>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of PegaWorld iNspire, brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Kerim Akgonul is here. He's the senior vice president of product at Pega, Pegasystems. Kerim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi Dave. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I mean I wish we were face-to-face at your big show, but this is going to have to do. A little different this year doing the virtual event. You're used to a big stage, big audience, lots of clapping and buzz. How's it been for you, this virtual pivot? >> It's been different, it's definitely been different, especially since the last few years we had it in Vegas, so it was a big Vegas show. Now we're in my living room. Not the same vibe, but nevertheless we have a lot of new products and new stories to tell, new experiences to share with the clients, so we're focusing on those aspects. >> Yeah, I'm excited to get into that, but I mean your whole raison d'être is you guys build for change, and obviously we've been thrown this curve ball, more than a curve ball, knuckle ball. Maybe talk about what you're seeing your customers do in terms of being able to rapidly adapt to this new abnormal. >> Yeah, so we've seen, obviously, across the globe, right, not just with Pega, not with just our clients, we've seen a tremendous amount of change. We've seen change in how we work, how we communicate, how we collaborate, how we get into meetings, and a lot of our clients, of course, had to quickly adjust to these recent changes as well in these last couple of months, and in many cases they had to make technology choices, and we're pretty excited that basically Pega technology has been on that top shelf of technologies that our clients chose to leverage in this time of crisis. They chose to use the technology to better engage across their organizational work that they do. They use the Pega technology to actually digitize how a lot of the work that gets done in their organization. They use it as a COVID-19 response. They use it to engage directly with the consumers, so it's been on, as I said, the top shelf of technologies that they had to leverage to adjust and transform, so it's been very busy, Dave. >> Obviously a lot of companies have been hit, and some industries have been very hard hit in the shutdown, but I want to pick a couple of examples. Let's start with healthcare. I mean they've been hit like no other, front lines. Do you have some examples that you can share, or any example in healthcare, how they pivoted? I mean have they been able to even spend time on anything that's not emergency? Maybe you could share some of your experiences there. >> Absolutely. Actually a lot of the healthcare organizations that we're working with, the front line workers, obviously, the way that they engage has changed quite a bit, but also the people that work in the corporate, in the back office, in the technology, they have changed as well as they had to really respond to the changes in the scale of their operations, changes in how they engage with their customers, with the other organizations that they work with, and how they operated their processes. We did have one of the customers that I talk about, HCA, one of the Pega customers, they basically implemented a Pega solution just in a couple of days, and rolled it out into production just a couple of days to keep track of their employees, the volunteers that basically work with them, to keep track of people who are impacted by COVID-19, and they have about 200,000 people that they need to manage the availability in the schedules, and they decided to use Pega technology to be able to manage that across the enterprise, which has been a great experience for us working with them. >> So Kerim, how would that work? So they're an existing Pega customer, they spun up a new module, they sort of developed it themselves. You guys helped them. Describe how that sort of became real. >> Sure, so we actually have a couple of different examples of these types of applications that went live in the last couple of months, from the healthcare organizations, we had it from some organizations in the telecommunications industry, we had state governments and different public sector companies. It works differently for each one of them, but it all starts with really having somebody, having a clear idea on exactly what they want to actually do. What do they want to keep track of? What do they want to operate? What do they want to be able to actually get done? And having somebody to have that vision and being able to articulate that in the Pega construct to automate it to define the process, to define what they're going to keep track of, to define the journeys of those things that they're going to keep track of, and a lot of the clients that have centers of excellence in their organizations with Pega experts, some of our clients work with our great set of partners who have come up with ideas and brought them into these organizations, and we also get pulled into a couple of these implementations, and like you said, Dave, we always talk about being built for change, and this is a time of crisis. This is a time of change, and Pega's technology is perfectly structured to be able to get things quickly done and up and running, but what it really needed at all times is somebody to actually have the vision and the ability to make a decision and go execute on it. And we know that the people are there. We know the technology is there, and that's how a lot of the results got done. >> Yeah, very fast decisions had to get made. Another example is we've been tracking the telecom space, and the whole work-from-home pivot has really put stress on distributed networks, the traditional corporate networks. Now everybody's at home. We've all experienced this, whether video calls, et cetera. The kids are at home, at school, sometimes gaming, so the internet, it didn't blow up, luckily, but still major change in the telco industry. >> Absolutely. How lucky we are to actually have access to all this technology, to all this internet capacity, and yeah, it's been a big change. Obviously the demand on their business has increased quite a bit in the telecommunications industry. One of our clients that basically had contact centers in other countries where the agents actually didn't have an opportunity to go into the contact center, and they couldn't actually enter the building. They weren't even allowed to be on the streets, out on the streets, so what they did, and while this is happening, right, while basically the agents are not able to go to work, at the same time the volumes are increasing through the roof, right? There's a tremendous amount of urgency and higher levels of volumes of requests coming in from the end customers, the end consumers coming in, right? It's basically a perfect storm of things happening, so what our clients have done is a couple of things. One, they created new sets of processes, and they created an army of volunteers from within the business to be able to respond to customer requests from home, and two, they really completely ramped up the pace of taking processes and making them self-service available on the mobile apps, on the website, on the IVR, because customers, consumers have a sense of urgency. They need an answer. They need something to get done quickly, and they want to be able to avoid waiting on line for four hours, right? We saw that, we saw a lot of the websites that says, "Hey, if you call our contact center," some companies put up these messages, "it's going to be so many hours." So our clients were able to take the processes that they have defined for their contact center agents and actually pushed them to self-service channels like the mobile channel, like the web self-service channel, as well as chat and chat bot channels, to be able to get the answers that the consumers need quickly and get their work done, respond to them quickly while in this time of amazing change. >> Yeah, so that enables scaling. Self-service is critical. Yeah, I want to ask you about digital transformation. It's a theme of PegaWorld iNspire. There's been a lot of talk the last three, four years about digital transformation. Frankly, a lot of lip service. I think it was Satya Nadella said we've accelerated. We've pulled two years of digital transformation into two months, but again, you guys are all about digital and digitizing processes, so kind of I want to know if you can talk about that theme of the show, kind of what it means to you and your client. >> I think it's been amazing. I think, like you said, there's been a lot of talk about it in several years, and there have been lots of initiatives, but I think it was missing the urgency that it needed to be able to get moving and get things done. We have had so many discussions. So many people have talked about what do we need to do, do we need to do it now, can we basically wait? Long meetings and long delays on making decisions to actually move forward, and this just basically changed all that, right? There's no more the question of do we need to go through a digital transformation? Everybody knows it's a yes. We had to do it, no question about it. There's no more question of can we do it. Yep, we know we can do it. Do we have the technology, do we have the people? Yep, got it. All that is in place. Now really the thing that we're seeing people succeed in is the ability to make a decision to move forward, to move forward aggressively, and having now proven that the people and the technology is there, and that they can get done, and it really basically requires decisiveness and leadership. >> Yeah, I think the word you use, 'urgency,' because there was a lot of complacency leading up to this, but the good news was there was also a lot of experimentation going on. So COVID obviously accelerated that urgency. Anna Gleiss from Siemens is an example of somebody who spoke during your keynote. Big industrial exposed with a huge supply chain, which for years some of that's been really opaque, and digitize that, now you get greater transparency. What were the key learnings from her discussion? >> Right, so Anna and the team have done a spectacular job, and like I say, they didn't need a worldwide pandemic to get going, and they basically approached theirs systematically with a great plan, and what they basically were able to do is really do that, another thing that people have done a lot of lip service in the past is IT and business collaboration. They actually executed brilliantly from that perspective where the IT organization, technology organization sort of delivered, on top of the Pega platform delivered a platform to be able to manage all the technical aspects of business applications that all the processes that seems needed, and in different departments and different divisions were able to leverage those assets and be able to quickly get applications up and running, and being able to dramatically increase the speed of innovation while at the same time dramatically reducing the cost of getting these things done and running them. So basically they built that environment where IT provided the technical aspects as a service to business applications so that they can quickly get things done, automate their processes, and deliver tremendous amount of operational efficiency into the organization. >> Now Kerim, of course, is the head of products. I want to get into some of the product discussion, some of the hard news that you have at PegaWorld. This notion of the Pega Process Fabric, I mean the metaphor is very strong. You think about digital, you think about a fabric. But what do we need to know about the Pega Process Fabric? >> Dave, it's a great solution that I believe corporations, especially enterprises, need to be able to make their staff more effective, streamline their work, getting them to a world where they don't have to personally navigate through dozens of different applications just to achieve an outcome, because whenever you basically have a situation where an employee of an enterprise has to jump through six, 10, 12 different applications just to be able to get something done for the customer, there's a tremendous amount of efficiency that's lost, there's a tremendous amount of training that's required to be able to actually get people to be able to manage all these, working across all these applications, and of course it's very easy to make mistakes. And whenever you have an environment that's built out like that, it inevitably gets exposed to the customers, and they basically, their experiences realize that there's a lot of jumping around. The Process Fabric is around bringing an experience to the users that is basically a single experience, even though work is coming from many different applications in the organization, right? You talk to any enterprise in anywhere in the world, and you basically name any enterprise software company, and they'll tell you, "Yeah, we got that." They have it. >> Yeah. >> They have Microsoft, they have Salesforce, they have ServiceNow, they have Pega, they have it, and users, employees have to juggle through all of these systems to be able to actually get their work done. The job of Process Fabric is to actually bring all these tasks, bring all this work that the workers, and then on behalf of the customers, have to get done, and weave them together into a single experience so that they don't have to jump around. There's much more efficiency. Get work done fast, and the organization then also has control around how the work is prioritized across different systems. How the work is managed through how it gets assigned, how to handle key customers and be able to see all the work that we're doing on behalf of them across all the different systems, and be able to actually bring a home all of these efforts and provide that experience to the user. >> So Kerim, what's the secret sauce there? Is it a combination of using APIs to those applications, and machine intelligence, and machine learning? >> There's a little bit of many things. The key is, one, we basically come with standard connectivity to standard enterprise solutions. We come prepackaged with connectivity to Pega environments within the organizations, as we have many customers that have deployed dozens of different Pega applications. We come with a standard open API approach to be able to provide connectivity, and then we use our decisioning capabilities and process capabilities to manage the prioritization, to be able to manage the routing and the experience for the end users. >> Okay, and the prioritization is something that's determined by business rules, is that correct? Or how does that all work? >> Absolutely. Absolutely, so the idea is to be able to leverage the business rules capabilities of the Pega platform to be able to handle the prioritization and the routing and sort of collating things together that are associated with the same work streams and for the same customers. >> When Alan Trefler started Pega it was right around the time I started in the industry and AI was the hot buzzword, and it took a while to get here, but it feels pretty real right now. How do you look at machine intelligence and the role that it plays? You've used the term real realtime AI. >> Right. >> What do you mean by that, and what's so special about your AI? >> Well, our realtime AI is real, so that's one of the main specialties, but look, there's a lot basically technology out there. There's a lot of great technology out there with great use cases that can look at historical sets of data and be able to actually generate predictive models from them, and those are great. Those are very, very valuable. But we believe that especially when we're directly engaging with customers, that is not enough. That you need actually realtime, real realtime AI. Let me give you an example. If you are basically running some predictive models against a set of customer data, say basically in January and February and using them in March, you will not get the right results that are basically for each individual customer, because things have changed dramatically between February and March. You couldn't make decisions about a customer based on what happened in their activity in January based on what's today. One of our telecom... One of our, I'm sorry, banking clients, for example, used their customer data in the UK, NatWest, used their customer data and identified people that work for the National Health Services and provided realtime programs that are specifically tailored for them, right, so that's basically being able to actually leverage the power of AI and be able to change how you engage with customers. They looked at customer data who might be at financial risk due to the crisis and actually changed programs and payment programs for them, because things have changed dramatically in the timeframe. Our AI leverages predictive models based on historical data, which is great, but actually also adds on top of it the ability to evaluate realtime data based on the real context of the end customer at this point in time, at this point on their experience on the website, on the IVR, on the mobile app, and be able to determine the best way to engage with that customer at that moment in time, and be able to deliver that one-to-one personalized experience. And this has been basically one of the major capabilities of Pega technology. That's how we differentiate in the marketplace in our ability to actually drive the AI capabilities in realtime interactions. >> Wonder if I could ask you about one of the trends in the marketplace, and you're seeing it in the equity markets, these private equity robotic process automation. People, I think, sometimes misunderstand you, and I've said, I've reported a number of times that RPA's just a small part of what you guys do, but at the same time you're seeing a lot of energy in the marketplace, money, billions of dollars, billions, yeah, have poured in. How do you look at RPA? Where does it fit in the Pega platform? >> Yeah, so RPA's absolutely a part of the overall journey. We look at things from an end-to-end automation perspective, essentially we need to do something for a customer, on behalf of a customer, to get an outcome delivered to a customer, and there's a process associated with it. And this process is frequently going to touch through a bunch of different