live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to minimun joining me we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 day three graciously hosted by five nine we've had great conversations with five nine folks customers partners and we're very pleased to welcome back to the cube but the first time live the CEO of five nine Rowan trollope Bruin thank you so much for joining Stu and me today thank you Lisa thank you sue great to be here and for hosting us I was telling you before we live we've had a great three days of talking to your customers your partners this contact center is hot it's electric it's electric I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to contact center connector or central or something it's it really all the innovation I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that wow there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right and not just us but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now the rise of the powered consumer yeah it's incredible how this consumer behavior that's the driver absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice yeah we call it the experience economy it's like you know we're all and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers and when we deal with brands we want to have a great experience all around like not just when we're you know buying or when we're using or but you know from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get and we're really really focused on that so that's the driver and your enterprises have realized that businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do so it's it's emerging as this like as this extraordinarily important part of every business yeah Rowen one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learn this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer right and if I do need to call them what that experience would be like that's right we're so we think a lot about customer love what you know what does it take to get a customer to love your business and it doesn't only take having a great product it takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center it's where all the action happens right it's right at that front line it's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you how do they greet you what is it like do you does the person know who you are do they give you that delightful experience and you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just grates on us you know great great and and five nine is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses one of the things we heard - in terms of omni-channel and you know as these empowered consumers we we want a company to communicate with us so as you were saying before I know us on whatever channel that we want but one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool that that really companies of any industry saying I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone so I just was surprised to learn that that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that we're surprising to row and it's voices sexy voices back it's we have to have the humans and the empathise or some some sort of old-school things that are coming back and resurfacing is critical yeah well you know on the omni-channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about I keep this really simple for people think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting sometimes I would call you sometimes I would text you sometimes I might send you an email they're all different not one or the other is better or worse they're just different if I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like you know I'm not gonna call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone I might send you a couple texts but then I walk out I jump in the car what a minute I'm gonna phone Conny on the phone the call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed so that's really the that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers the fancy word for that is omni-channel you know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver it deliver that out of the box right and we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can we partner with that and do that very effectively yeah Rowen one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening one of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment I have my own premises I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle it's you know we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more I know clouds one of the main reasons you know for 5/9 success yeah in one of the regions that came over we're a market leader in cloud you know that's how we started we're born in the cloud so we don't have any on-premises technology you know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this you know we're all about the agents login to our website at five nine com they get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight there's nothing to deploy there's no closets of equipment anywhere it's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution the idea back to your point that you know there's some things are too big for the cloud that's total BS I just say to have to say it that's not true you know what I would agree with though is that we're on a journey you know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud right and so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make and you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're gonna tell and it's not a it's not a lie it's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer and we're essentially we're through the evangelism phase here there's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses it is you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year then that's doubled in the last two years so it's a fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running a hundred percent on the cloud and they are loving it and another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI we've that's been a theme I know that hey I came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience yeah well I'll tell you a little story I was call center agent my first job we're talking about that earlier and you know I took a lot of calls and 8000 calls actually in a call center that I took after you take 8,000 calls your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about you've heard them all you're never gonna be surprised by an inbound sort of call or message or whatever you've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three words you already know where they're going but the big challenge in the context so if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions after you think $8,000 you're fast you're efficient you can deliver that great experience the big problem in the context Center it's mostly a labor driven operation there's very high turnover contact center reps once they've taken out phase 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center we think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem to deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents let them focus on the empathy we say let the Machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart because it's really important that you have the human touch in that experience right that drives that's what people crave in life they don't it's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or the IVR as far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IV ARS nobody likes talking to a computer you want to talk to a human so our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient how we can arm them with real-time interactions and that's all about leveraging data right because the data in this case is voice so de voices the new data it's the biggest source of dart data in the enterprise customer voice actual voice like WAV files what's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time take that customer voice convert it into text real time with with high accuracy better than humans can do and we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next right that sort of superpower rep who's taken 8000 calls how do you make every rep like that we are sort of heading down a path to enable that the very first step though is you have to get to the cloud because this technology cannot be done on premises so you know you can dance around that all you want but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on-premises with the legacy approach you have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we were that's where we started well