting, they're buying something, they're conveying some kind of a transaction together. Or there may be more of a back office approach to it, so that someone's operating on behalf of the customer. So when we think about all of those three dimensions, it's really about, was it frictionless, was it easy to do, did they get to the point where they felt delighted and they're willing to provide a reference or a testimonial because they're gushing because the experience was so good. They got what they needed and they're willing to tell people about it. >> Yeah, that's great. You see friction lists, it reminds me of what we talked for years about with cloud computing, talked about bringing joy and having authentic conversations. We've been talking for years about how social media and engagement should be. I have to think that the balance and interaction between people and machines and technology have to be a hot-button topic there. One of my favorite events that we did a few years ago was with MIT, talking about automation, are the robots going to take over everything? And what we know tends to work best is that there needs to be a balance of the robots, chatbots, whatever they are, and people. It can't be all of one, or even all of the other because it either get too costly, or the experience might not be optimal. >> Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think all of those different things have their place. And if you think about it, it's kind of like the pie. You're adding pieces to the pie. So you're adding the chatbot as another method, or another medium that someone can interact with the organization, but it's not the be-all and end-all. There has to be a level of human aspect to a lot of things. I'll give you an example. You're not gonna call your hospital when you're feeling some chest pains, and want the chatbot to be on the other end. >> [Stu] Right. >> So there has to be, we have to temper what types of technology we use with what areas, and we have to be thinking about the customer. I always advocate, you always think about the customer at the center of the universe, and make sure the customer has a seat at every decision table. So when we're thinking about bringing technology into organizations, we have to think about, well, how does this make the customer's experience better? Does it help them? Does it make their interaction with us better? And overall, does that technology make the types of customers and lifetimes value increase for us as organizations? >> You hear a lot of organizations, I'm customer focused, you go read Jeff Bezos talks about, I need to be paranoid about my customer, I need to think about everything they're doing, because if they change and they leave us, what are we left with? Bring us into customer experience, what does that matter, how do we get beyond lip service, talking, yeah, it's great to listen to the customers but, I've gotta worry about my bottom line and my employees and stockholders and things like that. >> Sure, well today, if you think about customer service, good customer service, every company in the world is talking about it. That's the baseline now, right? That is where we begin, and we're moving up from there to a level of customer service. So if we're thinking about customer service as, it has to be good, but how do you get from that good to great scenario, it's how do we train our people, how do we make sure they're empowered to provide the customer with all they need, and give them a little bit of decision making power when it makes the difference of keeping that customer for life, and maybe their children and friends and relatives, or potentially losing them at that single interaction. So, when we're thinking about the bottom line, we always have to think that every interaction could be the last interaction. But also, every interaction's an opportunity to make that relationship better. So we have to think about that in terms of how we do things, as well as what technology surrounds that. And obviously, the negative side of customer experience is if we do it wrong, we're certainly losing, but if we do it right, it's exponentially better. >> I'm curious Steve, what your thoughts are, how do I measure that? In the B to B world we talk about the net promoter score, NPS, and we love it, and it's great when you see a high net promoter score, but when you understand the details and what goes under it, that's only part of the picture. And boy do I agree with you about, if you have that opportunity to talk to a customer and turn it around, uh, you know. If you spend any time in the space, it's great when somebody comes back and has something good to say, but if somebody comes and says something bad, it's usually only the tip of the iceberg. There's usually other people that can have it, and you have to take that opportunity to turn it into something good. So, metrics and, how do we measure whether we're doing good or bad in the space? >> Absolutely, well, the contact center itself is metriced to the nth degree anyway. Net promoter score is one dimension of how we have to looks at things. I'll tell you a story, that I recommend to every C-suite person that I interact with, and I'm a member of a lot of associations, that the best thing that they can do is spend time in the contact center. Double check into those calls. Not only is it the best focus group you can ever pay for, that you already have, but also it allows for a C-suite, whether it's a CEO or the Chief Operating Officer or the CFO it allows them to understand really how the interactions are happening between the customer as well as the organization. But it goes a step further. Not only do you measure the customer satisfaction levels, but you also need to measure your employee satisfaction levels that way too. Because having employees that have the tools necessary to provide the best service possible, as well as make sure that they have the training, they have the empowerment to do it. Once you have those things in place, I always say that the CEO and others in the C-suite should be listening to those calls to understand, does the employee have all the right tools to make that customer interaction better. And to extend that lifetime value or not. And that's one way, which is much more of a qualitative versus the metrics, but it's one that's missed all the time. And I have CEOs tell me time and time again, after they've done it, it was absolutely enlightening for them to say, I never saw that part of the business, from that vantage point. >> Steve, bring us inside those call centers a little bit. I've got a little bit of background, but it was often overworked, underappreciated, very much metrics-driven. There's the big thing on the wall, saying how long the average call's been waiting. Have you hit the number that you needed to do? Has it gotten better? What's it like in these environments today? Outsourcing was a big push for a number of years, what's it like in those call centers? >> Outsourcing is still a big thing. A lot of U.S. companies have started bringing some of the things back in-house too. When they found that the metrics might not have been there. But they're also holding their outsources to a higher standard, now. So they're providing not only the training, but what I'm seeing as far as trends, is that they're providing the how-to much better. They're realizing that having a single source of truth that your employees are using, your customers can access via self-service, as well as the outsourcer, is really the key to making all of this work so you have the portability of process much better. Now the call centers are getting much better because they're starting to move more onto the knowledge side as well as the process side. They're looking internal. It's not good enough for them to say, well, it's been working fine, right? It's now to the point with, how much better can we get it to work? How do we get to the last mile? How do we get to the point where these customers are willing and call back to say, hey, I had a great experience. So, we're finding that one of the keys was making sure the employees, the people on the front lines, have what they need the second that they need it. Not to pop their head over the cube, not to escalate to a help desk, right? Because that just increases the overall cost of a contact center. Not to be shuffling through papers, or flipping through the pages of a binder every few minutes. But giving them the tools that they need