systems. And some of these systems it's going to touch are old. They've been around for a very, very long time. They're a pain point for a lot of organizations. What RPA does really well is it basically lets you put a robotic process, essentially, a process that runs on the desktop and to be able to sort of execute that process inside that old system automatically. And that saves time and saves money, and there's basically a clear ROI associated with it, but it doesn't eliminate that old technology. It just puts, essentially, a veneer in front of it so that the end user doesn't have to key into some old application. It just does it on their behalf. We think that's a part of an end-to-end process automation, and as you go through different steps you might have to execute these robotic process automations, but it's not digital transformation. You're not really transforming it, right? You are basically eliminating that pain point for time being, and it will become a problem maybe for the next person that has to deal with it. We believe that robotic process automation is a great way to automate stuff, but each one of those elements need to go through that transformation as a part of the modernization, digital transformation journey. >> So it's that systems view that you would stress, and obviously you've always taken a systems view. You've got a platform that is an end-to-end platform. That's really what you mean by the end-to-end is that systems view, correct? >> Well, what we mean, really, by end-to-end is a customer comes in and they have a need, and we basically get them what they come in here for, and whatever is in between, whatever processes, and systems, and integrations, and technologies that sit in between, that's sort of the second part of the story. The main important part is work that needs to get done, we get the work done. And we will do anything in between. We'll do integrations, we'll do routing, we will do automation, we'll do business rules, we'll do AI, we'll do robotic process automation, anything that is necessary to basically drive that outcome, drive efficiency, faster response times, and better customer experience. >> Okay, so those are the key metrics. You just answered that other question. Last question, then, is we've got uncertain times. We've talked the gamut of digital transformation, but what advice would you give to customers given this uncertainty? How should they be best prepared? >> I think it's most important, really, to pay attention to the end consumers, and look at it from a perspective of empathy. What is the end consumer worried about right now? What is difficult for them? What is it that they need from your organization given their current circumstances, and make sure the experience that your corporation provides to them is the right experience. This is, I think, a time for a lot of corporations to build some incredible loyalty with their end customers, with the consumers. This is an amazing opportunity to basically have great engagement and to be able to have people realize that yeah, they were there for me. It was a good experience, it was an easy experience, it was a seamless experience, and I would mostly emphasize on that empathy factor. Make sure that we understand what's going through, what's happening in their lives, what they need, and when they engage with the corporation make sure that we provide a seamless experience to them. >> I think that's a great point. We're not going back to the customer experiences of the 2010s. We're entering a new decade, and Kerim, thanks so much for your insights and coming on theCUBE to share them. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Be right back right after this short break. (smooth music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld Inspire brought to you by Pegasystems. Everybody welcome back to PegaWorld Inspired 2020 this is theCUBE and I'm Dave Vellante, we're here with Adam Field who is the head of innovation and experience at Pegasystems. Adam thanks for coming on, how are you doing man? >> It's my pleasure Dave, I'm doing well how are you? >> Good thank you, I'm excited we're talking innovation, we're talking to innovation hub but to start with your role I love the title, what do you do? Give us the background story. >> Yeah I get that question quite a bit so, I've been with Pega a little over 15 years now and I've held many roles, but currently as head of innovation and experience we have a team I like to call them Creative Misfits, if you will, we sort of bridge that gap between technology and creative, we do research on emerging tech and try to understand how our clients might use it, how it's going to change the future of work, that's the innovation side, on the experience side, we do things like for these PegaWorld events, we match we where art meets tech and we build these experiential things that people come and see at our events, we build all the demos and all the production that you see on the main stage, so we kind of touch a lot of different things around the future of where technology is going. >> Well, I can see, obviously you're innovative, you've got the awesome set up there, the great mic and sound, (laughing) fantastic you look good So and now you've been involved in previous PegaWorld both from behind the scenes and out front speaking obviously this is completely different, how did you prep differently for PegaWorld 2020 virtual versus what you normally do? >> Yeah right so this will be my well 16th I guess PegaWorld and obviously this one stands out as the most different normally we'd be in Boston today, we would have been, you know, working on our stage production and on a floor that's 170,000 square feet big with dozens of booths and hundreds of demos, and obviously this was completely different, but as far as prep goes, I remember the day we learned that early March, this was going virtual and after a few moments of sadness, the team really came together, and I remember the first thing we talked about is we're not going to take a three day event and try to put it all online. Let's--we know people's time is valuable, let's figure out how to take just what's important and get it out to people so that they're inspired to move forward and engage with Pega, so I think that's really been the biggest change in how we've prepped. >> Well, I think that's a great point because obviously theCUBE has been very much involved in these virtual events and. >> Right. >> People send out the note, hey we've made the tough decision to go virtual that's easy decision you really had no choice. >> That's right. >> The tough decision is what do you want to preserve from the physical and understanding that you can't just pop physical into virtual and you got to create a whole new content program, I think Robert Scoble wrote a post on, if you saw it he talks about, hey you better go out and hire Beyonce, oh you can't afford to be for Beyonce? well you better make your content interesting. So to me Adam, that's the tough part, help us understand how you thought that through and what the outcome actually is. >> Yeah, that's right. We didn't have Beyonce, but we did have the Dropkick Murphys, so that was pretty cool and they did a concert for us, so that's been great. But again a lot of people talk about all this free time that they have and I know I have two young kids who are schooling at home now, a job that's busier than it's ever been. I've tried to join a lot of these virtual events and frankly I have gotten overwhelmed, so we took two days and we boiled it down in a two and a half hours, and what we decided to do is we looked at all the areas which we go to market and how people design and deliver their apps, and some of the tech like Pega cloud that they use. And we went to our, I went to my extended team and I said, normally you have 75 booths, we're going to boil that down to 25, let's work together to figure that out. Normally your demos might be 20 minutes when someone walks up, we want to make them seven. But I think the biggest thing that we did, we said what we don't want to lose is that interactivity, and so we had online dozens of Pega experts we could ask questions live, Alan was online doing answering questions live. We made sure that we included live components, our host, Don Sherman was live from his house. We didn't just pre-record everything because then, why would anyone come join when they could just go watch it, 30 minutes later on your YouTube channel? >> See that's innovation to me is having that combination of live. Obviously, you've got to do some stuff a prerecorded, but having a live component adds a dimension, it's challenging, but that's pushing the envelope and I love it. The other thing is, Adam is roles. The roles are different in a virtual event, are they? You're not doing site inspections Like you said, you're not dealing with 170,000 square feet. How did you guys rethink the roles for virtual? >> Yeah so, there were some teams whose world was completely upended. You know, when this all went virtual, the people that do exactly what you were just talking about, dealing with hotels and vendors and things like that, and I got to tell you, one of the most events called PegaWorld Inspire and not to sound too cheesy about it, but one of the things that was really inspiring was to see how everyone stepped up and said, truly, how can I help? And what was really neat about it is we saw different skill sets come out of people that, maybe they hadn't had the opportunity to flex before where they might've worked on one thing that was no longer needed because of the change in the format, and they jumped into become copywriters or liaisons between cause now we have new vendors in this tech world that we didn't have that we turned around in just a matter of weeks. We had people like on my team who normally last year, build this massive physical exhibit containing mirrors and lights, that became video producers, to produce some of these live videos that we did. And one of the things was really impressive, you asked earlier about how did we prep differently and what changed? We looked in the marketplace for different tech and how to bring our CEO and our host and our head of product and everyone together live in split screen, and when you're a big studio you know, and you have that equipment ready to go, that's easy, but when you're just getting average people in their homes and you want to put all that together, we're finding some of the tech in the marketplace just wasn't there. My team built some new video chat technologies that they actually use to produce this in real time, so that was really impressive to me how we turn that around and really innovated not only the things that everyone sees, but all the stuff behind the scenes to. >> See again I think this is what's amazing to me is as I learned more and more about Pega interview Alan earlier. >> Sure. >> Pega is all about being able to adapt to these changes. So a lot of the processes we are using in virtual events, they're unknown. In normally software right through the history of software is okay, here's how the software works. Figure out how to fit your process into it, very rigid. >> That's right. >> Today you know, the last three months with this lockdown in this coronavirus have been completely unknown, and so that's sort of one of the hallmarks of your company, isn't it? >> That's right and we've had the tagline Build For Change for really long time, and I will tell you, I remember in that first meeting again, when we learned this was going virtual and someone stood up and they said, guys we're about to live our tagline. And people really do believe in that, 'cause we go to our clients every single day and say, change is what's going to make you special changes is what's going to make you different, now's your opportunity, seize that change and run with it. And so we said, look, we can't change the world right now, we know we got to go virtual, all we can do is change the type of event that we do, we're not going to do the standard event that we think every one else is going to do, let's do it differently and today was a pretty good example, I think we achieved that. >> I think a couple of things from a challenge standpoint, you mentioned the chat, how do you get people to engage? You had to sort of invent something. >> Yeah. >> And then really think it through for virtual. And I think the other is tech people come to these events, they want to touch the tech. And so you've got you know the innovation hub, it's where people get to play with the technology. You got to take us through how you thought through that and. >> Right. >> What the outcome is. >> Yeah, so that is the toughest part, and I got to tell you, you know all of this being said, I'm looking forward to someday being able to get back and meeting my clients in person, and I'm the type, when I see you on the floor of the innovation hub, I run by a booth and high five you for all the great weeks of hard work, you know? And I love to see people's faces, they see the demos and that's tough not being able to see them smile and get that moment of wow. But what was interesting was it really helped us hone our messages. I think we really realized when I went to everybody and said you don't have 20 minutes, you have seven minutes, here's a template, to follow, to be able to tell your story better, and people started thinking in that mode of storytelling, and what was interesting was lot of people came back to me and said, actually you know what? I can tell that story in a much more crisp way and really show people what they need to see in a in a much faster timeframe. And what it really allowed us to do was find those bits that we thought were most important, find those demos that we think are most important and just, you know bubble those up. One of the things we also did too, we took the opportunity to say you know what, we're going to be online, I watch my kids. My kids are avid gamers whether I like it or not, and they. >> Yeah. >> Watch these Twitch streams, and we thought well, we should be able to do that with even corporate software. So we had these live build sessions where we took some of our developers and I said you're going to be put on the hot seat for 15 minutes on script and we're going to let people just guide and direct you. And they were a little nervous at first, but they went off great, and it was a new format we had never tried before. So if we keep doing these types of different things and we just embrace the moment that we're in I think people will really really come to it and get some value out of it. >> I mean that's awesome, you've got to keep your audience engaged, and so you do lose, you don't have a captive audience, so you lose some time in terms of how much you can you know? how much Kool-Aid injection you can give him. I mean take 20 minutes down to seven minutes. But so you do lose some of that, but what do you gain with virtual? >> Well, I think one of the things that you obviously gain is you can be more widespread, so yeah, you know this event reached tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries. I did an event first week of April, so you can imagine you know, we had two weeks to turn on and I was supposed to be in London and Amsterdam presenting in soccer stadiums. And instead we made that a one hour virtual event and we thought, well, we're just going to get people from the London market and from the Netherlands market, and it turned out, we got people from all over the world to join. So one of the benefits to this is the reach, so we're able to reach a lot more people. I'd say one of the other just things that we realized after tours we're creating a lot of content, we filmed all of this as we were rehearsing, and we're going to put it up online later, so now we have all this great content that anyone can use and go view later, so that was sort of you know, unexpected outcome as well. >> Right yeah, you lose the airline miles, but you gain. (laughing) as I want to going to say you gian the post. >> I don't mind not traveling as well. >> Yeah I here you but, but you do gain that post and I think with physical events, people always at the end of it, it's like, I've never given birth, but I've witnessed that many times. but people feel like, okay, I got to just chill out now for a couple of weeks, and then when they come back, now they're swamped, they've got to catch up. And I think people are realizing, wow, there's a real opportunity maximize the post event here, post nurturing peep streaming out content and continue that engagement, that is a plus of these virtual event. >> Oh, for sure, and you know we started early on deciding how are we going to do, what are we going to do is follow ups you know? That European event that I talked about once again instead of taking all these different markets and trying to replicate it, we did one one hour event. But then because we were in the early days of COVID and some of our clients weren't able to get recorded and speak, we did subsequent webinars in the weeks following them, and the attendance was fantastic. So it allowed us to plan ahead and you know, have a lot of followup activities that we're starting to launch right now as soon as the event ended. >> How do you feel about the outcome for Pega? Do you think it was better, worse, the same or just different? >> I'm going to go with different you know, like I said I get energy I love being up on stage in front of 5,000 people, I love meeting my clients in person, I love the energy of being with my colleagues, but you know it is what it is, We had to do it, and I think what we really embraced it, so I'll say it's just a different way of doing things, but you know I do look forward to the day that I'm able to go meet my clients again and get back on stage and produce some really great things and once again being able to physically see our attendees go oh, when they actually see the software in person, that's the most rewarding thing for me. >> It's going to be interesting as we come out of this I mean, very clearly things are going to be different probably going to have hybrid for some time. Maybe even indefinitely but I'm interested in some of the learnings, some of the things that you think will be permanent, some of the advice. And one of the things I always say to people is don't start with what software are we going to use in there? Your