that that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week of the show and something we heard a lot from your team something that that's happening just across industries I'd love to hear a little bit about you know just future growth where you you know 5/9 had a very strong product great customer experience to begin with but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting moved down the AI path data becomes more and more important part of the story well what should we be looking at four five nine kind of the next you know 12 to 18 months yeah well I think five 9s got the best experience for our customers and you know where we're heading the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before so that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best best-in-class experience right that predictive you never wait you get someone whether it's text whether it's email whether it's chat you get a great answer you get a human touch but you also get the answer you want and whether that's inbound or outbound if its outbound it's really important that it is not only predictive but that it's anticipating what your needs are because I like to say if I have to call support like that's already a problem why am i calling you you know with IOT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data part of what you should be of doing every business should be doing is anticipating what their customers are gonna need and sharing that information across their company and a contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say look we know this customers are already having a problem with this like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them we should be calling them to figure out how do we can make that experience better so really honing and optimizing and anticipating your users needs is sort of the other side of this so it's both the inbound case I talked about but also that outbound case and and that that proactive engagement that that I think every end user really would like in an effective way five nine has about five billion recorded conversations customer conversations a year you have billion minutes a year five billion minutes thank you a year tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dirk data and becoming predictive talk to us about that as a competitive advantage yeah the very first step is lighting that data up we're lighting it up now with machine learning we signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech-to-text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data so very very secure obviously our our name is 5/9 we're known as the trusted you know brand in this industry five nines of reliability is what we're all about so this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step it's really okay take that voice data which is not very useful like you can have agent spot check or supervisors listen in on calls but that doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier the more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text let's then take that text and it becomes computable you can summarize it we can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls you can they can quickly scan down and see what's happened also to be predictive hey we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time we can actually go predict what they might you know what what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set so there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer from from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data so we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business yeah Ron one of the interesting things is if you look around this at this show floor you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps and blurring the lines between some of the environments we had carfax on good customer of yours started out with the the contact center agents but you know they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound not a traditional contact center you're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but you know some of those lines blur out quite a bit so what is it call - yeah a contact center that the lines of that are blurring you know the traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years of 30 years ago was like you know rows of cubes people on headsets like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers it's nurse practitioners it's doctors it's other experts that are interacting with their customers it's education consultants and specialists these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today you know I think about 10 years ago I'll give you an example of this transition 10 years ago I my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do cuz it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it she didn't give up she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk so fast forward to a year ago and we've moved we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go out all right all right I'll get it done so what do I do I think about well last time I did this I got a rack how am I gonna get a rack I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go under their websites and I do a little bit of self-service likes discovery and learning about their products I'm an empowered consumer at this point right I find three different companies I call one of them because like this is a big purchase I don't want this huge thing to show up steal blah blah blah my house if it's the wrong thing I guess gonna get ahold of someone I talked to them I have a good experience I hang up my called one other one just to kind of compare it I compared the two then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep so ten years ago let me give you the punchline here ten years ago one trip to brick and mortar zero calls to the call center ten years later now zero trips to brick and mortar two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale that's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they will look very different than how they look today it's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact centre agent is I wouldn't have thought of it as you're right these are nurse practitioners it's so diverse speaking of diversity I know that five nine has several thousand customers globally one of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because woman founded company woman founded company not a tech company talk to us about how 5/9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid yes we did George Clooney a solid so in the case of Estee Lauder they were a they're a huge company eleven billion dollars in sales they're an amalgamation of 40 different brands very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies they did not integrate any of them so you call any one of these places there was all different contact centers they didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had we had to sort of to make that a part of the discovery process and global they're in all over the world they're in asia-pacific they're in France and Europe they're here they had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases they had independent technology contracts and almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot so we engaged with them and basically provided we we help them write the RFP we help work through that process we got them on board with our software nothing to deploy nothing to install right just have your agents login we did a training and we're able to on board you know well over a thousand agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many many different businesses and some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like how fewer contracts or a better system but it's also to tie that system back into the business so you know they have a some products that are they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever gift bags and you know they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on they don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I you know would use maybe you would go to the VIPs but now it's called a regular contact center they want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure that you get the right specialist at the right time to that that customer that well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the on boardings George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills you know being able to route things in a complex way understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event that event has some you know some VIPs at the event