so that A. They know exactly what the process is, they can remain compliant with the process, they can navigate the myriad of applications that are open on the desktop, as well as know how to say the right things, they avoid saying the wrong things, and they don't come across as robotic. And that's one of the keys that is happening now. And we see that trend happening more and more in contact centers, and I probably walk in and out of 150 of them in a year, and see them from the inside. You know the one thing that I always look around in a contact center is, if there's lots of sticky notes around the monitors, if there's lots of binders on the desk and papers up on the cubes, there are process problems. There are opportunities to make that organization run a lot smoother on behalf of the customer. >> Steve, related to CX, one of the topics you've written about is Omnichannel. Maybe you can explain what that is, and what you're finding. >> Sure, so Omnichannel is really geared around how do we communicate with our customers, our partners, our dealers, our distributors, etc. So how do we communicate properly on any channel necessary that the customer wants? We always say that it used to be multichannel, right? We would have the telephone, we would have maybe the IVR is giving them directions and allowing them some information when they call in. But now customers want to be communicated with on Skype, or Slack, or Facebook Messenger, or Twitter or Instagram, or various other methods that are accessible to the consumer. The consumer has a lot of information as well as a lot of power at their fingertips now, that they probably didn't have, 10, 15 years ago. Now, the Omnichannel is really geared around creating a universal way of, of communicating with the customer where they want to be communicated with, and we say that's probably the best channel, is, what does the customer want, right? Where are they, so how do we get to them where they are? And to make that work there's technology involved. And also if we want to say, well how do we take care of our customers at 2:00 AM, maybe with a chatbot, so they can get some of the information that they need when they need it. It's all about time, right? The thing that we're trying to solve now is the problem of time. How do we make sure that we get the information into the hands of the person that needs it, whether it's our employee or our customer, or maybe our third-party dealers, distributors, etc. How do we get that information in a timely manner so that they can do something of action, of value? And that's really the key. So Omnichannel really is gearing around, how do we maintain all of those? But, some of the keys to it, and I wanna put those out there, is we have to curate content better. We have to look at the fact that, you don't write a procedure for the employee to speak over the phone the same way you're gonna write for Alexa as a virtual assistant, to be speaking out into the air. So we have to think about content curation as, what are the multiple versions of the same thing that need to be housed in one place? And then how do we orchestrate them at the moment of need? When Alexa does call in and says, I need information about your hours, that information and the version of that content has to be pushed in a sub-second method to go to the right channel at the right time, in the right format. >> That machine-to-machine discussion added a whole new dimension for a lot of companies. >> [Steve] Absolutely. To try to solve that. Great, give us, we're here towards the beginning of the year still, at 2019, give us a little bit look forward, what are the challenges, what are the things that are exciting you, as we look throughout this year. >> Sure. I think we're really looking forward to more companies understanding the customer. And by that I don't mean that they have to go through an entire customer journey mapping, but that is a good place to start. But at the end of the day, you have to make sure the operator 24 in Omaha, Nebraska knows the result of all that journey mapping. So there has to be a third dimension if you will, after you've done your analysis and your mapping, is how do they execute? On all of the stuff we've found in the customer journey mapping, how do they execute at that point, at that cold face of business happening, for the benefit of the customer, as well as for the employee satisfaction. So we're seeing that customer-centric conversations are increasing. By that I mean that companies are looking for, what are all the methods, the simple methods that we can incorporate today, which doesn't necessarily mean bringing in all kinds of technology, what are the methods that we can start bringing in to make our employees feel empowered around the whole customer experience paradigm. So, that I'm seeing, is happening. The other one is, as you referred to Jeff Bezos, whenever you have a decision in your company, and you've got the conference room table, put one chair over there and just put the name Customer on the chair, and allow the customer to have a decision. Allow the customer to have a seat at the decision table. And by that I mean that, always think, as you're making your moves in 2019 and 2020 and beyond, what does it mean to the customer? How is that going to affect the customer, and will it be positive for their experience? Those are the types of things that are getting real exciting, that companies are finally starting to look at those and they're not saying good enough is good enough anymore, and they're not looking at, well the whole operation is factored into the cost of doing business. They're all starting to say, how can we do better? And mostly the thing that's driving that is they have to get better at customer experience. Because if you think about it, price, everybody knows the price now, they can search for everything that they're shopping for, and they know who's got the same price, and pretty much there's an equilibrium on that. So, if price is one thing, and size and color and all of those things are similar, and all of the components of that are similar across the board, well what are companies starting to compete on? Companies in 2019 and 2020 are gonna start competing on the experience. So if you think about one of the best competitive advantages moving forward? Is, what is the experience that we give, over and above our competition. And that is so important, we're seeing the trends moving to that and honestly, that's what's really starts to excite me as companies are moving down this path. >> Steve, one of the things I know is that you've written a number of things on this topic. If people want to learn more about CX what are some of the resources they can go to? Which, not trying to pitch product from Panviva, but really thought leadership interface. >> We also work with a lot of thought leaders, and we only approach it from an educational perspective. Matter of fact, we just published a new e-book on customer experience. All the tips from ten industry leaders in customer experience, and that's available on our website, at Panviva.com. They can connect with me at Twitter @SXP01, or by email at spapas@panviva.com. And I'm happy to point them in the direction of any of these resources that fundamentally will help them start a workshop inside, and start the thought process of, how can we get better on behalf of the customer? >> Alright well, Steve, really appreciate you helping to educate our community a little bit more about the CX base and definitely do check out, either reach out to Steve directly, or check out the Panviva.com website to learn more. And be sure to check out thecube.net for all the upcoming shows as well as the archive of everything we have. If you go into the search box you can search on topic, company, or person, we've got the database of thousands of interviews we've done in the past. So, once again, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching The Cube. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine, 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Magento Imagine 2018 from the Wynn, Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm excited to be joined by some award finalists of the Magento Imagine Experience Awards. We have Dr. Markus Reheis, the chief marketing officer at Gabor Shoes, and Stefan Willkommer, the CEO of TechDivision, a systems integrator. Hi guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> Hi, nice to meet you. >> Great to have you guys here. Congratulations on being an award finalist for the best sales channel growth. We're going to talk about that in a second, but Gabor Shoes. Talk to us about what Gabor does, where you guys are located, and then we'll talk about how you're transforming the shoe space with e-Commerce. >> Gabor is a manufacturer of shoes, ladies shoes only. Our headquarters in Germany, and our main markets are in Germany and central Europe, but we do also export to 60 countries, more than 60 countries worldwide, to China, to Korea, also to the United States a little. >> Lucky me. So your customers are the retailers themselves. How many different brands do you have, different SKUs, different products? I imagine it's massive numbers. >> Yes, our main product is ladies shoes, as I said, we have several brands for the ladies shoes, Gabor, Rollingsoft for the sports shoes type, but we also offer bags, handbags, and socks and tights, but the most important is the ladies shoes for us. >> So many, many hundreds of thousands of SKUs, lots of different locations. You've been the chief marketing officer there for quite a long time. Talk to us about the opportunity that you saw, that you could give to your retailers by expanding this physical in-store shopping experience into the online world. >> Yes, we have started our online business quite late. We long time hesitated to set up our own online shop toward the end user, because it was always our philosophy that we want to be partners of our retailers. We did not want to compete with them by opening an online shop. So it was clear for us that when we start our online business, we want to have our retailers as partners on our side. And that's why we developed this Omnichannel concept that integrates the retailers. >> Omnichannel is a word that we hear a lot at events like this. It's critical for a seamless customer experience. We were talking before we went live is we're all consumers, everyday lives, we pick up a tablet or a mobile phone and we expect to be able to find whatever we want at a simple click. What was the process like of becoming partners with your retailers? Was it an obvious sell to them, that they have revenue-generating opportunities, the opportunities to reach many more customers in different regions? Or was it more of a challenging conversation to convince them? >> Yeah, let me explain a little bit about the situation. We do distribute via traditional classic brick and mortar retailers primarily. There are around 5,000 companies worldwide that buy shoes from Gabor. They have around 20,000 stores. But the situation is that there is quite a mixed structure of retailers. Many of them are small businesses, family owned businesses, and they do not have the chance to have an own online presence that is competitive. So they have to focus on their brick and mortar business. But nowadays, in Germany, we have around 30% of all shoes that are bought online, and this brings many of our customers into trouble. So it was our idea to open this marketplace to let the traditional retailer participate at the online business. >> So talk to us about, from a technology perspective, the modern technology that you needed to be able to deliver this. So, Stefan, talk to us about how TechDivision, as a long-time partner of Magento, is helping in working with Gabor shoes to enable this Omnichannel experience. >> First of all, the marketplace looks like a simple online shop. So for the end consumer, it looks like any other online shop where you simply buy just the shoes. In the background, there are a lot of processes going on, so like we have to allocate orders to stores, to inventory locations, that means the retailer, and we have to look where the inventory is. We don't want to do a lot of order splitting, of course, because we don't want to ship a lot of different packages, and you need a sophisticated solution who is capable of doing exactly that, because I mean there are a lot of processes, and of course algorithms that around, what do you need, or what do you have to have in place that you can do that like that. And Magento was offering, with the order management, exactly great product to delivering that. So this is the foundation for the whole concept, and makes it able for us, and for Gabor, to integrate the retailers really smooth. >> So how many retailers are integrated currently? >> We have started the concept just a few months ago. It was surprising that so many retailers contacted us and said, I want to be part of that system. So we have around 100 retailers with around 400 stores that still have to be connected. Currently we have 40 stores connected with the system. >> So you had retailers that were proactively reaching out to you, saying, we want to get in on this? >> Yeah. >> Wow, that must have been pretty exciting. And Stefan, you mentioned the word simple. And that's something, as buyers, we want a simple, clean experience as the consumer, but also for the retailer, right, and the supplier. Talk to us about how you're leveraging, You mentioned the Magento management software, to give your retailers this complete visibility of their inventory so that they can fulfill through the right channels. >> Yeah, first of all it is in the German market, in the German retail shoe market, a little bit simpler, maybe than in other countries. There is a couple of POS solutions, there are not too many, and we build a basic interface so they can really easily attach their inventory to our order management, or the order management of Gabor, and then we are able to utilize the different inventory, or the different stocks. That is pretty simple. There are a lot of other processes which are not really technical, it's more about contracting, so more the retailers, there is of course some training, you have to train the people, the staff, because they have to use the platform, and that way they see, okay, an order is coming in, what they have to do now, they have to create the pick list, they have to pick the stuff, pack the stuff, ship the stuff, print the label out, putting the documents in and everything, so you have to train the people and the simplicity is because they just need a simple web browser to do that. So either a tablet or a PC, that's all what they need. They don't need any other software. They don't need really other devices. Basically most of the retail stores already have these kind of devices in store. >> So they can utilize an existing POS system, or maybe an ERP system ... >> Yes. >> instead of having to replace things. So from an integration perspective, it sounds like it's a fairly... >> Yeah, they don't have to invest really money, they just have to, I mean, bring the inventory, and that can be through a flat file, or through a web service, so both possibilities are there. Right now they just need a web browser connected to the internet, that's all. >> Sounds so simple. >> Yeah, it is. >> So let's talk about, we hear the term digital transformation used everywhere, and it means different things to different organizations, depending on where they are in that digital transformation journey. When we look at commerce, commerce is becoming a center of gravity for digital transformation. Markus, talk to us about the transformation that Gabor has undergone. Where are you on this digital transformation journey? >> Still, we are really right on the beginning. We have installed, of course, digital tools to make the sales process easier, but we always thought about B2B processes. For example, we have installed a B2B online shop maybe 10 or 12 years ago, so that's an existing thing. The new thing for us is that we go towards the end user. I have a number for you. We produce around 9 million pairs of shoes every year, and still the amount what we directly sell to the end user is a very, very small amount. So we are at the beginning of this process, but we have ambitious goals, and we want to grow in the future. We started our marketplace concept in Germany, but we want to roll it out to other European countries, maybe to countries outside Europe, so there's a lot to do, a lot of opportunities for us in the coming years. >> So let's talk about the rest of 2018. Here we are in April. You're going to be adding many more retailers. What are some of the things from a technology perspective that TechDivision is going to be able to do with you, and maybe Magento, to start finding the other 8 million in opportunities that you just mentioned? >> In