software platform, think about the experience that you want to work backwards from there but what are other advice would you give for given your experiences? >> Right. >> You're so right about that point, I remember interviewing a lot of vendors that we were going to use to bring this online and we were telling them what we wanted to do, and some of them said no one's ever asked about that before we can't do that, so you're a hundred percent right about that. The advice I will say, and the thing I do worry about a little bit is, at first people were a little bit more accepting if maybe the video quality wasn't as good, or you know the content was like any old webinar. As months ago on expectations are going to be higher, people are going to have attended a lot of these things so you're going to have to keep upping the game. And I think the advice I would give is try to take what's great about an in person event and put it online but don't try to replicate the event and put it online. And some of the best things about in person events are just the live nature of it, take the risks, do some live stuff. People will really appreciate that, you'll get a lot of credit for that. The interactivity is what's important about a live event, so as best you can, figure out how to make sure there's some interactivity. Now in the early days I think it's going to be some live Q and A as we move on, it'll be real private rooms with experts that you're able to have one-on-one chats and go through and bounce around and be able to talk to people you know, just like you would accept, between two cameras instead of in person. So I think everyone is months go on. they just going to have to up their game. I think that's great advice, you're absolutely right up your game, up your brand, get a good camera, get good sound, and it's going to just, help your personal brand and your company's brand. Adam. >> We learned what it was like to try to ship microphone and camera equipment around the world (laughing) overnight so we're experts at that, if you you've got any questions. >> Well, I mean what a difference it made, so Adam, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your experiences. You guys, have one of the best that we've seen at the Virtual Event Platform so congratulations on that and really appreciate your contribution (mumbles). >> Thanks it's my pleasure, great to talk to you today (mumbles). All right, keep it right there buddy, this is theCUBES coverage of PegaWorld Inspire 2020 the virtual event, will be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Producer: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld Inspire. Brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hello, everybody. This is Dave Volante. Welcome back to our coverage of PegaWorld Inspire 2020. This is the preview show, and you're watching the CUBE. Stephanie lewis is here. She's the Senior Director of Community and developer relations or a programs actually at at Pega. Stephanie, good to see you. >> Thank you so much for having me Dave. I'm very happy to be here today. >> Yeah, so you know, let's get into it. I infer from your role that obviously all about community, which is critical developers are all about community, but talk a little bit more about kind of how you spend your time. >> Sure. So I am really excited about my role. I've been here for a year and a half, and I transitioned from the product world. So I really understand what developers need and how they use the product, and if we had just but developers don't know how to use them that it's kind of pointless. So I am truly passionate about ensuring that every individual understands how to use the product, and feels inspired to use the product and then also gives back to the community and builds a better ecosystem helping everyone around them to build better software. >> So product knowledge obviously crucial in this role. But developers they want access to the tools that they want to be productive. So tell us more about what you're finding that developers need. >> Let's say just in time, type of situation. So I'm going to plug my own agenda here as well, in addition to PegaWorld, but we're launching a brand new >> Great. >> Pega menu, which is where our developers get enabled and we are supporting them just in time. So we have the curated learning paths because picking your journey and your career path is critical, like where do you want to go? What credentials do you want to have? What job do you want to have? That's absolutely important. But when you're on the job, and you have a question, how do I do this? Or when do I use this? That's absolutely just as important, and I want to ensure that everybody can easily do that when they need it. >> So PegaWorld big show we had Alan on recently, we're talking about I mean, I just thought I said to him, you're going to miss that during your keynote, because he's such a great speaker, but you're also involved in the keynote. You're going to be interviewing Kerim, who's the head of products, and you guys going to be digging into that, obviously with your product background, but set that up for us, what should we expect? >> Sure. So there's a couple of different sessions that I want to highlight. One is Kerim is one of the biggest highlights in addition to Alan with the keynotes at the in person PegaWorld and we're going to continue that in the virtual aspect. So he's going to have his own standalone keynote, highlighting the product capabilities that people need to be aware of as they're enhancing their own digital transformation, and right now we're in a disrupted world. So he's going to talk about how our three key things of our products can really help companies not only adjust to the current environment if future proof. So he'll talk about those themes. He'll bring a customer on stage to talk about how they have used those, and then I'll also give a demo of the latest capabilities. That's just the beginning, and then at the end, I will be able to come on and put him on the hot seat. So ask him about the product roadmaps. I'm going to take questions from the community to be like, hey, Kerim, the community's asking about this, what do you think? And then we'll take questions live, that he'll have to answer at live during that session as well. >> And of course, you know, the thing about PegaWorld is it's got a lot of customer content in there. So I assume you're going to have some customers, some clients interacting as well. >> That's true. Yeah. So not only in the keynotes, when we bring customers on to talk about their stories and put the, you know, theoretical products capabilities to life with how they've used those. But then we also have, we've taken the tech pavilion, which is kind of where you go around and you see the different product capabilities. So we will have customers that are part of that as well as part of what are the breakouts where they will be telling their story, and talk about taking digital transformation and turn their business around. >> Love it. Product talk, architecture, roadmap, you know, showing off a little bit of the future. That's fantastic. So talk to me, like I'm a developer. Why should I go to this event? What's in it for me? >> So I think it's always important to understand the trends, right? As a developer, if you just take what someone tells you is a requirement, and you just go code that, then you're not a true engineer, or an innovator, right? It's not, it's in the problems that you're solving. So I think that is something to take to heart and that is something that you'll truly receive by coming to PegaWorld and hearing the end to end story. In addition to that, this tech pavilion that we've turned into the Innovation Hub is more than just looking at recorded demos, you'll be able to participate with product experts live coding and ask them questions. So you'll see them build an application, or build a chat bot or utilize a feature and ask them questions. To witch style, you are asked to participate, and then take that back to your job the next day, and utilize those new capabilities and the innovation that we're able to show you with this new virtual event. >> So Stephen, I got to ask you, you mentioned requirements, Docs, and a lot has changed there, right? I mean, it used to be, you'd have these big tomes and you'd hand down, you know, the edict from the business, talk about how that whole dynamic has changed. >> It has changed quite a bit with the Pega platform and the technology that we have across our products, because it's not just a like you said, it's the edict that you hand down and the developers just implement don't ask the why, and then don't get the opportunity to think about how to better that. So all of this is done now within the technology itself. So nothing is lost, and as you start to iterate on, why are you doing this? How is this good for the customer? What performance improvements? Or what are you trying to automate? And better all those questions are answered and then can be put right in there and allows developers to put their own innovation into the why, and the how, and the what, which I feel like will end up as a better result for the end customer and their end to end experience. >> So maybe this is a sign of progress, would be something to be optimistic about. Because six weeks ago, we did we started with COVID. That's all we talked about. Now we're going to end with COVID. I wanted to ask you about the whole work from home and remote workers. You know, developers are collaborative. They do a lot of whiteboarding. So how have you seen developers sort of responding to this pandemic and what kind of things are they doing to actually maintain that productivity and that collaborative spirit? >> So I've seen a couple of things there. One is utilizing some of the frameworks that we've put out for like the starter of some of the COVID tracking apps, we've put some of those out on our marketplace. So businesses, we've had several businesses use those and go live really quickly to just help respond to the pandemic, and operate and track the safety of their employees, and developers then have taken that in addition to what they need to do to progress their career. So they've used that then they've used our academy to continue their enablement as well as the collaboration. So we've got a great forum, a very active forum, where people are able to post questions and answer them and stay connected in this virtual environment. We've increased webinars, we just launched a virtual hackathon that's focused around doing good. So it's not just about hackathon to prove your skills and win the prizes, but we remind all the folks on how in the world respond to the situation. So we're trying to intertwine all of it because I think I truly believe that every person not only wants to progress their own career, but also give back and do good, and if you combine those two together, that's how you achieve the optimal results. >> Stephanie how about new developers coming into the Pega? you community platform? What's that experience like? Can you update us on that? >> Yeah, I'm glad you asked. Because we just launched some very new like I'm new to Pega, what do I need to do? So we've got the curated courses, which we're going to call missions around those, but we also have a trial. So if you just want to figure out and get your feet where you're not quite sure what this Pega thing is, sign up for the trial, and then we have guided tours. So it shows you what the different capabilities are and really guide you through that experience, and then if you are experienced, you can skip those tours and like, No, I know and I don't. I just want to dive in. But for those new people, we have those curated tours. So you're able to orient yourself and be more comfortable before you start to play around. >> But how functional is that? I mean, is it a lot of the trials are neutered, or you know, can I get the full picture? How does that work? >> Absolutely. I think that's a really good point is that we don't handicap anyone. Like there's no limited functionality. If you want the trial, you want to figure out app studio and have that guided experience, you can do that. If you want to unlock all of it, just go wild and play with all of it. You can do it as limited 30 days. You want to renew it, go ahead. But we don't restrict any of that because we want you to get access to the capability so that you can do your job better and that you learn the true power of the technology. >> Well, we're excited for PegaWorld 2020 it's on June 2 starts at 9 am East Coast time. So just google it and go sign up. This automation economy, it's going to kick in, in a big way already has actually but it's going to accelerate in this post COVID era. Stephanie thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and give us a preview of PegaWorld Inspire 2020. >> Thank you, and I hope to see you there. >> All right, you will, and thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you at PegaWorld Inspire 2020. This is Dave Volante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (smooth music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome. As you know, I've been interviewing a number of CEOs throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm really excited to have Alan Trefler here. He's the founder and CEO of Pegasystems. Alan, thanks for being part of the program. >> Oh, thanks for having me, Dave. >> So let's get into it. I mean when you were 27 years old, 37 years ago, 1983, you started Pega. Now you've seen a lot of cycles. Never seen anything like this, I know, but certainly there was the '87 crash. You saw, you know, the banking crisis in the late '80s, early '90s, the dotcom bubble, 2008, 2009, and now this. I want to ask you sort of how have you responded to crises in the past? I mean the hallmark of your company, the book you wrote is being able to manage through change. How did you manage through this one? What was your first move? >> Well, you know, what I'll tell you is from the inception we've always been a scrappy company. You know, we never took any venture capital. We bootstrapped this firm. I went public in the late '90s, and you know, we've now got a firm that will do over a billion in revenue this year and has 5,400 staff. So we've built, I think, a cohesive team around a set of principles that really have matched the way the software and technology have evolved, but has still taken a pretty radically different approach to how it should be used by businesses and business users. >> Well, so talk about some of the big waves that you've been riding over the years. I mean you set out to help business people really communicate better with IT. You laid out in your book some of the challenges there, and as you've pointed out many, many times, it gets more complex, people try to understand the customer better with terminology like customer relationship management. People don't necessarily want a relationship, right? Talk about some of the observations that you've made around customer behavior and channels, and how you've approached things a little bit differently as an entrepreneur. >> So I think organizations, when they think about how they want to engage with their customers, typically make a couple of serious mistakes. One is they say they want to do a good job for their clients, but especially if they're a big company they then devolve into actually doing the work in their channel. I mean they have a mobile group that builds the mobile app, which is different than the group that handles the call center, which is different than the group that handles the website, and all this business logic, it's baked into that. And that just destroys their ability to implement change rapidly, which particularly in this COVID era is so important for the organizations that are going to be successful. Now on the other side sometimes they get overly focused on their backend system. They're worrying about how they're going to put in the perfect ERP system or accounting system, that that will somehow support customer engagement better, but frankly it never does. We think you need to think about your business from the center out. How do I apply AI to what I want to do for and with my client? And then how do I apply workflow and work management capability to ensure that those decisions are done optimally and effectively? That's what Pega worked on from our inception, and now as we've gone into our fifth complete generation of software I think we've really crossed some boundaries that are pretty remarkable. >> So I mean, well what you've built is actually quite amazing. Since you've written your book the stock's exploded. I don't know if that's cause and effect, but nonetheless some of the things that you talk about again in the book, you talk about, you know, people looking at data the wrong way. What's impressed me is you've always taken a systems view. You're not trying to optimize, to your point, on one little either technology or maybe optimizing on cost. If you look at the whole system and think about outcomes, that is going to, you know, yield ultimately better businesses. And so I want to ask you-- >> Well, thinking about an end to end way of understanding how the technology should be applied is exactly what we've always believed, but the key is to be able to do this incrementally, iteratively, not monolithically, because no businesses can afford to rip out things. So you need to be able to do this what we call, say, "One microjourney at a time." One set of things that are good for a customer. In today's era it might send, as we do with many of our clients now under stress, we help them help their customers around things like loan forbearing. How do you give people a payment plan because they just don't have the money to pay their loan today. >> Right. >> And how do you do that while you keep them as customers, as opposed to, well, situations that could be far worse. >> Let's talk a little bit about machine intelligence. When you started Pega it was the same year I started in the industry at IDC, and AI was all the rage, and then, you know, it just never happened. You had the very long AI winter, but now it's, you know, starting to come back. You're seeing, you know, obviously there are certain technical capabilities, the amount of data, the processing power, et cetera, and the cost are much more aligned. You're seeing trends