we've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill this is the right person for it to go to they're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time so we saw it in action it was obviously great and what made us made us felt good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted Wow all that contacts Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me and also for 5/9 for graciously hosting the Q the last three days we've had a venture to hear great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year me too stay tuned stay tuned for Stu min Amman I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Live from Stanford University. It's the Cube covering global Women in Data Science conference brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Welcome back to the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin Live at the Stanford Ari Aga Alone, My Center for the Fourth Annual Women and Data Science Conference with twenty nineteen and were joined by a very special guest, Liza Donnelly, cartoonist for The New Yorker. But Liza, you are a visual journalists, visual journalism. You're here live, drawing a lot of the things that are going on. It would. You were just at the Oscars at the Grammys. Your work is so unique, so descriptive. Tell us a little bit our audience about what is visual journalism? >> Well, I suppose a lot of us define it different ways. But I did find it is somebody who I am, somebody who goes to events, either political or social, cultural and draw what I see. I'm not a court reporter. I'm I'm an Impressionist. I give people a feeling that they're they're with me from what? By what I draw what I see, how I draw it, and and it's I don't usually put any editorializing in those visual drawings, but my perspective is sort of a certain kind of approach. >> So you're bringing your viewers along this journey in almost real time. When people see people might be most failure with New Yorker your illustrations there. But folks that are watching the Woods event lie that engaging with that tell us a little bit about the importance of using the illustrations to bring them on this journey as if they were here. >> Well, you know, I send the drawings out immediately, do them on my iPad and I send them out on social media almost immediately, so as I do that so that people can see them immediately. So they feel like they're there, and it's a way to draw attention to whatever it is I'm drawing. Because on the Internet, there's so many words in so many photographs, people see a drawing by other stream that like, Wait, what's that? And I'm a thumb stopper, in other words, so it's. It gives people different perspective on what's going on. And I think that my background is a cartoonist for The New Yorker for forty years. Informs these drawings in an indirect background kind of way, because I have been watching culture have been watching politics for a very long time, so it gives me a, you know, a new attitude or a way to look at what's going on, >> right? And so you you call these illustrations, not cartoons. >> I do call the cartoons cartoons. Okay, we'll do the cartoons for the for >> The New Yorker and some other magazines, and those have a caption, and they often are supposed to be funny, or at least cultural commentary. I do political cartoons for medium, and those also have it have a point of view, are a caption. But the's this visual journalism like I'm doing here is more like reportage. It's more like this is what's happening here. You might be interested in seeing what people are talking about, what they're doing and I do behind the scenes to I don't just do like the Oscars. I'll do the stars if I could get them. And on the red crime on the red carpet, it's really cool. If I catch them, I'll draw them. And then But then I also do the people taking out the trash, the guy painting, you know, painting the sideboard or the counterman, things like that. So I try to give a sense of what it's like to be there. >> So you really kind of telling a story from different perspectives. Yes, right. Yeah. And so the role of I'd love to understand you mentioned being with the New Yorker for very long time and loved. You understand from your perspective, the evolution of cartoons and the impact they can make in in our society, in politics and economics. Tell us a little bit about some of the impacts that you've seen evolve over the last few decades. >> Well, I've written about >> that. I'm also a writer. I've written about that for a very sites. Did a commentary on op ed for The New York Times about the Charlie Hebdo's murders a couple years ago because we know cartoons can be very controversial. Yes and problematic Nick. And that's been true through the course of the history of our country, and I'm sure in England and other countries as well. But it's compounded. Now because of the Internet. I think cartoons could be misunderstood that could be used as weapons. People are gonna be talking about this next week at the South by Southwest. I'm talking about political cartoons and what what their impact has been in the past and how, >> how they, how they create an impact now >> and why that is, and how we could use it to the to our to good effect. You know, not a divisive tool, which I think is a problem that we're dealing with right now in our culture is everybody's so divided and so opinionated and so hateful towards each other. Can we use cartoons? Not to perpetuate that, but to make things better in some way. >> And that's kind of the theme of Wits, Women and Data Science Conference. You know, we're talking Teo and listening Teo at the live event here at Stanford and all of those around the world. It's really strong leaders and data sign. So we think of data science on DH, the technical skills. But data is generated. We generate tons of it as people, right with whatever we're buying, what we're watching on Netflix. But we're listening to on Spotify, etcetera. There's this data trail that we're all leaving, and we know you talked about using cartoons for good. Same conversations that we have on the data side, about being able to use data for good for cancer research, for example, rather than exposing and being malicious, that's interesting. Parallel that you've seen over the years that there is a lot of potential here. Tell me a little bit about the appetite in. Maybe we'll say the millennials and the younger generations for cartoons as a tool for positive the spread of positive social news and not fake news. >> Well, there. I know that >> there's more and more cartoons on the Internet now. A lot of Web comics and cartoonists are young. Cartoonists are using the Internet effectively, too. Put out their ideas. In fact, I when the Internet hit, I was mid career right, and it just took off and helped me become Mohr more well known just by leveraging the Internet. No, because I love it. You know, I love Communicate. It's >> actually it's really an extension >> of what I did as a child learning to draw, communicate with people. I was shy. I don't want to talk. The Internet is just a matter of for me. It's like a dialogue with people on DH. That's how I look at it, and I I think this new generation is really trying to find ways to use these tools in a good way. I think there's a whole new, you know, the kids in their >> twenties. I think they're trying >> to make a better world, are working on it, and that's exciting. >> You talk about communication and how you used your artistic skills from the time you were a child to communicate. Being shy. We also talk about communication in the context of events like the women, the data science, where it isn't just enough to be ableto understand and have the technical acumen to evaluate complex, messy data sets. But the communication piece kind of go back, Teo sort of basic human scaled, being able to communicate effectively. This is what I think the data say and why, and here's what we can do with it. So I think it's interesting that you're here at this event. That has a lot of parallels with communication with using a tool or information for the betterment off a little bit about how you got involved with women in data science. >> Well, I met Margot Garretson >> about five years ago, and through a mutual friend, we met in Iceland. All places >> like it's conference >> about women's rights. It was, it was the Icelandic women are so powerful anyway. We met there, really, to be good friends, and she invited me to come live, draw her new conference at the time. I think she had one year of it, and I thought, data science, OK, >> did you even know what >> that Wass? Yeah, kind of. But I didn't think I didn't see my connection. But I thought, Well, it's