the end, it's not just a thing of the online store, but of course it's a thing of online marketing, so this has to be increased, definitely. Yeah, we still have a lot of things to do, onboarding the retailers, and this again is not just a technical thing, it's a lot of, Stefan already told you, it's more to do with training, and explaining the processes, that costs a lot of time. So it goes step by step, but we make good progress there. >> So last question, Stefan, for you- as the chief marketing officer, I'm a marketer myself, tell me about, from a digital marketing perspective, as consumers, and really, in the B2B space, Magento had a study on their website that said 93% of B2B buyers want to purchase online, right? So we're seeing that trend as consumerization into the business space. From a marketing perspective, there's a lot of shifting going on there, too. Big data has been a big enabler of marketing becoming a science. And being able to demonstrate to the business and influence business there. Tell me a little bit about, in the last minute or so, how are you leveraging big data and analytics, maybe even through Magento, to redefine marketing that you're doing at Gabor? >> Yeah, again, big data can help us to build customer groups, to send them individual offerings. That's a good thing about the digital business, when we have a satisfied customer, of course we can always, again, send them products, product offerings, but these offerings have to be individual, they have to be relevant for the end user. That's why artificial intelligence, for example, can help us. >> Maybe to add something, we already started using Magento BI, for example. So we are using that full commerce suite of Magento right now. We are using the areas to measuring how fast the shipment is done through a retail stores, and then adjusting the allocation to that measurement. So if a retailer is shipping faster, it's getting more likely that he's getting an order allocated next time, when an allocation run is taking place. So we are using this to get a better end user, consumer experience, by having the products earlier, or more frequent ship. >> Right. So many benefits for the businesses, the retailers, maybe repeat sales, they've got this instant purchase capability that Magento released recently, one click, get things even faster, reducing checkout time, all the things that drive up repeat business. But also the personalization front is going to be key to be able to deliver, as you said, Markus, the relevance offers that we all want. >> Exactly. The great benefit of this marketplace concept is that since we have connected the different stocks of our retailers, we can offer much more product by this way than we could do it alone. So the offering of our 3,000 styles per season gets nearly unlimited to the end user. >> Limitless. We talk about limitless commerce. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with me today. We wish you good luck on the award nomination. I hear those are being given out tonight, so best of luck, and we hope to see you again on theCUBE soon. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, live from Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Host: Live from Midtown Manhattan it's The Cube! Covering Big Data New York City 2017, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media, and its Ecosystem sponsors. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live, The Cube in New York City for Big Data NYC, this is our fifth year, doing our own event, not with O'Reilly or Cloud Era at Strata Data, which as Hadoop World, Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, now called Strata Data, probably called Strata AI next year, we're The Cube every year, bringing you all the great data, and what's going on. Entrepreneurs, VCs, thought leaders, we interview them and bring that to you. I'm John Furrier with our next guest, Greg Sands, who's the managing director and founder of Costa Nova ventures in Palo Alto, started out as an entrepreneur himself, then single shingle out there, now he's a big VC firm on a third fund. >> On the third fund. >> Third fund. How much in that fund? >> 175 million dollar fund. >> So now you're a big firm now, congratulations, and really great to see your success. >> Thanks very much. I mean, we're still very much an early stage boutique focused on companies that change the way the world does business, but it is the case that we have a bigger team and a bigger fund, to go do the same thing. >> Well you've been great to work with, I've been following you, we've known each other for a while, watched you left Sir Hill and start Costanova, but what's interesting is that, I can kind of joke and kid you, the VC inside joke about being a big firm, because I know you want to be small, and like to be small, help entrepreneurs, that's your thing. But it's really not a big firm, it's a few partners, but a lot of people helping companies, that's your ethos, that's what you're all about at your firm. Take a minute to just share with the folks the kinds of things you do and how you get involved in companies, you're hands on, you roll up your sleeves. You get out of the way at the right time, you help when you can, share your ethos. >> Yeah, absolutely so the way we think of it is, combining the craft of old school venture capital, with a modern operating team, and so since most founder these days are product-oriented, our job is to think like product people, not think like investors. So we think like product people, we do product level analysis, we do customer discovery, we do, we go ride along on sales calls when we're making investment decisions. And then we do the things that great venture capitalists have done for years, and so for example, at Alatian, who I know has been on the show today, we were able to incubate them in our office for a year, I had many conversations with Sathien after he'd sold the first two or three customers. Okay, who's the next person we hire? Who isn't a founder? Who's going to go out and sell? What does that person look like? Do you go straight to a VP? Or do you hire an individual contributor? Do you hire someone for domain, or do you hire someone for talent? And that's the thing that we love doing. Now we've actually built out an operating team so marketing partner, Martino Alcenco, and Jim Wilson as a sales partner, to really help turn that into a program, so that they can, we can take these founders who find product market fit, and say, how do we help you build the right sales process and marketing process, sales team and marketing team, for your company, your customer, your product? >> Well it's interesting since you mention old school venture capital, I'll get into some of the dynamics that are going on in Silicon valley, but it's important to bring that forward, because now with cloud you can get to critical mass on the fly wheel, on economics, you can see the visibility faster now. >> Greg: Absolutely. >> So the game of the old school venture capitalist is all the same, how do you get to cruising altitude, whatever metaphor you want to use, the key was getting there, and sometimes it took a couple of rounds, but now you can get these companies with five million, maybe $10 million funding, they can have unit economics visibility, scales insight, then the scale game comes in, so that seems to be the secret trick right now in venture is, don't overspend, keep the valuation in range and allows you to look for multiple exits potentially, or growth. Talk about that dynamic, because this is like, I call it the hour glass. You get through the hour glass, everyone's down here, but if you can sneak through and get the visibility on the economics, then you grow quickly. >> Absolutely. I mean, it's exactly right an I haven't heard the hour glass metaphor before but I like it. You want to basically get through the narrows of product market fit and the beginnings of scalable sales and marketing. You don't need to know all the answers, but you can do that in a capital-efficient way, building really solid foundations for future explosive growth, look, everybody loves fast growth and big markets, and being grown into. But the number of people who basically don't build those foundations and then say, go big or go home! And they take a ton of money, and they go spend all the money, doing things that just fundamentally don't work, and they blow themselves up. >> Well this is the hourglass problem. You have, once you