like AI. You're seeing things like RPA, you know, which you've brought in to your platform. Talk a little bit about that sort of incremental change that you're adding in to your platform and how you go about doing that. And I want to ask you about some of your thoughts on those trends. >> Certainly. Well, AI has been, from our point of view, a really big thing for the last decade. There was a set of false starts, and we actually saw that they were false starts, so we didn't get sucked into it, but come around 2010 we made an enormous push to bring machine learning and decisioning into our work management platform, and it's in there beautifully and it's doing amazing things. You know, I just saw one of our customers, Commonwealth Bank in Australia, their CEO in his quarterly earnings announcement led by talking about what the Pegasystem, what our system, which they call a customer engagement engine, is doing for them. During the fires that earlier this year were ravaging Australia, they used that to send personalized, not just messages, but also relief to people whose homes were burned out, so they weren't going to be able to pay their credit card bill. They didn't have to call the contact center. We reached out through the brilliant work that they did using our technology, reached out to preemptively make those customers feel great, and now with the COVID epidemic that organization is doing the same types of things, which really both endears them with their customers but also gets tied into that efficiency layer because you stop doing needless work because you're being smart as a result of using AI to figure out what to do, and to learn from the outcomes that come from that. >> So we've seen, you know, the playbook of you see, you know, startups, they get out, they're well-funded, and they point to the large established companies and they say, "Oh, that's an old stack." They can't respond, innovator's dilemma, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things about Pega is you've been able to transform yourselves over the years. You know, build for change, I guess. An example, for instance, going from perpetual to an ARR type of model, which you very successfully have done, and now, you know, as I said, bringing in RPA, but I want to ask you about RPA. A lot of competitors out there, big valuations kind of pointing at you guys as the incumbent. You have RPA, but what do you see within that space specifically? >> I see a lot of delusional behavior. The ability to put robots in to do little pieces of task work can make sense in some situations, particularly if you don't have a good API, a good application programming interface, to get data in and out. A robot in that sort of situation can be a very, very helpful stopgap, but you really need an engine driven by AI and driven by process, process automation, that has to be at the heart. That's the dog to the robotic process automation tail, and a lot of these RPA vendors are running around saying, "You know, all you need's the tail." I'll tell you that in the last week two of the "biggest leaders" have both had massive layoffs. A little google work you can find out exactly who they are, and it's because their stuff isn't working well. >> I want to ask you about entrepreneurship during and coming out of a pandemic. Is it a good time to do a startup? Not that you're thinking about doing a startup, but you know, advice to entrepreneurs. >> Well, I think it's a terrific time to have a startup mentality. You know, part of why I think we've been able to reinvent our technology literally five times over our years is that we're always prepared to look from a new angle and apply that sort of entrepreneurial thinking and scrappiness. However, in terms of starting something right now, it's a very uncertain time. It's uncertain as to when customers will be back in the market. It's uncertain as to exactly how hard certain industry segments would be hit. And so whereas I think that even during recessions it can be a fine time to launch a startup, and in fact that's when I launched Pega was during a time when the economy was not doing that great, I would wait a little bit right now to see exactly when things are going to stabilize. I think that it's just a little too uncertain, but that time will emerge again. >> So I want to ask you, so again, in your book you talked about big data, big problems. I always joke to my friends who have little kids, little kids, little problems, (chuckling) and so little companies, little problems. You're now a billion dollar company, and you're bringing in new talent. You've set your sights on becoming a multibillion dollar company. You've got a great track record. I want you to talk about sort of how you see the future and what your aspirations are. You don't have to give specific numbers, but just frame that for us. >> Well, first of all, just to be clear the numbers in terms of a billion, that's an actual revenue number, as opposed to some of these valuations which we've seen with companies like WeWork might be a little bit tentative. What we see as being central to our growth and value prop are a couple of things. First, we've made our software tremendously easier to use, particularly our last release, which came out about six months ago, really, really straightforward for business people even to take ownership of their projects and work really collaboratively with IT. So that's one aspect of how we grow and want to accelerate the growth. The second aspect is Pega Cloud. Last year Pega Cloud grew enormously. It's now more than half our business, and for people to come on Pega Cloud where we do all of the database work, we do all the heavy lifting for them from a technology point of view, also provides a route to growth, though we also support what we call client cloud, which is where one of our customers wants to run it on their own cloud. And I think the third thing that we're doing that we're hoping is going to allow us to accelerate our growth is to broaden our go-to-market function, make our go-to-market function just larger by continuing to hire, and by the way, this is a great time for a company with a half a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be out looking to hire talent. Looking to hire and broaden and deepen our go-to-market and how we work, especially with those awesome customers, some of whom are suffering but are going to come back, and they're going to increasingly need to change their digital infrastructure. Their digital transformation, we think, is going to benefit from platforms like ours in unique ways. >> Well, Alan, I love the story. As you just pointed out, you just tapped the credit market. You've got a fantastic balance sheet. You've got a lot of tailwinds, you know, despite this pandemic, and as we often say, you've got a founder as the CEO and we've seen how that really culturally makes huge differences at companies. Alan, thanks so much for coming on our CEO series. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. It's been a real pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (smooth music)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hobb universe and welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Studios here in Palo Alto California another great conversation today we're here with leon truffula senior vice president of global customer success at one of my favorite technology companies over the years pega systems leon welcome to the cube glad to be here Peter thank you very much for having me now leon pegas had a great track record over a number of years of helping customers build relatively complex applications and domains like crm etc but where is pega today what have you guys been up to most recently well I think that was some of the most exciting work we're doing is helping customers through their digital transformation journeys and it's where we're seeing our customers generate some incredible value and so that that happens to be the space that I think is most exciting at the at the particular moment especially in terms of how it affects the way our customers are engaging with their customers so I want to build on that because we're pretty passionate about this notion of digital transformation let me throw out a couple concepts I agree where you think this might end up so we believe pretty strongly that the route there is a difference between a business and initial business and that difference is how a business uses its data how it formulates it's at its data into assets and that has significant implications because it suggests that the process of digitally transforming is in fact the process of reinstitution iliza work organizing work organizing engagement around what your data tells you and what your data can do for your customers how does that comport with the way you guys are well I'm going to throw a level of context around that absolutely the data is essential it's essential to understand your customer but that is the point I think I think the point has to be the customer and what the customer is trying to accomplish and of course you need the data to be able to support it but really focusing on the customer instead of focusing on what it is you're trying to do internally is what's key for digital's success so yeah we would agree and by the way when so we would say that it is about applying data to the processes of creating and sustaining your customer yes but you're absolutely right we're not just doing digital transformation on our operation so that's pretty important we're doing digital transformation on anything that's important to how the business engages its marketplace yes yes and and and one of the things that we think is essential though is yes you can assemble the data but if you don't understand from the customer's perspective how that data is going to apply to them as they go from channel to channel what you miss is the important aspect of understanding the true customer journey I mean what is it the what is the outcome the customer is trying to accomplish okay in terms of their interaction with you how do you apply that data so that you ensure that they're getting the right next best action in terms of guiding them through that process and how do you make that next best action contextual with what the customer is a cop trying to try to do so for example you may have an engagement with the customer and through your segmentation have decided wow this is a high net worth customer I want to I want to sell them lots of stuff but if they're on your web page around how to cancel their service with you offering them a cross-sell opportunities inappropriate its leveraging that data as well as the context as well as what is the customer trying to accomplish to ensure that that next best action actually drives to the outcome that you're looking for oh it's in so context matters so let me only run another concept by you then so as for number of years I talked about the difference between what we call offer response for fill marketing where the business is projecting an offer and expecting someone who's respond and then they'll fulfill to need match engage where increasingly you're trying to capture information or insight about again as you said what the customers outcome is and then hopefully find a way to match to their journey there are six their success parameters and then engage them to help them achieve their success is that kind of what we're talking about it is it not to engage where in turn it is except that except that our perspective is is that especially in digital channels you you don't necessarily have to be responsive but actually be proactive be proactive in terms of okay I know this is the outcome the customer is trying to achieve what value can I provide to them as they're going through my process so that they get the most out of my experience one it's going to be simple okay it's got to be quick but it's also going to be value-added to them otherwise they'll fail just as doing that you know you're not really relevant to them and they'll find somebody that is but it speeds important so this so I would say that's part of the matching is the ability to understand the customers need but also provide visibility into their future what how to get to the outcome and what not but that's going to require a new way of thinking about building systems and how those systems get applied to engagement what types of things are your customers doing along those lines to improve the hit rate of matching but also sustaining that throughout a customer's journey so I'm gonna tell you the three biggest mistakes that people make and how pega tries to guide them to avoid it so the first mistake that people make in their digital journeys okay is they think in terms of channels and not the customer journey the second biggest mistake they make okay is that they think in this context of a transaction I'm just doing the transaction but not in terms of the outcome that we're trying to accomplish and then honestly the third biggest mistake is they think in silos instead of the end-to-end relationship that you want to have at the customer so so too often what happens is is that companies take an internal view of what they're trying to accomplish rather than the external view of what's the customer trying to accomplish with me so channel transaction silo those that those those three problems so if we can turn that around what we're basically saying let's start with channel we're focusing first and foremost on the context of the customer and where they are in relation to a journey to an outcome is that the first thing that they're not quite so when you think about channels you almost have to think of this as being a channel agnostic point of view because your customer is going to move from channel to channel to channel as we go through the journey as they go through the journey like if I wanted to open a checking account on a with a digital Bank you know I might start with my mobile device don't have enough time to finish it get into the office want to continue the application on my on your website okay run into a problem want to call you the customer expects that they never have to tell you anything that they've already told you and if you actually end up building the logic for how you open something like a checking account in the channels you will never be able to have that and and fluid seamless experience so let me put that in very specific terms if the context of the engagement is bound inside a particularly then you can't track what the customers doing it's a state you can't track what the customers doing across different channels yes exactly so this is why you've got to think of the customer journey okay this is what a customer has to do to open a checking account with me how do you nuance that experience per channel but essentially okay you end up having to reuse that journey to effectively drive in a successful customer experience and that also leads to this question of silo right because sometimes silos are product silos other times they're channel silos or other times they're customer attributes silos and what you're basically describing is if you're going to truly track where the customer is relative to their outcome and acknowledge that different channels provide different ways of engaging and providing value to the customer different points along that journey then you want to break down those silos so that you can be provide a richer experience to the customer wherever they are on the journey I got that right yeah absolutely so it's another big mistake when I talk about silos people think about what am I gonna push to the customer push to the customer and internally as you think away a lot of you know companies are organized they're organized around products so of course those silos within companies want to push whatever they think the customer should have however the customer is the one that's really in charge and the customer doesn't care about your silos they care about the relationship they have with you all right so and whether achieves the outcome rather than uh facilitates and provides a fidelity or to the outcome that they seek yeah so just imagine how terrible would be if through your segmentation you've decided that you know Peter you're a high-value customer I want to sell you lots of stuff and I want to I want to cross sell you something but if in the context of you being on my page around how you cancel my service with me okay flashing you across that lad that's not going to go over very well that's not going to make you more inclined to stay with me now however you may annoy the hell out of me quite frankly if I understood the context and knew that's the right message for you is a retention proposal well then all of a sudden you start to drive improved relevance to the customer which will in turn drive improve success with the customer I mean we you know we're having our user conference in a couple of days June 36 there's pega world and you know we've got some great mainstage speakers and one of the one of the fabulous stories from last year was around house sprint okay was able to across channels drive improved retention okay why because they actually took that journey approach they understood where their customers were the context of what was happening when a customer might be at risk of leaving okay and be able to provide with the right next best action an offer to ensure that that customer stayed with the organization and they've achieved tremendous success as a result of that and this year we're excited about other customers like anthem telling the story around how they're going to drive customer improvement and customer engagement once again by understanding the customer journey the outcomes the customers are trying to achieve and bringing the right message driven by the data in the right time through the right next action so many years ago I was I have a friend who's a Business School professor and I was discussing the adoption of very complex high-value transaction operational and applications like si P and then as we were having this conversation he kind of stopped and he said so you're telling me your customers were actually willing to pour concrete in their business so hagit none of ecosystems nonetheless provides applications provides a platform provides development tools how are you ensuring that your customers aren't pouring concrete on their