about women's rights and >> I'm a big part of my interest in what I want to do with my work is promote equal rights for women around the world. And so I thought, this this sounds terrific. Plus, it's global, and I do a lot of work globally to help them and help freedom of speech as well. So it seemed to be a great fit on DH and and it seems even more to be a good fit in that. It's a way to get the information out there in a visual way because people will hear that word data, and they like they probably just >> start. Yeah, zero because >> they see it connected with a cartoon or drawing it humanizes it for them a little bit. And if I could do that, that's great. And that's what's also fun is that I thought about this today was drawing the speakers, and I'm drawing one of the speakers. I forget her name right now, but I thought and I put it out on the Internet. There were no words on there, but it was just a woman speaker talking about really very technical data science. I put on the Internet with the caption on the tweet and I thought, People, it's it's it's just a constant reminder to people that women are doing this. And it's not a silly not like writing a long essay about why women should be in data signs and why they are and why they're important. But they're doing great things. But if you see it, it resonates a little bit more quickly and more forcefully. >> Absolutely. And it aligns with what we hear and say a lot of we can't be what we can't see. >> That's right. Yeah, that's a saying right where you said that. >> Yes. I'm not sure I'd love to take credit for it. Sure >> would be if she can see it, she could be it. That's another >> thing. That a young girl, she's my drawing of a professor talking on stage. Maybe she'll think about it. >> Absolutely. So in the last few seconds here, can you just give us a little bit of an idea of how you actually What What inspires you when you're seeing someone give a talk like you mentioned about maybe an esoteric or a very technical top? What do you normally look for? That's that Ah ha moment that you want to capture in ten minutes. >> Well, I try to capture that person's essence. I'm not a caricaturist. I don't pretend to be, but I draw >> a likeness of them, and they're the full body is the best body language. You know, they're just tick yah late ing. And then oftentimes I try to capture a sentence that they're saying that has has more universal appeal that somehow brings like a not like a layman into the subject A little bit. If I can find that sentence in what they're saying, I'll put that you have the speech balloon will be saying that. But I just try to capture the person best. I can >> do anything if you compare two wins. Twenty eighteen. Here we are a year later. Even more people here, the live event, even more people engaging and think Margo's that about twenty thousand live today. One hundred thousand over. I think the one hundred thirty plus regional with events, anything that you hear, see or feel that's even more exciting this year than last year. >> Um, well, I do. I do feel the >> the increase in numbers. I can feel it. There's there soon be more people here I don't true, but the senior more young people here, what else is it is it is a buzz. I think there's a >> There's an energy >> is an energy. Not that there wasn't there last. The last I've >> done three years now. It's been there, but there's a certain excitement right now. I think more women are stepping into this field of being recognized for doing so. >> And it's great that you're able Tio, reach, help wigs, reach an even bigger audience and tell this story with your illustrations in a more visual way, way also. Thank you so much, Liza, for taking some time. Must daughter by the Cuban talked to us. It's an honor to meet you And you. I love your drawings. >> Thank you so much. You >> want to thank you for watching the Cube? I'm Lisa Martin Live at the fourth annual Women and Data Science Conference at Stanford's took around. Be right back with my next guests.

>> [Announcer] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone welcome back, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here at VMware's Radio 2018, this is their seminal, big-tent event for their top engineers, smartest people come together present their reports, their projects, and come together as a community and share great content and agenda. As Steve Herrod former CTO says, this is like a sales kickoff for engineers, it's motivated and they flex their muscles, technically, stretch their minds. I'm here with Pat Gelsinger, the CEO VMware, great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Hey thank you very much, it's fun to be here at Radio. >> So this is nerd central, this is >> Absolutely, this is like geek city baby. >> Dave and I always complement you on your business acumen obviously doing great as a CEO, the numbers, business performance, world class organization, check, best place to work, one of the best places to work for, check. But you're kind of a geek at heart, you like to get down and dirty, technical, this is your event. You gettin' down with the folks? >> Yeah it's fun, I was just at our sales, we have a top sales people, our sales club, so we did it in Abu Dhabi this year, so I was just over there a couple of week ago for that so hobnobbing with the sales guys which is super important, right? Their motivation, their creme de la creme of the year, but to me this one is better, right? Just 'cause now the tech guys comin' together 'cause most companies don't do anything like this, right? So it really is a unique piece of the VMware culture where the tech guys get together and they just geek out for a couple of days and to be awarded best of Radio, it's like, oh man you're a god inside of VMware. >> It's like the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, the Oscars, it's a huge accomplishment and knowing people internally. >> Yeah and some of Ray's numbers this morning as he showed in the keynote, I mean it's competitive to get your paper shown here is competitive, right? So there's a set of judges that are picking the papers that are here out of this we already have over 200 invention disclosures that have come out of just the preparation for the conference and we haven't even gotten started yet, and now the keynotes this morning and poster sessions all week long, and letting the engineers just really vibrate off of each others' ideas and challenge them and all of our PEs and fellows roaming around here they're sort of like the big guys on campus, but hey the young Turks are coming up and they're challenging them on ideas it really is a delightful few days. >> I love your perspective, I wanna get your reaction 'cause one, not only do you have a storied history working at Intel, really a great innovative founders of Silicon Valley with HPs of the world, and now you're the chief of VMware a modern era's here, you talk about this all the time publicly about the business context and at the events, but it's different Google had pioneered this notion of 20% of your time you could work on side project, more of an academic culture Google has, I mean I love that it's cool, but VMware has a unique culture and I want you to talk about that dynamic because you have to be versatile now, agile more than ever, you have to be faster time to market, and it's always been hard for companies to crack the code on knocking down the big ideas, solving the hardest problems but yet making it practical at the same time. What's your reaction to how you guys are doing it, >> what's different? Share some color. >> In some ways and I think some of the panel, we had a panel session this morning, Steve did one session, but we had of the original engineers in the company, the five of the original engineers, right were here and they were saying it was sort of like we're doing research in a business who had business objectives, right? Solving problems that had never been solved before, Sort of the VMware culture is if it's not a hard problem, it's not worth it, right? And our objective isn't to be 2x or 10% better, but to be 10x better, right? And when you're doin' those kind of things you can't always put that on a schedule, right? The problem is solved when it's solved, right? And I was just meeting with one of my teams last night and this is, well alright that looked pretty good but I don't think you've met the minimum viable product yet so let's put it in an open beta for six months before we actually call it GA 'cause I don't think you're done >> solving the hard problem yet, right? >> So you're squinting through and looking at the projects from that? >> Yeah right, is it ready? And have we