get through that unique economics, then you have true scale, and value will increase. Everybody wins there so it's about getting through that, and you can get through it fast with good mentoring, but here's the challenge that entrepreneurs fall into the trap. I call it the, I think I made it trap. And what happens is they think they're on the other side of the hourglass, but they still haven't even gone through the straight and narrow yet, and they don't know it. And what they do is they over fund and implode. That seems to be a major trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into, while I got a 50 million pre on my B round, or some monster valuation, and they get way too much cash, and they're behaving as if they're scaling, and they haven't even nailed it yet. >> Well, I think that's right. So there's certainly, there are stages of product market fit, and so I think people hit that first stage, and they say, oh I've got it. And they try to explode out of the gates. And we, in fact I know one good example of somebody saying, hey, by the way, we're doing great in field sales, and our investors want us to go really fast, so we are going to go inside and we, my job was to hire 50 inside people, without ever having tried it. And so we always preach crawl, walk, run, right? Hire a couple, see how it works. Right, in a new channel. Or a new category, or an adjacent space, and I think that it's helpful to have an investor who has seen the whole picture to say, yeah, I know it looks like light at the end of the tunnel, but see how it's a relatively small dot? You still got to go a little farther, and then the other thing I say is, look, don't build your company to feed your venture capitalist ego. Right? People do these big rounds of big valuations, and the big dog investors say, go, go, go! But, you're the CEO. Your job is analyze the data. >> John: You can find during the day (laughs). >> And say, you know, given what we know, how fast should we go? Which investments should we make? And you've got to own that. And I think sometimes our job is just to be the pulling guard and clear space for the CEO to make good decisions. >> So you know I'm a big fan, so my bias is pretty much out there, love what you guys are doing. Tim Carr is a Pivot North doing the same thing. Really adding value, getting down and dirty, but the question that entrepreneurs always ask me and talk privately, not about you, but in general, I don't want the VC to get in the way. I want them, I don't want them to preach to me, I don't want too many know-it-alls on my board, I want added value, but again, I don't want the preaching, I don't want them to get in the way, 'cause that's the fear. I'm not saying the same about VCs in general, but that's kind of the mentality of an entrepreneur. I want someone who's going to help me, be in the boat with me, but not be in my way. How do you address that concern to the founders who think, not think like that, but might have a fear. >> Well, by the way, I think it's a legitimate fear, and I think it actually is uncorrelated with added value, right? I think the idea that the board has certain responsibilities, and management has certain responsibilities, is incredibly important. And I think, I can speak for myself in saying, I'm quite conscious of not crossing that line, I think you talk. >> John: You got to build a return, that's the thing. >> But ultimately I would say to an entrepreneur, I'd just say, hey look, call references. And by the way, here are 30 names and phone numbers, and call any one of them, because I think that people who are, so a venture capital know-it-all, in the board room, telling CEOs what to do, destroys value. It's sand in the gears, and it's bad for the company. >> Absolutely, I agree 100% >> And some of my, when I talk about being a pulling guard for the CEO, that's what I'm talking about, which is blocking people who are destructive. >> And rolling the block for a touchdown, kind of use the metaphor. Adding value, that's the key, and that's why I wanted to get that out there because most guys don't get that nuance, and entrepreneurs, especially the younger ones. So it's good and important. Okay, let's talk about culture, obviously in Silicon Valley, I get, reading this morning in the Wymo guy, and they're writing it, that's the Silicon Valley, that's not crazy, there's a lot of great people in Silicon Valley, you're one of them. The culture's certainly an innovative culture, there's been some things in the press, inclusion and diversity, obviously is super important. This whole brogrammer thing that's been kind of kicked around. How are you dealing with all that? Because, you know, this is a cultural shift, but I think it's being made out more than it really is, but there's still our core issues, your thoughts on the whole inclusion and diversity, and this whole brogrammer blowback thing. >> Yeah, well so I think, so first of all, really important issues, glad we're talking about them, and we all need to get better. And to me the question for us has been, what role do we play? And because I would say it is a relatively small subset of the tech industry, and the venture capital industry. At the same time the behavior of that has become public is appalling. It's appalling and totally unacceptable, and so the question is, okay, how can we be a part of the stand-up part of the ecosystem, and some of which is calling things out when we see them. Though frankly we work with and hang out with people and we don't see them that often, and then part of which is, how do we find a couple of ways to contribute meaningfully? So for example this summer we ran what we called the Costanova Access Fellowship, intentionally, trying to provide first opportunity and venture capital for people who traditionally haven't had as much access. We created an event in the spring called, Seat at the Table, really, particularly around women in the tech industry, and it went so well that we're running it in New York on October 19th, so if you're a woman in tech in New York, we'd love to see you then. And we're just trying to figure-- >> You're doing it in an authentic way though, you're not really doing it from a promotional standpoint. It's legit. >> Yeah, we're just trying to do, you know, pick off a couple of things that we can do, so that we can be on the side of the good guys. >> So I guess what you're saying is just have high integrity, and be part of the solution not part of the problem. >> That's right, and by the way, both of these initiatives were ones that were kicked off in late 2016, so it's not a reaction to things like binary capital, and the problems at uper, both of which are appalling. >> Self-awareness is critical. Let's get back to the nuts and bolts of the real reason why I wanted you to come on, one was to find out how much money you have to spend for the entrepreneurs that are watching. Give us the update on the last fund, so you got a new fund that you just closed, the new fund, fund three. You have your other funds that are still out there, and some funds reserved, which, what's the number amount, how much are you writing checks for? Give the whole thesis. >> Absoluteley. So we're an early stage investor, so we lead series A and seed financing companies that change the way the world does business, so up and down the stack, a business-facing software, data-driven applications. Machine-learning and AI driven applications. >> John: But the filter is changing the way the world works? >> The way, yes, but in particularly the way the world does business. You can think of it as a business-facing software stack. We're not social media investors, it's not what we know, it's not what we're good at. And it includes security and management, and the data stack and-- >> Joe: Enterprise and emerging tech. >> That's right. And the-- >> And every crazy idea in between. >> That's right. (laughs) Absolutely, and so we're participate in or leave seed financings as most typically are half a million to maybe one and a quarter, and we'll lead series A financing, small ones might be two or two and a half million dollars at the outer edge is probably a six million dollar check. We were just opening up in the next couple of days, a thousand square feet of incubation space at world headquarters at Palo Alto. >> John: Nice. >> So Alation, Acme Ticketing and Zen IQ are companies that we invested in. >> Joe: What location is this going to be at? >> That's, near the Fills in downtown Palo Alto, 164 staff, and those three companies are ones where we effectively invested at formation and incubated it for a year, we love doing that. >> At the hangout at Philsmore and get the data. And so you got some funds, what else do you have going on? 175 million? >> So one was a $100 million fund, and then fund two was $135 million fund, and the last investment of fund two which we announced about three weeks ago was called Roadster, so it's ecommerce enablement for the modern dealerships. So Omnichannel and Mobile First infrastructure for auto-dealers. We have already closed, and had the first board meeting for the first new investment of fund three, which isn't yet announced, but in the land of computer vision and deep learning, so a couple of the subjects that we care deeply about, and spend a lot of time thinking about. >> And the average check size for the A round again, seed and A, what do you know about the? The lowest and highest? >> The average for the seed is half a million to one and a quarter, and probably average for a series A is four or five. >> And you'll lead As. >> And we will lead As. >> Okay great. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now that gets you excited? It doesn't have to be a portfolio company, but the research you're doing, thing, tires you're kicking, in subjects, or domains? >> You know, so honestly, one of the great benefits of the venture capital business is that I get up and my neurons are firing right away every day. And I do think that for example, one of the things that we love is is all of the adulant infrastructure and so we've got our friends at Victor Ops that are in the middle of that space, and the thinking about how the modern programmer works, how everybody-- >> Joe: Is security on your radar? >> Security is very much on our radar, in fact, someone who you should have on your show is Asheesh Guptar, and Casey Ella, so she's just joined Bug Crowd as the CEO and Casey moves over to CTO, and the word Bug Bounty was just entered into the Oxford Dictionary for the first time last week, so that to me is the ultimate in category creation. So security and dev ops tools are among the things that we really like. >> And bounties will become the norm as more and more decentralized apps hit the scene. Are you doing anything on decentralized applications? I'm not saying Blockchain in particular, but Blockchain like apps, distributing computing you're well versed on. >> That's right, well we-- >> Blockchain will have an impact in your area. >> Blockchain will have an impact, we just spent an hour talking about it in the context our off site in Decosona Lodge in Pascadero, it felt like it was important that we go there. And digging into it. I think actually the edge computing is actually more actionable for us right now, given the things that we're, given the things that we're interested in, and we're doing and they, it is just fascinating how compute centralizes and then decentralizes, centralizes and then decentralizes again, and I do think that there are a set of things that are fascinating about what your process at the edge, and what you send back to the core. >> As Pet Gelson here said in the QU, if you're not out in front of that next wave, you're driftwood, a lot of big waves coming in, you've seen a lot of waves, you were part of one that changed the world, Netscape browser, or the business plan for that first project manager, congratulations. Now you're at a whole nother generation. You ready? (laughs) >> Absolutely, I'm totally ready, I'm ready to go. >> Greg Sands here in The Cube in New York City, part of Big Data NYC, more live coverage with The Cube after this short break, thanks for watching. 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(upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in the Palo Alto studio, a little bit of a break from the crazy conference season, so we can have a little more intimate conversation without the madness of some of the shows. So we're really excited to have many-time CUBE alumni, Guy Churchward, on. He's the president and CEO of DataTorrent. Guy, great to see you. >> Thank you, Jeff, 'preciate it. >> So how have you been surviving the crazy conference season? >> It's been crazy. This is very unusual. It's just calm and quiet and relaxed, and there's not people buzzing around, so it's different. >> So you've been at DataTorrent for a while now, so give us kind of the quick update, where you guys are, how things are moving along for you. >> Yeah, I mean, I've kicked in about five months, so I think I'm just coming up to sort of five and a half, six months, so it's a enough time to get my feet wet, understand whether I made a massive mistake or whether it's exciting. I'm still-- >> Jeff: Still here, you're wearing the T-shirt. >> Yeah, I'm pleased to say I'm still very excited about it. It's a great opportunity, and the space is just hot, hot. >> So you guys are involved in streaming data and streaming analytics, and you know, we had Hadoop, was kind of the hot thing in big data, and really the focus has shifted now to streaming analytics. You guys are playing right in that space and have been for a while, but you're starting to make some changes and come at the problem from a slightly different twist. Give us an update on what you guys are up to. >> Yeah, I mean, so when I dropped into DataTorrent, obviously, it's real-time data analytics, based on stream processing or event processing. So the idea is to say instead of doing things like analytics, insight, and action on data at rest, you know, traditional way of doing things is sucking data into a data store and then poking it litigiously at sort of a real-time analytics basis. And what the company decided to do, and again, this is around the founders, is to say if you could take the insight and action piece and shift it left of the data store in memory and then literally garner the insight and action when an event happens, then that's obviously faster and it's quicker. And it was interesting, a client said to us recently that batch, or stream, or near real-time, or microbatch, is sort of like real-time for a person, 'cause a person can't think that fast. So the latency is a factor of that, but what we do is real-time for a computer. So the idea here is that you literally have sub-second latency and response and actions and insight. But anyway, they built a toolkit, and they built a development platform, and it's completely extensible, and we've got a dozen customers on board, and they're high production, and people are running a billion events per second, so it's very cool. But there wasn't this repeatable business, and I think the deeper I got into it, you also look at it and you say, "Well, Hadoop isn't the easiest thing to deploy." >> Jeff: Right, right, consistently. >> And, the company had this mantra, really, of going to solve total cost of ownership and time to value, so in other words, how fast can I get to an outcome and how cheap is it to run it. So can you create unique IP on top of opensource that allows you to basically get up and running quickly, it's got a good budget constraint from a scale-up perspective and scale-out, but at the same time, you don't need these genius developers to work on it because there's only a small portion of people who basically can deploy a Hadoop cluster in a massive scale in a reliable way. So we thought, well, the thing to do is to really bring it into the masses. But again, if you bring a toolkit down, you're really saying here's a toolkit and an opportunity, and then build the applications and see what you can do. What we figured is actually what you want to do is to say, no, let's just see if we can take Hadoop out of the picture and the complexity of it, and actually provide an end-to-end application. So we looked to each of the customers' current deployments and then figured out, can we actually industrialize that pipeline? In other words, take the opensource components, ruggedize them, scale them, make sure that they stay up, they're full torrents, 7x24, and then provide them as an application. So we're actually shifting our focus, I think, from just what are called the apex platform and the stream-based processing platform to an application factory and actually producing end-to-end applications. >> 'Cause it's so interesting to think of batch and batch in not real-time compared to real-time streaming, right? We used to take action on a sample of old data, and