business when they adopt peg systems well a lot of it has to deal with with a confluence of a bunch of technologies one core to our product is the ability to build for change so all of our products all of our products are built on a no code platform okay so citizen developers were able to actually take control of their applications make changes of course working with IT ok to ensure that they're well integrated with the systems and and things are well designed but we make it very very easy to build an application and then change that application however what's also critically important is to recognize where it is you need to change so pega has invested very heavily in robotics okay and one of the robots that we bring to market is one that captures the metadata of your users keystrokes as they're engaging okay so this is robotic process automation music no robotic process automation is is is a different type of organism this particular robot we call workforce intelligence and Workforce Intelligence captures the metadata of you users keystrokes throws it up to the cloud where AI engine understands the customer journeys that are happening oh this particular user is opening a new account oh now they're changing an address so on and so forth it sees how your users are engaging with technology and honestly how your technology is engaging with users now today what happens is is that the system will generate report that will show you oh we see this is an area for improved automation because we know what your people learn we can tell you that the ROI from implementing this automation will be X the next one is Sierra next one so we've actually prioritizes for you it gives you a report to prioritize for you the areas where you should change to be able to improve the overall experience now as I turn that into practical things that might be for example suggesting what the next sprint is yes very much so that is what's real today let me take you on a journey of the art of the possible now let me tell you what's around the call no I won't go you won't go well let me take you anyway what's net what's around the corner is the ability for us to generate self optimizing applications so today ok will give you a report telling you what your low-hanging fruit is how about if I also asked you hey do you want us to build test it and deploy it for you do you want us to put an RPA bot here a robotic desktop automation there may be a little DPM automation here that's around the corner and it's actually real today in some of our applications it's real today in our applications around retention upsell cross-sell and end-to-end collections and we're driving it more and more into more of our solutions so this is an incredibly exciting time because not only we able to help customers achieve their digital journey but we're also helping them achieve the incremental improvements that frankly you always have to have to implement because we live in a world with no status quo so you always have to be ready for change no that's very true and the just super clear the whole notion of as you said the citizen programmer means we're not working down in primitives we're working very very close to the way the business thinks about problems right yeah so as we think about building an application it's kind of like the manufacturing of software well the manufacturing of software is the only type of manufacturing yet to benefit from CAD cam so our development environment which we call directly capturing objectives is actually incredibly business friendly using metaphors that are familiar to the business you do not write code in fact if you're writing code when you're delivering a Pegasus you are doing it wrong so the citizen developer the the technically savvy business person is able to very very quickly master the capabilities of how to use a pega system and honestly how to build and maintain their own applications so that's how we make it easy to implement change you we're trying to break out of this paradigm where whenever you want to implement something that's a change you've got to go and hire somebody to come in and do a walk through that write a requirement document okay and then throw it over the fence to IT to translate something in Microsoft Word into a language computers can understand I mean that's been the paradigm for the last 60 years we think there's a better way and and that's what our platform is really focused on driving that better way excellent all right we have to stop there William oh thank you Peter it's been a great conversation went very very very fast all right so Leon trifler global customer success SVP pega systems on Peter Burris this has been another cube conversation Leon great thanks very much thank you Peter [Music]

>>Hello, and welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS 2021. We're here live real people, and we're pleased to bring you this hybrid event. The most important hybrid event of the year to wrap up really 20, 21 and kick off next year, we're going to dig into the intersection of machine learning and business intelligence, business intelligence, Innomar, and Corian is here as the senior vice president of technology alliances at click and costy Wasilla caucus is the head of product growth for low code, no code machine learning at AWS gentlemen. Welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks for having us. >>I think the first time you were on at reinvent Sev definitely early last decade of >>My life. I >>Had black hair and it was maybe a 2013, I want to say. So it's been quite a run >>And it's definitely been a, been a privilege. I had a, had a chance to attend pretty much all all reinvents from the first one, eh, with a much fewer people and say this growth year over year. And what's amazing about it. This is beyond the scale, how much you grow, the number of people. It's just the face of innovation. Keeps, keeps accelerating as an it's, just this phenomenal. >>We're lucky that we chose data as sort of a, our business passion. But, um, so speaking of data, what are you hearing from customers about what they want to do with their data and bringing together business intelligence and machine learning it's being injected in, but what are they telling you that they, that they want, that they need? What's the opportunity that you're hearing now? >>So, uh, I think first of all, this is a fascinating, fascinating topic because we're talking kind of about the intersection of, uh, what everybody wants to look to do as the next frontier of, uh, of data with predictive data, because descriptive analytics have been around for a long time, but what coconut use predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics to enrich what we've had with descriptive analytics to be the end of the day, improve the business and what, what I love talking to people around here and just listening to customers, express the, you know, their needs is how can they get more value out of data? So they have the data, they don't use. A lot of the data are in Applegate and they want to use it in more ways. And that's what exciting to discuss those new ways. They want to bring it together >>Because anything you'd add to that from AWS perspective, >>I'll tell you what we don't hear from our customers and that we've stopped hearing what is AI and machine learning. And on the contrary we are hearing, how can we make the teams that already AI and ML a lot more productive and make a lot more of it, for example, how can they iterate a lot faster across the ML workflow, how they can train and build really large state of the art, natural language processing models like DDB DBT three, how can we help customers build, train and tune customer specific models for all their, to be able to bring in hyper personalization to their products? And the other thing we're hearing is how can we help the teams that are not tapping into AI and ML get the most power of it in a way, how could you actually potentially either democratize the building and development of machine learning models? Or how can you, in another way, expose machine learning into applications that analytics users are already using? >>Yeah. So in my, when we first met success was measured in, yeah, I got the Hadoop cluster, the work technically, but to your point, they customers want to get more value out of that data now. And so they want to operationalize machine intelligence. Is that what active intelligence is? >>Um, so active intelligence is something that you have here click started to talk about, but we believe it really represents what customers are trying to achieve. And the reason we use the word active intelligence is if you're going to think about active, not being passive. So, uh, traditional BI, uh, kind of relied on pre-configured historical data sets, which were great for what they did, but today they're kind of out of gas in terms of supporting real time decisioning and action. So what active intelligence is all about is really enabling customers to make it take informed, informed action, not just informed decision informed action in the moment. So when that action needs needs to happen. So in order to accommodate that again, this is really the difference between active and passive. Is it active intelligence is all about innovations to bring real-time data. So it's all just historical data. >>I need real time data that's relevant to what's happening. Now. I need a way to get an intelligent data pipeline. And I lead this data pipeline that makes it real-time data available in the forum and the structure that allows me to make a decision or to take action. And finally, it's really to be designed to drive action, right? So whether it's a manual action or whether it's even completely automated, but it's intelligent, it's informed. So that's, that's what active intelligence is all about that by the way, predictive data fits really well into that entire paradigm. Right. >>I mean, we've been talking for years about real-time and it's like, okay, what is real time? Well, it's real time is before you lose the customer before you lose the patient before the machine explodes. Right? So your point about predictive. Yeah. Now you guys made an announcement yesterday, uh, ADA, which stands for AI, for data analytics, what what's that all about? Well, >>Ate them tries to aims to address the very point I mentioned before our customers that are asking us, how can we give access to our business teams? There are a lot more business needs to machine learning. An AI for data analytics is a set of partner solutions that are ML powered. And they're focusing across the spectrum of analytics from data warehousing, business intelligence, business process automation, and other business application. And the idea is to help our partners bring to our customers a lot of those more ways. And for example, we've built integrations with clique Tableau, snowflake, Workato Pegasystems. And through those, those usually take two flavors. Either we help our partners build a mail and embedded into their applications and in a way, make them more intelligent as Mr. Wright mentioned, or we help our partners expose machine learning capability from AWS, right within the UI. >>So for example, yes, they will launch snowflake integration with SageMaker. Now snowflake user can use the same user experience in three-year the same use, the SQL query that they love and trigger an auto ML process insights maker, right from the same UI and get ML into the same UI. And I'm quite excited to also discuss today about the integration we announced today with click SageMaker integration or that was about it. No, no, no other, so I think, um, what a setups, yeah. You mentioned customers want to create more machine learning. They, they want to build faster, new, more machine learning capabilities, which is whereby the way the, the, uh, no code local, you know, comes into mind. How can you use the autopilot, which is a SageMaker product for enabling faster creation of models. So I want to create models faster. They also want to be able to use models in a sense, monetize them, turn them into value to make them available to more users where they're you there's users are. >>Eh, so, you know, BI environments or experiences like as we started to think about him. So I says, well, be provided with Gleevec. And again, with our active intelligence platform is all about weaving the data into the applications, into the environments, either the analytic workflows that, uh, that users have. So we introduced and are super excited. Uh, we've announced, uh, two integrations. So very robust integration between cloud and Amazon SageMaker. And that includes both our new analytic connector for, uh, uh, Amazon SageMaker and our integration with Amazon SageMaker autopilot. So with integration with SageMaker, we now have ClixSense interacting directly and seamlessly with any model deployed within SageMaker. So again, very much like cost dimension in your experience as a user seamlessly, you now also have predictive predictive data. So as you working in application, as you're interacting with your data, dynamically data is interchanged between click and SageMaker in reaching your decision, making your actions with predictive datasets. And that's, what's so cool about it. So again, the clinic environment, we bring real-time data in, prepare it for analytics, and then feed that real-time data to SageMaker to get the real-time prediction back in the same experience for the user. So we're really, really excited about that. So >>Translate what that means for customers is that everything happens faster. Is it unlocked new capabilities? Can we unpack >>A little bit? Absolutely. So aware in a way, bridging the chasm between the data science world and the business teams. So the data science teams are building machine learning models to make predictions. And now with the first integration that Myra mentioned, we actually expose those machine learning models in an application that the business team uses click and with the same dashboards that they are very familiar with can now trigger those machine learning models and get real time predictions in the dashboards themselves powered by machine learning. So in a way, this chasm between the two worlds of data science and business users is completely bruised. And the second integration we built with autopilot, she helps data engineers use completely their own machine learning technology powered by AWS pacemaker. So a data engineers creating different pipelines and through those pipelines, they can now with a building block, add auto ML capabilities in that pipeline without them really knowing machine learning. So we bridge the gap of the business teams, getting access to the data science teams and also bringing the skillset gap for the data engineers to tap into machine learning. You mentioned >>Monitor monetization before. So this to me is key because who's going to do with doing the monetization. It's the business lines that are going to do that, not the data scientists data they're going to enable that, but ultimately it's those data consumers that are building those, I call them data products that they can ultimately monetize. And that's, I'm interested in low-code no-code who sits in your title too, so that all plays in doesn't it? >>Yeah, you guys, and we're heavily invested into that whole space. So for example, today we just launched SageMaker canvas. That is a low-code no-code capability for analysts and business users, but we realized we don't need to only innovate on the technology side. We need to also innovate on the partnerships that we built and those integrations help expose those, our technology to wherever our customers want to be the one to be in clique. So be it, let them use the machine learning technology that we are innovating on exactly where they wanted to be. >>Can you give us some customer examples and use cases, maybe make it real for us, >>Uh, for sure. And I, and I think as you, as you think about these use cases, one of the other things I want to do to kind of envision is the fact that all this predictive data and all this integration that we're talking about is not, can actually express itself in a lot of different experiences for the user. It can be a dashboard. It can also be a conversation analytics, which is part of what we offer in the cloud. So you can actually, he can arrive and interact with the data. You don't have to actually look at it. It can be alerts that actually look automatically and inform you that you need to take action. So you don't actually look at the data. The data will come to you when it, when it needs you including base on, on predictive data. So there's a lot of, uh, a lot of options about how you're going to do it. >>Then give me, let me give you, let me give you an example. I'll let me try and maybe pick one that is intuitive. I think for, for many, for many people sales, right? So you have sales, you have a lot of orders. You want to try to close to closing a quarter, you have a forecast, the deals you expect to close. Uh, and then you can use machine learning for example, to forecast or to try to project which, which deals you're going to lose. So now again, that can look at a lot of different aspects of the deal, the timing, the folder, the volume, the amounts, a lot of other parameters, right. Then predict if you're going to lose a deal. So now, if there's a deal that I, that my sales person is telling me, he's going to win, but the mall is telling me you may lose, well, I probably want to double click on that one. >>Right? So I cannot bring that information right in again, in the moment it is to the seller or to the management, so they can identify it and take action. Now, not only can I bring it to them, but I can also, you know, from the machine learning, you know, what is the likely reason that they lose? And if I know the likely reason, it also become prescriptive, I now can know what to do to try and fix it, right. So I can either do it again manually, or it can also integrate it, uh, again, you know, click cloud. We also also click on application automation, which is again, also kind of a low-code no-code environment to orchestrate processes. I can also take that automatically, also update back Salesforce or the CRM. Okay. So that the metadata management system gets updated. So you got an example, exactly. The example of active intelligence. It allows me to take informed action in the now in the moment about making the best example. >>And if Salesforce salesperson, maybe I prioritize and the machines helping me direct my resources. Is this available today? Is it in general availability >>Available right now? Right? Anyone can go start it right now and click LA >>Congratulations. Um, last question. So what's the future hold for this partnership? Where are you guys headed? Give us a little >>Direction. First of all, would love to scale those integrations. So if you're a customer of Blake, please go ahead and test them and do sir, the feedback. And second for us, we really want to learn from our customers and improve those integrations. We bring to them, we really want to hear what technologies they want to expose to a lot more users. And we are aspiring to build that partnership and get a lot more tight aligned with, uh, with Glick. And, uh, thank you costly. And, uh, we, we see tremendous additional opportunities. I think Amazon tells it where I would say is, well, we're in day one. That that's how we kind of feel about it. There's only so much we put into it, but the market is so dynamic. There's so many new needs that are coming up. So we kind of think about it that way. >>So first of all, we want to journey to expand Lee cloud, adding more services. It's actually a platform where we're bringing both data services. They integration data management, everything related to the analytics pipeline, and of course the analytic services. So it all comes together in one environment that makes it more agile, faster to build these new modern, active intelligence type experiences. So as we do that, we're going to be adding more services, creating more opportunities to integrate with more services from the AWS side. So we're really excited to look at that and just like close to, you mentioned with canvas, you know, Amazon keeps coming up with new new services and new capabilities. So there's gonna be a lot of more opportunity. Eh, we're gonna keep, uh, again, within spirit of our partnership where we want to, you know, jump first innovate quickly and, uh, you know, create is integration, adds value to customer >>Often the flywheel that's. I love it. Great. Great to have you guys awesome to reconnect. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching. This is the queue and we're covering AWS reinvent 2021. We're the leader in high tech coverage, right back