really delivered something that customers can say, "Yeah here's the value proposition you promised, here's what you're delivering me, it is a quality product," right? Which is something that's deep in that history of VMware right in many cases, and I love one of the statistics this morning, they said the early core dumps of ESX, right they found that over 2/3 of them were a result of memory parody errors, not of ESX failures of any sense, so meaning that the hardware was less reliable than the software was, that's all we sort of this magic that we say, we're out to produce world class infrastructure software that's better than the hardware ever could have been and for a hardware guy that's sort >> So that was your problem, originally I think it was on your watch actually the first core dump. Throwback Thursday would they do core dumps from like 10 years ago look at a simpler core, >> look at x say "Hey look at the core dump, Hey look at cool that is." (laughing) >> If I see the Biaz prompt oh my gosh where did that come from? >> Let's get some vinyl records and look at some core dumps from 1992. >> So Pat, now this is important because I think this is a killer point, when you look at innovation VMware has to meet the challenge of being on that next wave and you've said on theCUBE many times, if you're not on that next wave you're driftwood. A lot of companies who try to do R&D end up solving hard problems to attract the top talent, but they end up getting so focused on the problem they end up in a cul-de-sac on the wrong wave, they miss the next wave. >> [Pat] Yeah. >> How do you manage that? 'Cause this is your sticking point is to make sure you don't miss the next wave, you transition properly, how do you avoid that problem of getting so focused on the intoxicating aspect of solving problem and being in a cul-de-sac no market wave missed? >> Yeah and it's hard right? In that sense and I'll say there's, we sort of look at it from three different dimensions, one is, hey you gotta keep this bubbling cauldron of ideas and that's why we're here at Radio, right? Just these people working on ideas, right? You have some really cool stuff and every once in a while you're telling the engineers, "Well that's good but you haven't solved the hardest piece of that problem yet and so on." Then you have to be able to take it from that bubbling cauldron to, I'll say, an incubation product, right? 'Cause VMware yeah we do R&D, we do core research as well, but fundamentally we've been able to create markets based on our products and really scale them, right? The embarrassing truth of any enterprise software company is for every dollar of R&D you spend, you spend two dollars of sales and marketing, so we can't under invest in those products that we've picked that now are scaling into the market, we have to put the >> dedicated sales >> [John] Get the leverage >> out of it >> The SEs et cetera, that's really frightening. When I'm done innovating a new idea maybe I've dumped 10 million or 15 million into the core idea, okay, now I got to go spend twice that amount on >> Good marketing. >> Marketing of it and boy it's expensive to bring things into the enterprise and if the product isn't robust and solid and really compelling, then it might be three or four x, so you're now rewarded with your R&D investment to go spend on sales and marketing now, so yeah we've really taken and we have a very BCG matrix kind of view of how we take products from incubation into early market success and then into scale and finally cash cow and retirement and that process is one you have to be equally disciplined about. The third piece of it is you have to be able to declare failure and for failures, it's how do you harvest technologies and learning, but be able to look at something vCloud Air and say, "Okay we weren't successful" and now go build a multi cloud, an Amazon partnership coming out of it, we have to be able to make those shifts right and be able to declare failure, be able to move our customers forward, and then move on to the next big thing >> [John] I mean the math works >> 'Cause you're not gonna get 'em all right. >> So to your point, the math works when you can abandon quickly >> [Pat] Yeah. >> That's where the winners are 'cause then you can move the probability of success somewhere else. >> Yeah and if you can't declare failure, right, and view that in the positive and proud way. One of the failures of vCloud Air became the success of our hybrid cloud service capability now, right a lot of this ability to move workloads between public clouds was a direct harvesting of our vCloud Air failure, we're able to take that technology forward and that's now one of the pillars of how we're differentiate and our Amazon service, OBH partnership, IBM, are building on those hybrid cloud capabilities. >> Pat we've been watching you that's one of the things I will say that you're really amazing at, you're good at, you're the captain, you've got your hand on the wheel, you gotta know when to say, "Hey, close that hatch, or we're going to sink," you gotta, or I'm not that there, knowing when to make the calls. So I gotta ask you, when you look at the marketplace now, you have the option to build, the option to buy, and you have to kinda also balance those three areas, you've got Ray, you've got Rajiv, and you've got the Corp Dev guys, they have to work together and sometimes, hey let's go buy that hot start up or no I have it internally, and sometimes it might be in a core competency area. Talk about as the CEO, you've got your hand on the wheel, okay, you're steering the ship, you're setting the direction, the team's workin' hard, how do you make those calls buy build, and when it's in the core area as the market's shifting, what's that look like for you? What your view as you look forward? >> Yeah there's clearly and we think about the case let's take two examples of our buy. AirWatch, hey we saw that we had nothing in mobility and if we're gonna be in end-user computing we must have mobility in the family, so we really in some degree, we didn't have a choice, we had to go buy if we're gonna be in that space and it became foundational for us in that area. You might have argued, hey we should have done that five years sooner, but we didn't, we had to make a buy decision and then we went out and shopped, literally MobileIron or AirWatch? We looked at those and bake those off until almost the last day, alright? And I went into that expecting we were gonna buy MobileIron, right? >> [John] Really? What was the tipping point? >> Right, well, I became a Silicon Valley company, I thought their technology was a little bit better, I thought the AirWatch guys were a little bit too much market and focused on winning the early market, I didn't know if the product had the quality of a VMware product, so I really was handicapping the MobileIron one and the team came out unanimously with my agreement that AirWatch was the right thing, right? In the case of Nicira, one of the other foundational acquisitions that we did, we had a lot of the distributive virtual switch technology we had already innovated, but we hadn't put a control plane, a scale control plane against and that's Nicira did, so there it was really bringing those pieces together which really has become, I'll say, a marquee aspect of our acquisition, in many cases we're in the space >> You feel good about that, how much you paid for that. >> Oh yeah, I mean at the time people said, "1.2 billion for less than 10 million of revenue, what are you guys stupid?" Now everybody says, "Wow you're brilliant." >> So they didn't look at the underlying technology. >> Absolutely >> Leverage you were getting. >> Four years of hard work, core technology, right, and boom, we're unquestionably the leader in software defined networking now as a result of making a pretty bold bet at the time. Obviously organic innovation is the best because it sort of fits in your stream, you don't have to go, you know, change gooey practices or test release practices, it's already part of you as well. But sometimes, hey, I get to look over 10 startups and pick the winner. I may not be able to fund 10 startups internally and pick the winner, but I can look out over, you pay a premium, and one of the unique things about VMware is that over the 60 or so 70 acquisitions I think we've done now, as a company we have a highly successful track record. >> Is that because of the architectural decisions? It's not just bolt on a business unit and say stand alone and produce cash you guys are thinking strategically around how it fits architecturally, is that the difference? >> I'd say it boils down to a handful of