now, you've got the opportunity to actually take action on all of the now data. Pretty significant difference. >> Yeah, I mean, it kills me. I've got to say, since the last time we met, I literally wrote a blog series, and one of them was called Analytics, Real-Time Analytics versus Real-Time Analytics. And I had this hilarious situation where I was talking to a client, and I asked then, and I said, "Do you do real-time analytics?" They go, "Yeah." And I said, "Do you work on real-time data?" And they said, "Yeah." And I said, "What's your latency between an event happening "and you being able to take an action on the event?" And he said, "Well, 60 milliseconds." It's just amazing. I said, "Well, tell me what your architecture looks like." And he says, "Well I take Kafka into Apex as a stream. "I then import it in essence into Cassandra, "and then I allow my customers to poke the data." So I said, "Well, but that's not 60 milliseconds." And he goes, "No, no, it is." And I said, "What are you measuring?" He goes, "Well, the customer basically puts "an inquiry onto the data store." And so literally, what he's doing is a real-time query against a stale data that's sitting inside of a date lake. But he swore blind. >> But it's fast though, right? >> And that's the thing is he's looking, he say, "Hey, well, I can get a really quick response." Well, I can as well. I mean, I can look at Google World and I can look at my house, and I can find out that my house is not real-time. And that's really what it was. So you then say to yourself, well look, the whole security market is based around this technology. It's classic ETL, and it's basically get the data, suck it in, park it into a data store, and then poke at it. >> Jeff: Right >> But that means that that latency, by just the sheer fact that you're taking the data in and you're normalizing it and dropping it into a data store, your latency's already out there. And so one of the applications that we looked at is around fraud, and specifically payment fraud and credit card fraud. And everything out there in the market today is basically, it's detection because of the latency. If you kind of think about it, credit card swipe, the transaction's happened, they catch the first one, they look at it and say, "Well, that's a bit weird." If another one of these ones comes up, then we know we've got fraud. Well, of course, what happens is they suck the data in, it sits inside a data store, they poke the data a little bit later, and they figure out, actually, it is fraud. But the second action has happened. So they detected fraud, but they couldn't prevent it, so everything out there is payment fraud prevention, or payment fraud detection because it's basically got that latency. So what we've done is we said to ourself, "No, we actually can prevent it." Because if you can move the insight and actions to the left-hand side of the data store, and as the event is happening, you literally can grab that card swipe and say no, no, no, you don't do it anymore, you prevent it. So, it's literally taking that whole market from, in essence, detection to prevention. And this is, it's kind of fascinating because there's other angles to this. There's a marketplace inside the credit card site that talks about card not present, and there's a thing called OmniChannel, and OmniChannel's interesting, 'cause most retailers have gone out there and they've got their bricks and mortar infrastructure and architecture and data centers, and they've gone and acquired an online company. And so, now, they have these two different architectures, and if you imagine if you got to hop between the two, it kind of has gaps. And so, the fraudsters will exploit OmniChannel because there's multiple different architectures around, right? So if you think about it, there's one side of saying, hey, if we can prevent that, so taking in a huge amount of data, having it talk, having a life cycle around it, and literally being able to detect and then prevent fraud before the fraudsters can actually figure out what to do, that's fantastic, and then on the plus side, you could take that same pipeline and that same application, and you can actually provide it to the retailers and say, well, what you'd want to do is things like, again, I wrote another blog on it, loyalty brand. You know, on the retail side, is for instance, my wife, we shop like crazy, everybody does. I try not to, but let's say she's been on the Nordstrom site, and we've got a Nordstrom. So Nordstrom has a cookie on their system and they can figure what had been done. And she's surfing around, and she finds a dress she kind of likes, but she doesn't buy it because she doesn't want to spend the money. Now, I'm in Nordstrom's about four weeks later, and I'm literally buying a pair of socks. A card swipe, and what it does is because you've got this OmniChannel and you can connect the two, what they want to do is to be able to turn around and say, "Oh, Guy, before we run this credit card, "we noticed that your wife was looking at this dress. "We know her birthday's coming up. "And by the way, we've checked our store, "and we've got the color and the size "she wants it in, and if you want, "we'll put it on the credit card." >> Don't tell her that, she already bought too much. She won't want you to get that dress. Nah, it's a great, it's a really interesting example, right? >> But it is that, and if you kind of think about it, and this where, when they say every second counts, it's like every millisecond counts. And so it really is machine-to-machine, real-time, and that's what we're providing. >> Well, that's the interesting, you know, a couple things just jump into mind as you're talking. One is by going the application route, right, you're reducing the overhead for just pure talent that we keep hearing about. It's such a shortage in some of these big data applications, Hadoop, specifically. So now, you're delivering a bunch of that, that's already packaged to do a degree in an application, is that accurate? >> Yeah, I mean I kind of look at the engineering talent inside an organization is like a triangle. And at the very top, you have talented engineers that basically can hard code and that's really where our technology has sat traditionally. So, we go to a large organization. They have a hundred people dedicated to this sport. The challenge is then it means the small organizations who don't have it can't take advantage. And then you've got at the base end, you have technologies like Tableau, you know, as a GUI that you can use by an IT guy. And in the middle you've got this massive swath of engineering talent that literally isn't the, Yoda hardcode on the analytics stuff and really can't do the Hadoop cluster. But they want to basically get dangerous on this technology, and if you can take your, you know, the top talent, and you bring that in to that center and then provide it at a cost economics that makes sense, then you're away. And that's really what we've seen is. So our client base is going to go from the 1410, 1420, 1450s, into the 14,000s and you bring it down, and that's really, if you think about it, that's where Splunk kind of got their roots. Which is really, get an application, allow people to use it, execute against it and then build that base up. >> That's ironically that you bring up Splunk 'cause George Gilbert, one of our Wikibon analysts, loves to say that Splunk is the best imitation of Hadoop that was ever created. He thinks of it really as a Hadoop application as opposed to Splunk, because they're super successful. They found a great application. They've been doing a terrific job. But the other piece that you brought up that triggered my mind was really the machine-to-machine. And real-time is always an interesting topic. What is real time? I always think of real time means in time to do something about it. That can be a wide spectrum depending on what you're actually doing. And the machine-to-machine aspect is really important because they do operate at a completely different level of speed. And time is very different for a machine-to-machine operation interaction interface than trying to provide some insight to a human, so they can start to make a decision. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, it was, again, one of those moments through the last five months I was looking at it. There's a very popular technology in our space called Spark, Apache Spark. And it's successful and it's great in batch and it's got micro-batch and there's actually a thing called Spark Streaming, which is micro-batch. But in essence, it's about a second latency, and so you look at it and you go, but what's in a second? You know what I mean? I mean, surely that's good enough. And absolutely, it's good enough for some stuff. But if you were, I mean we joke about it with things like autonomous cars. If you have cruise control, adaptive cruise control, you don't want that run on batch because that second is the difference between you slamming into a truck or not. If you have DHL, they're doing delivery drops to you, and you're actually measuring weather patterns against it, and correlating where you're going to drive and how and high and where, there's no way that you're going to run on a batch process. And then batch is just so slow in comparison. We actually built an application and it's a demo up on our web. And it's a live app, and when I sat down with the engineering team, and I said, "Look, I need people to understand "what real real-time does and the benefits of it." And it's simply doing is shifting the analytics and actions from the right-hand side of where the data store is, to the left-hand side. So you take all of the latency of parting the data and then go find the data. And what we did is we said, look, well, I want to do this really fair and, when you were a kid, there used to be games like Snap, you know, where the cards that you would turn over and you'd go snap and it's mine. So we're just looking and say, "Okay, "why don't we do something like that?" It's like fishing, you know, tickling fish and who sees the first fish, you grab it, it's yours. So we created an application that basically creates random numbers at a very, very huge speed, and whichever process, we have three processes running, whichever one sees it the first time, puts their hands up and says, "I got that." And if somebody else says, "I've got that," but they see a timestamp on the other one, they can't claim it. One wins, and the other two lose. And I did it, and we optimized around, basically, the Apache Apex code, which is ours in stream mode, the Apache Apex, believe it or not, in a micro-batch mode, and Spark Streaming, as fast as they can, and we literally engineered the hell out of them to get them as fast as possible. And if you look at the results, it literally is, win every time for stream, and a loss every time for the other two. So from a speed perspective, now the reality is like I said, is if I'm showing a dashboard to you, by the time you blink, all three have gotten you the data. It's immaterial, and this isn't knocking on Spark. Our largest deployments all run on what we call, like a cask-type architecture, which is basically Kafka Apache, Spark. So we see this in Hadoop, and it's always in there. So it's kind of this cache thing. So we like it for what it is, but where customers come unbundled, is where they try and force-fit a technology into the wrong space. And so again, you mentioned Splunk, these sort of waves of innovation. We find every client sitting there, going, "I want to get inside quicker". The amount of meetings that we're all in, where you sit there and go, "If I'd only known that now "or before, then I would've made a decision." And, you know, in the good old days, we worked at-rest data. At-rest was really the kingdom of Splunk. If you think about it, we're now in the tail end of batch, which is really where Spark's done. So Splunk and Spark are kind of there, and now you're into this real-time. So again, it's running at a fair pace, but the learnings that we've had over the last few months is toolkits are great, platforms are great, but to bring this out into a mass adoption, you really need to make sure that you've provided hardened application. So we see ourselves now as, you know, real-time big data applications company, not just Apache. >> And when you look at the application space that you're going to attack, do you look at it kind of vertically, do you look at it functionally, kind of, you mentioned fraud as one of the earlier ones. How are you kind of organizing yourself around the application space? >> Yeah, and so, the best way for me to describe it, and I want to spin it in a better way than this, but I'll tell you exactly as we've done it, which is, I've looked at what the customers have currently got and we have deployments in about a dozen big customers and they're all different use cases, and then I've looked at it and said, "What you really want to do is you want to go "to a market that people have a current problem, "and also in a vertical where they're prepared "to pay for something and solving a problem "that if they give you money, they either "make money quickly or they save money quickly." So it's actually-- >> So simple. (laughs) >> But it would be much better if I said it in a pure way and I made some magical thing up, but in reality is I'm looking and going, "You got to go where the hardest problems are," And right now, a few things like card not present, you look at roaming abuse and you look at OmniChannel from payment fraud, everybody is looking for something. Now, the challenge is the market's noisy there, and so what happens is everybody's saying, "But I've got it." >> That's what strikes me about the fraud thing is you would think that that's a pretty sophisticated market place in which to compete. So you clearly have to have an advantage to even get a meeting, I would imagine. >> Yeah, and again, we've tested the market. The market's pretty hard on the back of it. We've got an application coming out shortly, and we're actually doing design partnerships with a couple of big banks. So but we don't want to be seen as just a fraud, now, just a fraud, just a fraud prevention company. (chuckles) I'll stay with a fraud, myself. But you kind of look and you say, look, they'll be a set of fraud applications because there's about half a dozen only to be done, retail, like I mentioned on things like the loyalty brand stuff. We have a number of companies that are using us for ad tech. So again, I can't mention the names. Actually, we've just published one, Publix, no, PubMatic is one of the ad tech organizations that's using our products. But we'll literally come out and harden that pipeline as well. So we're going to strut along but instead of just saying, "Hey, we've solved absolutely everything," what I want to do is to solve a problem for someone and then just move forward. You know, most of our customers have somewhere between three to five different applications that are running up and that are in production. So once the platform's in, you know, then they see the value of it. But we really want to make sure that we're closer to the end result and to an outcome, because that's the du jour way that customers want to buy things now. >> Well, and they always have, right? Like you said, they've got a burning issue. You either got to make money or save money. And if it's not a burning issue, it falls to the bottom of the pile, 'cause there's something that's burning that they need to fix quickly. >> And the other thing, Jeff, is if you, and again, it's dirty laundry, but if you think about it, I go to an account and the account's got a fraud solution, and it's all right but it's not doing what they want, but we come along up with a platform, say, "We can do absolutely anything." And then they go, "Well, I've got this really difficult "problem that no one's solved for me, "but I'm not even sure if I've got a budget for it. "Let's spend two year messing around with it. And that's no good, you know? From a small company, you really want that tractionable event, so my thing is just say, "No, what we want to do is I want to go "talk to John about John's problem," and say, "I can solve it better than the current one." And there is nothing in the market today, on the payment fraud side, that will provide prevention. It is all detection. So, there's a unique value. The question is whether we can get the noise out. >> All right, well, we look forward to watching the progress and we'll check again in five months or so. >> Thank you, Jeff, 'preciate it. >> Guy Churchward, he's from DataTorrent, President and CEO. Took over about five months ago and kind of changed the course a little bit. Exciting to watch, thanks for stopping by. >> Guy: Thank you >> All right, Jeff Frick, you're watching the theCUBE. See you next time. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)