>>Mhm. Mhm Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS summit here. Public sector summit here in Washington, D. C. I'm john for your host, We're live at a physical event. People face to face. We're here with the cube on the ground back in business. Of course we have a virtual cube. We got the cube studios in Palo alto in boston. We're gonna bring you all the great coverage and our next guest is parallel casa, Anita Casanova got it. Chief of Channels at Pegasystems, also known as mega official titles, head of global partner ecosystem. But you're known as the Chief of channels. >>Absolutely, thank >>you for coming on. >>Absolutely nice to be here face to face in an event. >>Feel happy, feels good. It feels great. People are happy. I'm still good attendance. Considering what it is about 5, 6000 people roughly give or take maybe up to 7000, who knows. But you guys have a really strong relationship with AWS, you're the chief of the channel. You guys have a great enabling product that crashes itself, as you guys say. So let's get into it before explain what PEG A does. >>Okay, so paga he's a $1 billion dollar company. It's a software company and we call it that software built itself Because we are definitely here to crash customer complexity. So we do it by three doing three things, 1-1 customer engagement customers, customer service and also intelligent automation. So we are a platform and we are helping any single client that has a complex solution to make it simple and to have a good customer experience. >>So I got it wrong. It doesn't crash itself, it crashes complexity, It builds itself okay there it is. All right, I got that out of the way. Software that crashes itself actually doesn't really kind of doesn't sound like a compelling products, but it's not the case. So I gotta ask you So ecosystems are a big part of the cloud amazon has a great ecosystem but the ecosystem has ecosystem is starting to see an expansion of the cloud business with the software model. With cloud scale. What are you guys doing in the channel within the public sector? How do you guys work, how do people engage with you? >>Okay, so first of all we we were always very friendly channel partner but we were using our partners only for implementation because our product is so so uh built for each of the clients, there's a lot of services opportunity and we have very strong peg a practices in the different partners. But last year when I came in I came in almost 16 months ago we decided that we wanted also to improve our our sales with the partners. So we are engaging with partners and to and from the beginning of a sale cycle and brainstorming on what the client needs in order to be more efficient to reduce cost to the moment of the implementation. So we have been working with several uh system integrators, some resellers and with aws as our cloud platform. So we have been moving everything we can to the peg, a cloud that is on aws and clients are are really happy to be modernized in there because there you have the security, the scalability then you the new versions of the product without having to be worrying about it because it's done by our support. >>So it's software on amazon. So customers can buy your software through the marketplace or whatever through a partner or the marketplace and then they can still use the higher level services at in AWS, correct? >>They can use a high services in AWS or with any other partner system Integrator that also works with AWS and we have many cases where we are we we use the power of three. Right. We work with AWS accenture and and for example, Peg or we can use lay does or or booz allen or a parrot on any of the partners that are here in government. >>So you know, the channel equation, you're the chief of the channel. Channel channels love simplicity, simple products to buy. They love products that can throw off gross profit. And you said services, how is that going? Are you guys seeing a good economic equation with your partners? >>Well, our partners do between five and 10 IX of uh, of the revenue that we do on software on services. So that equation definitely works and they love it for that. At the same time we have invested five x the quantity of people that we have supporting the channel. For example, here in government we have invested also two or three times on the rest of the of the business. But there has been definitely good investments for partners. The partners are happy with us because again they not only they can do a good business one off, they can then radiate one. You usually clients one day once they buy peg for one of their use cases or case management as we call it, they usually want to replicate it in other cases and that is where the partners are doing enormous money because they are replicating the same use case in different departments. >>That's the way it's supposed to be, it's their touching the customer, they're adding value on top of your product. So they get to have the best of both worlds high margins on the profits and the services but yet worked with the customer directly to engage, make sure they get the right solution from you and a W. S together. >>Absolutely. Okay, >>what are the key challenges that you find that partners need to solve and overcome to keep this this this equation going. What do you guys focus on? You mentioned more people, what are some of the trends in the public cloud? I mean public sector area? What's this with the dynamics? >>So in in this moment the whole world is with a huge need of digital transformation the every single client but especially in government, they had all digital transformation projects. But they were going at slow motion because of the situation of the pandemic that I don't even want to name it again because everybody's talking about it but it's a reality. These projects have to accelerate 10 times. So whatever it was going to be done in five years has been done in one. So the biggest challenge that we are having is to ensure that we have that capacity to support all these projects that are being done very fast and and for that that's why we also need our partners right Because they have big mega practices. They have been investing as well as we are to ensure that we cover all those needs and but for now we are doing well and so that's that's right. We are growing as a company and with the partners >>carol great to have you on board with the company now kicking some butt now in the channel, Chief of channel good margins happy customers growth. What are some of the use case successes that you've had. Can you name a few customers and what they've done and what's their best practice? >>Well we have, I will name some government because we are in a public secretary event but we have and I will name north America although we also have in the rest of the world. So U. S. Census. That is something that everybody has done right. Even if you did in your mobile, you did it on paper, you did it on the phone. All of that was managed by paga And for the first time ever there was zero than downtime. Not a single problem to access the web. For example, the the US census took us 50% less expense than the one that we did in 2010 just because we use this digital approach And then we also were 50% more efficient because we needed, we didn't need to use all that paper storage that was used in the past. So we taxpayers have to be happy because they really spend less than what they should have spent on this topic. So definitely that was one of the biggest cases that we have in 2020. We have other, we took big big projects like the US and or we do smaller projects and there's one that is not small but that is smaller, that is the New Jersey court that caught my attention because I imagine myself in a situation like that that you are like my mistake taken to the court and you and they are, they are you have to defend yourself that was taking three hours and it's stressful, right? And you don't have to be there if you don't need to And this process got to 20 minutes, that is also reduction and expenses even jail expenses sometimes. So that was one that we did as well. And and that was just by making four legacy systems getting to one having a much faster experience on that. So >>a lot of migrations, a lot of cloud native re factoring going on in the applications sounds like >>yes. What we do is whatever legacy systems you have, we managed to ensure that we connect them all and to have a front line so that you can access information real time and that you can as a user and that you can really have a better experience whatever you do today, whatever company telco company you have, bank you use, I can guarantee you have you have, you speak to you just don't know about >>that. It's under the covers. I gotta ask you my final question. So you guys really doing some good business out here, what if people watching here trying to understand the dynamics of public sector market? What's your take, what's your what do you what would you say, that person? What's the big story happening in public sector? >>Well, to begin with, I'm not a public sector experts, I'm sure that there's a lot of public sector experts out there that can tell me, oh no, you missed this point. But what I have seen in these days that I have been here with the team is that the government needs to act fast in order to digitalized all these projects. So one of our partners yesterday was telling me that there is a mandate in in the army for example to move everything to cloud. How do you do it? They don't even know they're there, there are people that they don't they don't know how to do this. So our partners are building solutions to help them faster get into the cloud because they have to do it by the end of the year. And these are the key things that we are working on with partners to build solutions that can really can access for robust and they can >>escape. It's a very robust ecosystem. Yes, So amazon is an ecosystem you guys and you have an ecosystem. >>It's an ecosystem of ecosystems and that is what works right because Amazon has very good sellers for example, very good people that know the clients and they have a lot of experience but they are not specialized in what to do >>with the channel. These >>other partners have a peg a practice, they are experts and as I told you this is about crushing complexity. So it's making you need to understand the technology and the details behind it to make the best solution to the client. >>Corolla. Great to have you on very dynamic. Love, Love chatting with you Corolla Cazenove >>Cazenove >>Cazenove chief of channels that Pegasystems also known as peg a great to have you on, congratulations on your success. Ecosystems within an ecosystem crushing complexity. Mr que bringing you all the signal out there from the noise. I'm john Kerry. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In our 2020 predictions post, we said that organizations would begin to operationalize their digital transformation experiments and POCs. We also said that based on spending data that cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike and Okta were poised to rise above the rest in 2020, and we even said the S&P 500 would surpass 3,700 this year. Little did we know that we'd have a pandemic that would make these predictions a virtual lock, and, of course, COVID did blow us out of the water in some other areas, like our prediction that IT spending would increase plus 4% in 2020, when in reality, we have a dropping by 4%. We made a number of other calls that did pretty well, but I'll let you review last year's predictions at your leisure to see how we did. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Erik Bradley of ETR is joining me again for this Breaking Analysis, and we're going to lay out our top picks for 2021. Erik, great to see you. Welcome back. Happy to have you on theCUBE, my friend. >> Always great to see you too, Dave. I'm excited about these picks this year. >> Well, let's get right into it. Let's bring up the first prediction here. Tech spending will rebound in 2021. We expect a 4% midpoint increase next year in spending. Erik, there are a number of factors that really support this prediction, which of course is based on ETR's most recent survey work, and we've listed a number of them here in this slide. I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit, the pace of the vaccine rollout. I've called this a forced march to COVID, but I can see people doubling down on things that are working. Productivity improvements are going to go back into the business. People are going to come back to the headquarters and that maybe is going to spur infrastructure on some pent-up demand, and work from home, we're going to talk about that. What are your thoughts on this prediction? >> Well, first of all, you weren't wrong last year. You were just, (laughs) you were just delayed. Just delayed a little bit, that's all. No, very much so. Early on, just three months ago, we were not seeing this optimism. The most recent survey, however, is capturing 4%. I truly believe that still might be a little bit mild. I think it can go even higher, and that's going to be driven by some of the things you've said about. This is a year where a lot of spending was paused on machine learning, on automation, on some of these projects that had to be stopped because of what we all went through. Right now, that is not a nice to have, it's a must have, and that spending is going quickly. There's a rapid pace on that spending, so I do think that's going to push it and, of course, security. We're going to get to this later on so I don't want to bury the lede, but with what's happening right now, every CISO I speak to is not panicked, but they are concerned and there will definitely be increased security spending that might push this 4% even higher. >> Yeah, and as we've reported as well, the survey data shows that there's less freezing of IT, there are fewer layoffs, there's more hiring, we're accelerating IT deployments, so that, I think, 34% last survey, 34% of organizations are accelerating IT deployments over the next three months, so that's great news. >> And also your point too about hiring. I was remiss in not bringing that up because we had layoffs and we had freezes on hiring. Both of that is stopping. As you know, as more head count comes in, whether that be from home or whether that be in your headquarters, both of those require support and require spending. >> All right, let's bring up the next prediction. Remote worker trends are going to become fossilized, settling in at an average of 34% by year-end 2021. Now, I love this chart, you guys. It's been amazingly consistent to me, Erik. We're showing data here from ETR's latest COVID survey. So it shows that prior to the pandemic, about 15 to 16% of employees on average worked remotely. That jumped to where we are today and well into the 70s, and we're going to stay close to that, according to the ETR data, in the first half of 2021, but by the end of the year, it's going to settle in at around 34%. Erik, that's double the pre-pandemic numbers and that's been consistent in your surveys over the past six month, and even within the sub-samples. >> Yeah, super surprised by the consistency, Dave. You're right about that. We were expecting the most recent data to kind of come down, right? We see the vaccines being rolled out. We kind of thought that that number would shift, but it hasn't, it has been dead consistent, and that's just from the data perspective. What we're hearing from the interviews and the feedback is that's not going to change, it really isn't, and there's a main reason for that. Productivity is up, and we'll talk about that in a second, but if you have productivity up and you have employees happy, they're not commuting, they're working more, they're working effectively, there is no reason to rush. And now imagine if you're a company that's trying to hire the best talent and attract the best talent but you're also the only company