things. That's absolutely one of 'em. We're looking deep at technology, how does it fit our technology, can we bring it in? Second we look at the culture of the company, right? We've said no to some acquisitions just 'cause we've decided that culture won't fit our culture or we're not gonna be able to mold it into our culture as well. Number three, we protect this thing, we run a process by which, hey if this is the acquired company, right, and here's the CEO of this startup company, he has passion, he is the commander of his universe, and tomorrow some low-level legal person can say, "No you can't do that," right, yesterday he was enjoying (laughing). Do we protect them? Do we turn their passion and get them to believe that their passion, remember, they're, yeah they wanna be successful, but they wanna turn their passion and objective into a big industry-changing event. And is that passion better executed inside of the platform of VMware? So we protect them, that low-level legal person can't say no or that finance person, we run a special board process around 'em to protect 'em. >> You don't want people handcuffed. >> Yeah, absolutely, we want them to be unleashed, that they have more power not less after they become part of this company that the platform for their vision and passion becomes bigger as part of ours so we protect 'em like crazy in that process. >> And you do that here at Radio as well. You wanna unleash the ground swell, get the grass roots movement going, let the sparks of innovation kinda fly out there. >> Yeah and our success rate is close to 90% on acquisitions and the industry average is below 50% so I think we've really mastered organic and inorganic innovation as good as any company has in the industry. >> Yeah I will say that's the totally true. And also Vsam became a project that came out of Radio that's been highly successful. >> [Pat] Yeah totally organic in that one. >> So you guys think strategically, it's not just bolting on revenue, although that could help if you can find it, there's not much out there for you guys. (both men laughing) Let's talk about some of the hot trends here at Radio. One of the things we're seeing, obviously with tie-in of the competitive, but also the comradery, a lot of, it's interesting to see how competitive it is, but also again VMware's got a hard core engineering culture, but also a hardcore community culture that shines through, it's obvious, so props to the folks running Radio and then the process. But when you look at the trends, what's trending up is the blockchain. We talked to some of your folks there you guys are looking at this, this is really strategic aspect, you talked with Dave about it briefly at Dell Technologies World, what's your view on blockchain? Obviously, you look at infrastructure, blockchain jumps out at you, your reaction to the hype and allusions and reality of blockchain crypto currency, not so much the ICO's, I think that's just a funding dynamic, lot of project-based stuff, but really there's some infrastructuring dynamics, your thoughts on blockchain as an infrastructure enabler for future wave? >> Yeah you know a couple of comments and one is, I think blockchain as a algorithmic breakthrough is on par with public private key encryption, alright? It's just sort of opened up the world of general purpose cryptography, and I think this idea of an immutable distributive ledger, right, sort of busts apart the database and I don't have to bring things together now the databases spreads, right, across it, immutability, right, transactability, et cetera, takes a lot of the acid characteristics of core databases and now does it in the fully distributive way, very powerful and I think it's gonna change supply chains, change financial systems, it's gonna have very broad implications so overall we're in, we believe very much in the importance of that. >> Real quick, to interrupt you real quick, >> 'cause I wanna get this thought in because you brought up general purpose, one of the things we've been kind of talking off camera, most of our team members is, blockchain looks a lot like maybe processors, general purpose processors, opening up an PC revolution, in the sense of general purpose computing. Blockchain seems to have that same dynamic, potentially, not as a direct metaphor, but if you can open up a new dynamic, that could explode new business models yet to be foreseen. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah absolutely. If we could take the cost of transactions down by an order of magnitude, right? If you could increase the reliability of a supply chain, right? If you could right in fact guarantee the source of origin of any product against the ultimate place of consumption, these are industry-changing type of capabilities, so we do see it quite significantly that way. But then as VMware looks at it, if there's not a hard problem to solve, then we shouldn't be in this space. So our team, one of the core problems of blockchain, right >> [John] Slow. >> Is the exponential compute requirements of higher order blockchains, so our team has solved that problem we've done some algorithmic breakthroughs that we believe allow blockchain to scale, a close to linear scale as opposed to exponential scale, wow that's game-changing for, we're also solving the auditability problem, immutable, anonymous, immutable is great, but a lot of things need to audited, right? So how can you bring some of those core concepts into blockchain? So those are some of the hard problems that we're solving, sort of back to the 10x culture, solve hard problems in fundamental ways and that's what we think that we can bring to the blockchain universe. >> Well Pat, I think it's amazing that you're here at the event, I know that you love, look forward to this as well, but to have the CEO come in at the Radio event and really lead the troops by example is awesome. We've got VMworld coming up around the corner, give us some teasers, what's happening? I know you're gonna get in trouble from Robin Matlock, (Pat laughing) but come on tell us what's coming at VMworld. >> (laughes) Well you know we have, of course we have a lot of key products, updates and other things that are coming out. I hope to broaden at VMworld this year, the view of the cloud, right? And you say, "Broaden the view of the cloud, what are you talking about Pat?" Well you're gonna have to come to VMware to get the full story, but I do think that we've thought about the hybrid cloud world largely in this idea of public and private in the past, right? But we see that the vision that we're pursuing is one much larger than that where, right, it's public, private, telco, and edge, right? And the confluence of those four worlds, we believe is something that VMware is uniquely positioned to be able to bring right to the marketplace and the implications of that so, I'm quite excited as I broaden our general view >> of the cloud as we come up on VMworld. >> And one of the exciting things it's our ninth year at VMworld, we've been every year one since theCUBE's existed and thank you for your support. >> Ah that's great. >> But I gotta say, one of the things we can do is look at the tape as they say, you said in 2011 or 2012, hybrid cloud and I kind of was like, Pat come on, hybrid cloud. >> Now everybody's talking about it. >> I think that's what it is. >> Yeah. >> But 2012? How many years ago was that? >> I think 2012 I think is when we first started to use that word. >> Yeah you put the stake in the ground, >> again, you saw that as a wave and a lot's been changed and you look back since 2012 you make the right calls, you feel good about where you're at? Things you could do over? What would you do given from a progress standpoint? What's changed radically in your mind? 'Cause we're still talking about private cloud, what, I mean obviously service mesh is around the corner other cool stuff's happening. >> Yeah you know, clearly I think when we think about the STBC, hey we called it right, we're executing better than anybody else. So you can sort of say check, right? Virtual storage, check. We talk about what we've done at NuComputing, transformed their workplace, check. We're unquestionably the industry leader in that area. I think this idea of hybrid cloud it's taken us too hard, too long too hard to realize that the multicloud vision, so that's the one I'd say, okay we haven't delivered as rapidly or as effectively as we needed to, it's now really starting to materialize, but it's taken me a couple, three years longer than it should have to get there and we comment on the vCloud Air and a little bit of the miss that we had there and that delayed our schedule, also some of the Amazon aspects sent us sideways a little bit, but hey I think we're on a very good path now but then to broaden it, to what we're doing in telco, what we're doing in edge, okay this gets to be really really powerful. >> Pat, great for you success. Thanks for coming by theCUBE here at Radio 2018 this is where all the R&D, it's where the ideas are booming I'm John Furrier with Pat Gelsinger, here in San Francisco for Radio 2018, we'll be back with more coverage after this break, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(energetic music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back and we are here live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Oracle's Modern C-EX, Modern Customer Experience Event. Part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, I am John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Adrian Chang, director of customer programs at Oracle Marketing Cloud, also emcee of the Markie and big part of that program. Congratulations on the success of the Markie's awards, which were given out last night. I read your blog post on the site this morning. >> Thank you >> Great to see you again and welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, always great to be here and I love Modern Customer Experience and that marketing is a part of it. >> It's really been a great transformation this year. The simplification of just now narrowing it down to one simple value president, Modern Customer Experience, which encapsulates a lot of stuff. Quickly review what that is and then let's talk about the Markies. >> Absolutely, so I start with the Markies and so we have a history of celebrating excellence in data-driven modern marketing. So, this program has grown tremendously over the past 11 years. When I look at the submissions, they're customers that are focusing on acquisition and loyalty retention. And they read these stories all the time and spend weeks preparing the submissions. So this event is all about how can we share our intent to have our customers have a good experience as part of Oracle and then how can we help them delight their customers in delivering experiences and create value at every touch point. >> One of the thing I really like about the change in the name from Modern Marketing Experience to Modern Customer Experience is you move from the process, the function, to the outcome and the result. So how are the Markies reflecting that this year? >> Absolutely. So if you think about where we started, again it was six categories celebrating excellence in B2B marketing and reaching folks behind a single device, their laptop computer. So cut to 2017, the customers' preferences, their activities are fluid. So great marketing requires you to use a series of channels to reach them everywhere. And so, marketers have to balance brand with action, and then also deliver on intent. So the Markies have had to evolve to think about the habits. So the account-based marketing team of the year was a new award that we gave out that really represented the intent. Are people actually doing this, we have tons of great stories. So we have to balance out a bit of the usage of the product and the technology and embracing the new strategies and what's current within the marketplace. >> So the future of marketing as it goes into data, that's been the theme here. All of our interviews, day one. And certainly the key notes, even Mark was giving a great specific example. Now data is at the heart of it. Adaptive intelligence is the theme. You can see the dots are connecting the convergence of where the Markies are showing traction are some pretty interesting use cases. Any notables you'd like to share that kind of highlight that data piece? >> Absolutely. So our winner for best email campaign was from Jetstar and they're an airline in Austraila. What's great is they have been able to find ways to-- so when you get an email about travel, sometimes you book at one particular point and your preferences and relationship with that airline may change. Your travel destinations may change. So the fact that they can optimize the information at the time of send, sending the weather, curing you to maybe upsell and look at other opportunities to have a pleasant experience, that's amazing. So Laura Ipsen spent some time talking about how we at Oracle are looking to evolve preferences, so going from one to many, to one to one, and the hallmark which is one to you. And I think the Jetstar campaign, they use Oracle responses as a perfect example of that. The first award that we gave out was to Covance for account-based team of the year and by doing, setting up an account-based marketing strategy, putting it in place, getting all the stakeholders in sales in place, getting the discipline on the content. They were able to increase their engagement with key accounts by a significant margin. And they were delighted to be among those that are partners to celebrate that achievement. >> Adrian, I want you to talk about, for the folks that are watching who aren't here, the buzz in the hallways, because the hallways is always a good conversation, certainly the lunch table as well. I'll include that technically at the hallway, but people sitting down. >> Absolutely. >> AI has been front and center, but it's not being painted over, white-washed, "Oh! AI! It's hot so let's jump on the bandwagon." There's some real tech involved. What has been the reaction from customers in used cases that you hear in the hallways? >> Customers are excited about it. I think for a lot of our customers had the opportunity to hear Mark Heard talk about it. Where he embraced and said, "If you think about AI at the core, it's computing done real fast to help people make really rich decisions about what to do next." And so, I think our customers are still grappling with all the technology and how to get value out of their core platforms, how do they deliver on their initial objective and then we have a subset of our most mature, most excited, who are starting to put those data plots together, and start getting more predictive and allow the machine to do the work for you. But in order for you to have, to even think about it, you've got to have great, you've got to fill the cup with great data. And I think people are still getting there so that the machine isn't biased and you don't make the wrong decision about how to treat your customers. >> So just notable trending tweets I wanted to share with you, and again, get your reactions, because this is speaking to the customer in used case. One was from a part from our digitizing panel, Mark wrote "According to digitize, if you're not looking to use chatbots and AI, you're going to be out of business hashtag MME17", a little bit of that, legacy there. And then hashtag Modern CX. And the other one is, "Netflix is a great example of a company creating content combined with powerful AI targeting programs." Little bit of sample of some of the things we're seeing. Chatbots. It's a new interface. It's a new way to use data. Netflix content, which modern marketers need content in this platform. Picking a Netflix approach. So, kind of begs a question. Chatbots? Netflix? Kind of modern. Email? Old? So how do you get a marketer to get you to use the reliability of hardened critical infrastructure, like email, not going away anytime soon but, it's going to be one dimension of Netflix. Content marketing. Binge watching. All this content out there. Netflix and chatbots interface. Your thoughts? >> So my thought is I am, so I was in the room when I watched the chatbot piece and I loved the fact of the, we could live in a world where we could have a fluid customer experience anywhere. You can ask a question. I also support our communities where you ask a question and know you're automatically going to get an answer to the algorithm. So that delivers on that one to you scenario. So I'm super excited about it. When I look at the Netflix example, even to get the information on what the recommendation engine should be, you still need a lot of data. And you still need to know what are the habits of your customers who even land on that decision tree. So I love the fact that folks are thinking Netflix and thinking content, but that chatbot thing, oh my goodness. When people start doing that I can't wait to see those customers that win those Markies. >> Peter: But they have to do it right. >> They have to do it right. >> One of the dangers that marketing always faces is the idea that it's all about collecting information, having the customer give something to me and not giving something valuable in return. >> Adrian: Absolutely >> And the challenge that I see with chatbots is, and I think you agree John, is are chatbots going to be used to further automate information collection at the expense of really presenting value. The new marketing, the Modern Customer Experience, has to be focused on are we delivering value with the customer at every single interaction, not is the customer doing more for us inside of marketing. What do you think about that? >> So I agree. Cause if we do not know that we are creating value and that we're not, that we're adding friction into the problem, you pour that into your algorithm, there's going to bias. And so then, you can't make a decision about how to feed information into the machine and not have the right information that says we don't have the right region, we don't understand the behavior across all products. You can't have bias in the model at all. It has to be complete for you to then look at your customer base holistically. >> Yeah, we don't want to better automate bad marketing practices. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> We want to use these technologies to continuously drive to use a famous person's parlance a more perfect union between this marketer and the buyer. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> John: Well you got a great article up on Martechseries, "This year has gone above and beyond, fully leverage and most innovative marketing technology to create customer centric campaigns that deliver outstanding results that Laurie has spent, Senior Vice President Chairman." Okay that's obviously marketing packaging for the quote, from PR, but what she's getting at is customer centric. Again this is the theme, multitude of technologies now in the platform. Very interesting. Are customers responding well to this platform and are they seeing the need to stand up thing quickly in these campaigns? >> Adrian: Absolutely. They are finding that there's more pressure to get interim value. They are absolutely buying into the platform message and we have quite a few customers who also were recognized for the use of multiple products and multiple partner related applications. And so we're actually seeing a nice trend in both. To do great marketing, part of the messaging, or part of Laura's talk track from today was people are freaked out about the data but if you find a way to harness it, you'll create experiences where you'll stop chasing the customers. They'll start chasing you cause you'll find the right way to have the conversation with them. >> And word of mouth gets around too. I'm going to ask you to pick your favorite child of the awards. Was there one that jumps out, without alienating all the winners. Is there one that you like? >> This is a really, really hard question for me. As you know I read all the submissions, I play a heavy role in writing the speech. So it's really hard. >> John: Here we go, the preamble, not picking one. Here we go! I don't like to pick my favorite child. No parent likes to do that. >> I don't like to pick my favorite child. This is a really, really hard thing. >> Okay, audience favorite? >> How are they different this year from last year? How about that? Or is there something general that shows, that kind of reinforces some of this customer experience or are you seeing a progress in how the Markies are evolving? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm happy to answer that one. And so for the first time since 2012, we brought back the dinner. And so having the Markies and our customer celebration, it shows our intent as Oracle Marketing Cloud, for our customers as well. That we love and want them to have a great week and want to celebrate their accomplishments and get other people to the winning circle. So being at a table and feeling that energy, getting that opportunity to sit with an executive or sit with a member of a team is a really, really great lift to then come to an event with over 4,000 people and feel warm and feel included. So I think that was an important part, that was a huge feel. I mentioned that we added a account-based team of the year award. Again, you couldn't be in B2B marketing and hide from account-based marketing. It's everywhere. We also delivered an overall customer experience award, so we had two customer-related awards and we created one category. I personally the videos, so our best video submission categories won where the viewers got to pick. And I would say the reaction of Juniper taking home two trophies last night, if I had to pick one, because that one had bit of a go to it. >> Peter: Juniper? >> Juniper Networks. >> Really? >> John: Two awards. >> They won two awards last night. I loved their reaction as well as the reaction of our folks from Brazil. You know, really, really great stories from their use of data. We also had Chris Diaz, our leader of the year, who not only led really strong customer experience transformations across marketing, sales, and service. >> This is the CMO of Time Warner? >> Uh no, that's Kristin. >> Kristi? >> Uh yeah, that's Kristin at Time Warner. I'm talking about Chris Diaz who is also driving sustainability efforts in Africa. It's really transformational. Huge, huge advocate of Oracle. As is the team at Kenya Airways. There's some really feel good moments. There are really exciting moments, you can feel it. People were hugging each other. People were laughing. People brought their own noise cannons and sparklers. >> Who doesn't love an awards show? When you're giving out great trophies? >> You know, we always get the comparison to the Oscars, and so this year it felt like the Golden Globes. >> So you handed out the wrong award. >> So you had a couple of times when the winner, when the wrong winner was >> We actually did not have that but we actually did joke about it. We embraced it. So Kayla Sullivan helped us with the awards distribution. And that was fun. The trophy itself is actually made by the same designer who makes the Emmy. And I believe I said that last year. But the feel was more like the Golden Globes. There was refreshments and opportunity to have there. >> John: It was well done. It looked great on photos. Big crowd. You had the jibs and all the cameras. Great camera angles. >> We had a drone do the delivery so we played with some new drone deliveries >> John: That's the next one up on Amazon delivering your packages by drone, you know, dropping in. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So we had one delivered via tweet and then we had one that was delivered via drone and so we covered all their risk management pieces in advance. And I'm just super happy that InVision, who partnered with us in hosting and producing the event, were able to get some of these things cleared. So our intent was let's be futuristic, let's be digital, let's be now. And they managed to incorporate that into the show for us. >> Well, Adrian. Congratulations on all the great work with the Markies and continued success. What's next next year? What do you guys look, I know, processing, you got to have a little fun now. Relax a little bit. But as you look forward to next year's Markies, you're watching, you've got your submission. It's kind of like the college admissions. You want to know who the judge is. Here he is. What are you looking for for next year? Have you though about it, any ideas? Random thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a great question. It takes us about seven months to actually plan. To sit down and actually plan our calendar from submission peer, the content. And so, we tend to create the categories that are aspirational. So we likely will figure out what's the best way to incorporate the trend. Get them out early to drive customers to get really excited about what's next. We're talking about AI now. What will we be talking about in six months? I'm looking forward to to hearing more customers share about the value their getting from Marketing Cloud, the new channels that they're using, how they've overcome barriers within their organizations to do new and great things. And really focus on taking these stories and telling them all year. >> And that's speed and empowerment. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Adrian Chang. Here in theCUBE back with Markies update with great commentary. Great to see you. Looking great, love the outfit. Lookin' good, as always. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> Peter: Took me a while to figure out what that was though The flower. What is that thing? From here it's like >> It's good. Looks good on you. Adrian Chang, here inside theCUBE bringing all the Markie action, all the great coverage. It's theCUBE. We'll have more live coverage after the short break. (energetic music)