telling them where they have to live. I mean, good luck with that, right? So even if a few of them decide to make this permanent, that's something where you're going to really have to follow suit to attract talent. >> Yeah, so let's talk about that. Productivity leads us to our next prediction. We can bring that up. Number three is productivity increases are going to lead organizations to double down on the successes of 2020 and productivity apps are going to benefit. Now, of course, I'm always careful to cautious to interpret when you ask somebody by how much did productivity increase. It's a very hard thing to estimate depending on how you measure it. Is it revenue per employee? Is it profit? But nonetheless, the vast majority of people that we talk to are seeing productivity is going up. The productivity apps are really the winners here. Who do you see, Erik, as really benefiting from this trend? This year we saw Zoom, Teams, even Webex benefit, but how do you see this playing out in 2021? >> Well, first of all, the real beneficiaries are the companies themselves because they are getting more productivity, and our data is not only showing more productivity, but that's continuing to increase over time, so that's number one. But you're 100% right that the reason that's happening is because of the support of the applications and what would have been put in place. Now, what we do expect to see here, early on it was a rising tide lifted all boats, even Citrix got pulled up, but over time you realize Citrix is really just about legacy applications. Maybe that's not really the virtualization platform we need or maybe we just don't want to go that route at all. So the ones that we think are going to win longer term are part of this paradigm shift. The easiest one to put out as example is DocuSign. Nobody is going to travel and sit in an office to sign a paper ever again. It's not happening. I don't care if you go back to the office or you go back to headquarters. This is a paradigm shift that is not temporary. It is permanent. Another one that we're seeing is Smartsheet. Early on it started in. I was a little concerned about it 'cause it was a shadow IT type of a company where it was just spreading and spreading and spreading. It's turned out that this, the data on Smartsheet is continuing to be strong. It's an effective tool for project management when you're remotely working, so that's another one I don't see changing anytime. The other one I would call out would be Twilio. Slightly different, yes. It's more about the customer experience, but when you look at how many brick and mortar or how many in-person transactions have moved online and will stay there, companies like Twilio that support that customer experience, I'll throw out a Qualtrics out there as well, not a name we hear about a lot, but that customer experience software is a name that needs to be watched going forward. >> What do you think's going to happen to Zoom and Teams? Certainly Zoom just escalated this year, a huge ascendancy, and Teams I look at a little differently 'cause it's not just video conferencing, and both have done really, really well. How do you interpret the data that you're seeing there? >> There's no way around it, our data is decelerating quickly, really quickly. We were kind of bullish when Zoom first came out on the IPO prospects. It did very well. Obviously what happened in this remote shift turned them into an absolute overnight huge success. I don't see that continuing going forward, and there's a reason. What we're seeing and hearing from our feedback interviews is that now that people recognize this isn't temporary and they're not scrambling and they need to set up for permanency, they're going to consolidate their spend. They don't need to have Teams and Zoom. It's not necessary. They will consolidate where they can. There's always going to be the players that are going to choose Slack and Zoom 'cause they don't want to be on Microsoft architecture. That's fine, but you and I both know that the majority of large enterprises have Microsoft already. It's bundled in in pricing. I just don't see it happening. There's going to be M&A out there, which we can talk about again soon, so maybe Zoom, just like Slack, gets to a point where somebody thinks it's worthwhile, but there's a lot of other video conferencing out there. They're trying to push their telephony. They're trying to push their mobile solutions. There's a lot of companies out there doing it, so we'll see, but the current market cap does not seem to make sense in a permanent remote work situation. >> I think I'm inferring Teams is a little different because it's Microsoft. They've got this huge software estate they can leverage. They can bundle. Now, it's going to be interesting to see how and if Zoom can then expand its TAM, use its recent largesse to really enter potentially new markets. >> It will be, but listen, just the other day there was another headline that one of Zoom's executives out in China was actually blocking content as per directed by the Chinese government. Those are the kind of headlines that just really just get a little bit difficult when you're running a true enterprise size. Zoom is wonderful in the consumer space, but what I do is I research enterprise technology, and it's going to be really, really difficult to make inroads there with Microsoft. >> Yep. I agree. Okay, let's bring up number four, prediction number four. Permanent shifts in CISO strategies lead to measurable share shifts in network security. So the remote work sort of hyper-pivot, we'll call it, it's definitely exposed us. We've seen recent breaches that underscore the need for change. They've been well-publicized. We've talked a lot about identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security, and so as a result, we've seen the upstarts, and just a couple that we called, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler has really benefited and we expect them to continue to show consistent growth, some well over 50% revenue growth. Erik, you really follow this space closely. You've been focused on microsegmentation and other, some of the big players. What are your thoughts here? >> Yeah, first of all, security, number one in spending overall when we started looking and asking people what their priority is going to be. That's not changing, and that was before the SolarWinds breach. I just had a great interview today with a CISO of a global hospitality enterprise to really talk about the implications of this. It is real. Him and his peers are not panicking but pretty close, is the way he put it, so there is spend happening. So first of all, to your point, continued on Okta, continued on identity access. See no reason why that changes. CrowdStrike, continue. What this is going to do is bring in some new areas, like we just mentioned, in network segmentation. Illumio is a pure play in that name that doesn't have a lot of citations, but I have watched over the last week their net spending score go from about 30 to 60%, so I am watching in real time, as this data comes in in the later part of our survey, that it's really happening Forescout is another one that's in there. We're seeing some of the zero trust names really picking up in the last week. Now, to talk about some of the more established names, yeah, Cisco plays in this space and we can talk about Cisco and what they're doing in security forever. They're really reinventing themselves and doing a great job. Palo Alto was in this space as well, but I do believe that network and microsegmentation is going to be something that's going to continue. The other one I'm going to throw out that I'm hearing a lot about lately is user behavior analytics. People need to be able to watch the trends, compare them to past trends, and catch something sooner. Varonis is a name in that space that we're seeing get a lot of adoptions right now. It's early trend, but based on our data, Varonis is a name to watch in that area as well. >> Yeah, and you mentioned Cisco transitioning, reinventing themselves toward a SaaS player. Their subscription, Cisco's security business is a real bright spot for them. Palo Alto, every time I sit in on a VENN, which is ETR's proprietary roundtable, the CISOs, they love Palo Alto. They want to work, many of them, anyway, want to work with Palo Alto. They see them as a thought leader. They seem to be getting their cloud act together. Fortinet has been doing a pretty good job there and especially for mid-market. So we're going to see this equilibrium, best of breed versus the big portfolio companies, and I think 2021 sets up as a really interesting battle for those guys with momentum and those guys with big portfolios. >> I completely agree and you nailed it again. Palo Alto has this perception that they're really thought leaders in the space and people want to work with them, but let's not rule Cisco out. They have a much, much bigger market cap. They are really good at acquisitions. In the past, they maybe didn't integrate them as well, but it seems like they're getting their act together on that. And they're pushing now what they call SecureX, which is sort of like their own full-on platform in the cloud, and they're starting to market that, I'm starting to hear more about it, and I do think Cisco is really changing people's perception of them. We shall see going forward because in the last year, you're 100% right, Palo Alto definitely got a little bit more of the sentiment, of positive sentiment. Now, let's also realize, and we'll talk about this again in a bit, there's a lot of players out there. There will probably be continued consolidation in the security space, that we'll see what happens, but it's an area where spending is increasing, there is a lot of vendors out there to play with, and I do believe we'll see consolidation in that space. >> Yes. No question. A highly fragmented business. A lack of skills is a real challenge. Automation is a big watch word and so I would expect, which brings us, Erik, to prediction number five. Can be hard to do prediction posts without talking about M&A. We see the trend toward increased tech spending driving more IPOs, SPACs and M&A. We've seen some pretty amazing liquidity events this year. Snowflake, obviously a big one. Airbnb, DoorDash, outside of our enterprise tech but still notable. Palantir, JFrog, number of others. UiPath just filed confidentially and their CEO said, "Over the next 12 to 18 months, I would think Automation Anywhere is going to follow suit at some point." Hashicorp was a company we called out in our 2020 predictions as one to watch along with Snowflake and some others, and, Erik, we've seen some real shifts in observability. The ELK Stack gaining prominence with Elastic, ChaosSearch just raised 40 million, and everybody's going after 5G. Lots of M&A opportunities. What are your thoughts? >> I think if we're going to make this a prediction show, I'm going to say that was a great year, but we're going to even have a better year next year. There is a lot of cash on the balance sheet. There are low interest rates. There is a lot of spending momentum in enterprise IT. The three of those set up for a perfect storm of more liquidity events, whether it be continued IPOs, whether it could be M&A, I do expect that to continue. You mentioned a lot of the names. I think you're 100% right. Another one I would throw out there in that observability space, is it's Grafana along with the ELK Stack is really making changes to some of the pure plays in that area. I've been pretty vocal about how I thought Splunk was having some problems. They've already made three acquisitions. They are trying really hard to get back up and keep that growth trajectory and be the great company they always have been, so I think the observability area is certainly one. We have a lot of names in that space that could be taken out. The other one that wasn't mentioned, however, that I'd like to mention is more in the CDN area. Akamai being the grandfather there, and we'll get into it a little bit too, but CloudFlare has a huge market cap, Fastly running a little bit behind that, and then there's Limelight, and there's a few startups in that space and the CDN is really changing. It's not about content delivery as much as it is about edge compute these days, and they would be a real easy takeout for one of these large market cap names that need to get into that spot. >> That's a great call. All right, let's bring up number six, and this is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's more of a longer-term prediction and that prediction is in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are going to re-architect their big data platforms, and the premise here is we're seeing a rapid shift to cloud database and cross-cloud data sharing and automated governance. And the prediction is that because big data platforms are fundamentally flawed and are not going to be corrected by incremental improvements in data lakes and data warehouses and data hubs, we're going to see a shift toward a domain-centric ownership of the data pipeline where data teams are going to be organized around data product or data service builders and embedded into lines of business. And in this scenario, the technology details and complexity will become abstracted. You've got hyper-specialized data teams today. They serve multiple business owners. There's no domain context. Different data agendas. Those, we think, are going to be subsumed within the business lines, and in the future, the primary metric is going to shift from the cost and the quality of the big data platform outputs to the time it takes to go from idea to revenue generation, and this change is going to take four to five years to coalesce, but it's going to begin in earnest in 2021. Erik, anything you'd add to this? >> I'm going to let you kind of own that one 'cause I completely agree, and for all the listeners out there, that was Dave's original thought and I think it's fantastic and I want to get behind it. One of the things I will say to support that is big data analytics, which is what people are calling it because they got over the hype of machine learning, they're sick of vendors saying machine learning, and I'm hearing more and more people just talk about it as we need big data analytics, we need 'em at the edge, we need 'em faster, we need 'em in real time. That's happening, and what we're seeing more is this is happening with vendor-agnostic tools. This isn't just AWS-aligned. This isn't just GCP-aligned or Azure-aligned. The winners are the Snowflakes. The winners are the Databricks. The winners are the ones that are allowing this interoperability, the portability, which fully supports what you're saying. And then the only other comment I would make, which I really like about your prediction, is about the lines of business owning it 'cause I think this is even bigger. Right now, we track IT spending through the CIO, through the CTO, through IT in general. IT spending is actually becoming more diversified. IT spending is coming under the purview of marketing, it's coming under the purview of sales, so we're seeing more and more IT spending, but it's happening with the business user or the business lines and obviously data first, so I think you're 100% right. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, we've contextualized our operational systems, whether it's the CRM or the supply chain, the logistics, the business lines own their respective data. It's not true for the analytics systems, and we talked about Snowflake and Databricks. I actually see these two companies who were sort of birds of a feather in the early days together, applying Databricks machine learning on top of Snowflake, I actually see them going in diverging places. I see Databricks trying to improve on the data lake. I see Snowflake trying to reinvent the concept of data warehouse to this global mesh, and it's going to be really interesting to see how that shakes out. The data behind Snowflake, obviously very, very exciting. >> Yeah, it's just, real quickly to add on that if we have time, Dave. >> Yeah, sure. >> We all know the valuation of Snowflake, one of the most incredible IPOs I've seen in a long time. The data still supports it. It still supports that growth. Unfortunately for Databricks, their IPO has been a little bit more volatile. If you look at their stock chart every time they report, it's got a little bit of a roller coaster ride going on, and our most recent data for Databricks is actually decelerating, so again, I'm going to use the caveat that we only have about 950 survey responses in. We'll probably get that up to 1,300 or so, so it's not done yet, but right now we are putting Databricks into a category where we're seeing it decelerate a little bit, which is surprising for a company that's just right out of the gate. >> Well, it's interesting because I do see Databricks as more incremental on data lakes and I see Snowflake as more transformative, so at least from a vision standpoint, we'll see if they can execute on that. All right, number seven, let's bring up number seven. This is talking about the cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The battle to define hybrid and multi-cloud is going to escalate in 2021. It's already started and it's going to create bifurcated CIO strategies. And, Erik, spending data clearly shows that cloud is continuing its steady margin share gains relative to on-prem, but the definitions of the cloud, they're shifting. Just a couple of years ago, AWS, they never talk about hybrid, just like they don't talk about multi-cloud today, yet AWS continues now to push into on-prem. They treat on-prem as just another node at the edge and they continue to win in the marketplace despite their slower growth rates. Still, they're so large now. 45 billion or so this year. The data is mixed. This ETR data shows that just under 50% of buyers are consolidating workloads, and then a similar, in the cloud workloads, and a similar percentage of customers are spreading evenly across clouds, so really interesting dynamic there. Erik, how do you see it shaking out? >> Yeah, the data is interesting here, and I would actually state that overall spend on the cloud is actually flat from last year, so we're not seeing a huge increase in spend, and coupled with that, we're seeing that the overall market share, which means the amount of responses within our survey, is increasing, certainly increasing. So cloud usage is increasing, but it's happening over an even spectrum. There's no clear winner of that market share increase. So they really, according to our data, the multi-cloud approach is happening and not one particular winner over another. That's just from the data perspective that various do point on AWS. Let's be honest, when they first started, they wanted all the data. They just want to take it from on-prem, put it in their data center. They wanted all of it. They never were interested in actually having interoperability. Then you look at an approach like Google. Google was always about the technology, but not necessarily about the enterprise customer. They come out with Anthos which is allowing you to have interoperability in more cloud. They're not nearly as big, but their growth rate is much higher. Law of numbers, of course. But it really is interesting to see how these cloud players are going to approach this because multi-cloud is happening whether they like it or not. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up multi-cloud in a context of what the data's showing 'cause I would agree we're, and particularly two areas that I would call out in ETR data, VMware Cloud on AWS as well as VM Cloud Foundation are showing real momentum and also OpenStack from Red Hat is showing real progress here and they're making moves. They're putting great solutions inside of AWS, doing some stuff on bare metal, and it's interesting to see. VMware, basically it's the VMware stack. They want to put that everywhere. Whereas Red Hat, similarly, but Red Hat has the developer angle. They're trying to infuse Red Hat in throughout everybody's stack, and so I think Red Hat is going to be really interesting to, especially to the extent that IBM keeps them, sort of lets them do their own thing and doesn't kind of pollute them. So, so far so good there. >> Yeah, I agree with that. I think you brought up the good point about it being developer-friendly. It's a real option as people start kicking a little bit more of new, different developer ways and containers are growing, growing more. They're not testing anymore, but they're real workloads. It is a stack that you could really use. Now, what I would say to caveat that though is I'm not seeing any net new business go to IBM Red Hat. If you were already aligned with that, then yes, you got to love these new tools they're giving you to play with, but I don't see anyone moving to them that wasn't already net new there and I would say the same thing with VMware. Listen, they have a great entrenched base. The longer they can kick that can down the road, that's fantastic, but I don't see net new customers coming onto VMware because of their alignment with AWS. >> Great, thank you for that. That's a good nuance. Number eight, cloud, containers, AI and ML and automation are going to lead 2021 spending velocity, so really is those are the kind of the big four, cloud, containers, AI, automation, And, Erik, this next one's a bit nuanced and it supports our first prediction of a rebound in tech spending next year. We're seeing cloud, containers, AI and automation, in the form of RPA especially, as the areas with the highest net scores or spending momentum, but we put an asterisk around the cloud because you can see in this inserted graphic, which again is preliminary 'cause the survey's still out in the field and it's just a little tidbit here, but cloud is not only above that 40% line of net score, but it has one of the higher sector market shares. Now, as you said, earlier you made a comment that you're not necessarily seeing the kind of growth that you saw before, but it's from a very, very large base. Virtually every sector in the ETR dataset with the exception of outsourcing and IT consulting is seeing meaningful upward spending momentum, and even those two, we're seeing some positive signs. So again, with what we talked about before, with the freezing of the IT projects starting to thaw, things are looking much, much better for 2021. >> I'd agree with that. I'm going to make two quick comments on that, one on the machine learning automation. Without a doubt, that's where we're seeing a lot of the increase right now, and I've had a multiple number of people reach out or in my interviews say to me, "This is very simple. These projects were slated to happen in 2020 and they got paused. It's as simple as that. The business needs to have more machine learning, big data analytics, and it needs to have more automation. This has just been paused and now it's coming back and it's coming back rapidly." Another comment, I'm actually going to post an article on LinkedIn as soon as we're done here. I did an interview with the lead technology director, automation director from Disney, and this guy obviously has a big budget and he was basically saying UiPath and Automation Anywhere dominate RPA, and that on top of it, the COVID crisis greatly accelerated automation, greatly accelerated it because it had to happen, we needed to find a way to get rid of these mundane tasks, we had to put them into real workloads. And another aspect you don't think about, a lot of times with automation, there's people, employees that really have friction. They don't want to adopt it. That went away. So COVID really pushed automation, so we're going to see that happening in machine learning and automation without a doubt. And now for a fun prediction real quick. You brought up the IT outsourcing and consulting. This might be a little bit more out there, the dark horse, but based on our data and what we're seeing and the COVID information about, you said about new projects being unwrapped, new hiring happening, we really do believe that this might be the bottom on IT outsourcing and consulting. >> Great, thank you for that, and then that brings us to number nine here. The automation mandate is accelerating and it will continue to accelerate in 2021. Now, you may say, "Okay, well, this is a lay-up," but not necessarily. UiPath and Automation Anywhere go public and Microsoft remains a threat. Look, UiPath, I've said UiPath and Automation Anywhere, if they were ready to go public, they probably would have already this year, so I think they're still trying to get their proverbial act together, so this is not necessarily a lay-up for them from an operational standpoint. They probably got some things to still clean up, but I think they're going to really try to go for it. If the markets stay positive and tech spending continues to go forward, I think we can see that. And I would say this, automation is going mainstream. The benefits of taking simple RPA tools to automate mundane tasks with software bots, it's both awakened organizations to the possibilities of automation, and combined with COVID, it's caused them to get serious about automation. And we think 2021, we're going to see organizations go beyond implementing point tools, they're going to use the pandemic to restructure their entire business. Erik, how do you see it, and what are the big players like Microsoft that have entered the market? What kind of impact do you see them having? >> Yeah, completely agree with you. This is a year where we go from small workloads into real deployment, and those two are the leader. In our data, UiPath by far the clear leader. We are seeing a lot of adoptions on Automation Anywhere, so they're getting some market sentiment. People are realizing, starting to actually adopt them. And by far, the number one is Microsoft Power Automate. Now, again, we have to be careful because we know Microsoft is entrenched everywhere. We know that they are good at bundling, so if I'm in charge of automation for my enterprise and I'm already a Microsoft customer, I'm going to use it. That doesn't mean it's the best tool to use for the right job. From what I've heard from people, each of these have a certain area where they are better. Some can get more in depth and do heavier lifting. Some are better at doing a lot of projects at once but not in depth, so we're going to see this play out. Right now, according to our data, UiPath is still number one, Automation Anywhere is number two, and Microsoft just by default of being entrenched in all of these enterprises has a lot of market share or mind share. >> And I also want to do a shout out to, or a call out, not really a shout out, but a call out to Pegasystems. We put them in the RPA category. They're covered in the ETR taxonomy. I don't consider them an RPA vendor. They're a business process vendor. They've been around for a long, long time. They've had a great year, done very, very well. The stock has done well. Their spending momentum, the early signs in the latest survey are just becoming, starting to moderate a little bit, but I like what they've done. They're not trying to take UiPath and Automation Anywhere head-on, and so I think there's some possibilities there. You've also got IBM who went to the market, SAP, Infor, and everybody's going to hop on the bandwagon here who's a software player. >> I completely agree, but I do think there's a very strong line in the sand between RPA and business process. I don't know if they're going to be able to make that transition. Now, business process also tends to be extremely costly. RPA came into this with trying to be, prove their ROI, trying to say, "Yeah, we're going to cost a little bit of money, but we're going to make it back." Business process has always been, at least the legacies, the ones you're mentioning, the Pega, the IBMs, really expensive. So again, I'm going to allude to that article I'm about to post. This particular person who's a lead tech automation for a very large company said, "Not only are UiPath and AA dominating RPA, but they're likely going to evolve to take over the business process space as well." So if they are proving what they can do, he's saying there's no real reason they can't turn around and take what Appian's doing, what IBM's doing and what Pega's doing. That's just one man's opinion. Our data is not actually tracking it in that space, so we can't back that, but I did think it was an interesting comment for and an interesting opportunity for UiPath and Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, it's always great to hear directly from the mouths of the practitioners. All right, brings us to number 10 here. 5G rollouts are going to push new edge IoT workloads and necessitate new system architectures. AI and real-time inferencing, we think, require new thinking, particularly around processor and system design, and the focus is increasingly going to be on efficiency and at much, much lower costs versus what we've known for decades as general purpose workloads accommodating a lot of different use cases. You're seeing alternative processors like Nvidia, certainly the ARM acquisition. You've got companies hitting the market like Fungible with DPAs, and they're dominating these new workloads in the coming decade, we think, and they continue to demonstrate superior price performance metrics. And over the next five years they're going to find their way, we think, into mainstream enterprise workloads and put continued pressure on Intel general purpose microprocessors. Erik, look, we've seen cloud players. They're diversifying their processor suppliers. They're developing their own in-house silicon. This is a multi-year trend that's going to show meaningful progress next year, certainly if you measure it in terms of innovations, announcements and new use cases and funding and M&A activity. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, there's a lot there and I think you're right. It's a big trend that's going to have a wide implication, but right now, it's there's no doubt that the supply and demand is out of whack. You and I might be the only people around who still remember the great chip famine in 1999, but it seems to be happening again and some of that is due to just overwhelming demand, like you mentioned. Things like IoT. Things like 5G. Just the increased power of handheld devices. The remote from work home. All of this is creating a perfect storm, but it also has to do with some of the chip makers themselves kind of misfired, and you probably know the space better than me, so I'll leave you for that on that one. But I also want to talk a little bit, just another aspect of this 5G rollout, in my opinion, is we have to get closer to the edge, we have to get closer to the end consumer, and I do believe the CDN players have an area to play in this. And maybe we can leave that as there and we could do this some other time, but I do believe the CDN players are no longer about content delivery and they're really about edge compute. So as we see IoT and 5G roll out, it's going to have huge implications on the chip supply. No doubt. It's also could have really huge implications for the CDN network. >> All right, there you have it, folks. Erik, it's great working with you. It's been awesome this year. I hope we can do more in 2021. Really been a pleasure. >> Always. Have a great holiday, everybody. Stay safe. >> Yeah, you too. Okay, so look, that's our prediction for 2021 and the coming decade. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. You'll find it. We publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you got to check out etr.plus. It's where all the survey action is. Definitely subscribe to their services if you haven't already. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The steepest drop in the stock market since June 11th flipped the narrative and sent investors scrambling. Tech got hammered after a two-month run, and people are asking questions. Is this a bubble popping, or is it a healthy correction? Are we now going to see a rotation into traditional stocks, like banks and maybe certain cyclicals that have lagged behind the technology winners? Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Wikibon's CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to give you our perspective on what's happening in the technology space and unpack what this sentiment flip means for the balance of 2020 and beyond. Let's look at what happened on September 3rd, 2020. The tech markets recoiled this week as the NASDAQ Composite dropped almost 5% in a single day. Apple's market cap alone lost $178 billion. The Big Four: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google lost a combined value that approached half a trillion dollars. For context, this number is larger than the gross domestic product for countries as large as Thailand, Iran, Austria, Norway, and even the UAE, and many more. The tech stocks that have been running due to COVID, well, they got crushed. These are the ones that we've highlighted as best positioned to thrive during the pandemic, you know, the work-from-home, SaaS, cloud, security stocks. We really have been talking about names like Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce, DocuSign, Splunk, and the security names like CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. By the way, DocuSign and CrowdStrike and Okta all had nice earnings beats, but they still got killed underscoring the sentiment shift. Now the broader tech market was off as well on sympathy, and this trend appears to be continuing into the Labor Day holiday. Now why is this happening, and why now? Well, there are a lot of opinions on this. And first, many, like myself, are relatively happy because this market needed to take a little breather. As we've said before, the stock market, it's really not reflecting the realities of the broader economy. Now as we head into September in an election year, uncertainty kicks in, but it really looks like this pullback was fueled by a combination of an overheated market and technical factors. Specifically, take a look at volatility indices. They were high and rising, yet markets kept rising along with them. Robinhood millennial investors who couldn't bet on sports realized that investing in stocks was as much of a rush and potentially more lucrative. The other big wave, which was first reported by the Financial Times, is that SoftBank made a huge bet on tech and bought options tied to around $50 billion worth of high-flying tech stocks. So the option call volumes skyrocketed. The call versus put ratio was getting way too hot, and we saw an imbalance in the market. Now market makers will often buy an underlying stock to hedge call options to ensure liquidity in these cases. So to be more specific, delta in options is a measure of the change in the price of an option relative to the underlying stock, and gamma is a measure of the volatility of the delta. Now usually, volatility is relatively consistent on both sides of the trade, the calls and the puts, because investors often hedge their bets. But in the case of many of these hot stocks, like Tesla, for example, you've seen the call skew be much greater than the skew in the downside. So let's take an example. If people are buying cheap out of the money calls, a market maker might buy the underlying stock to hedge for liquidity. And then if Elon puts out some good news, which he always does, the stock goes up. Market makers have to then buy more of the underlying stock. And then algos kick in to buy even more. And then the price of the call goes up. And as it approaches it at the money price, this forces market makers to keep buying more of that underlying stock. And then the melt up until it stops. And then the market flips like it did this week. When stock prices begin to drop, then market makers were going to rebalance their portfolios and their risk and sell their underlying stocks, and then the rug gets pulled out from the markets. And that's really why some of the stocks that have run dropped so precipitously. Okay, why did I spend so much time on this, and why am I not freaking out? Because I think these market moves are largely technical versus fundamental. It's not like 1999. We had a double whammy of technical rug pulls combined with poor underlying fundamentals for high-flying companies like CMGI and Internet Capital Group, whose businesses, they were all about placing bets on dot-coms that had no business models other than non-monetizable eyeballs. All right, let's take a look at the NASDAQ and dig into the data a little bit. And I think you'll see what I mean and why I'm not too concerned. This is a year-to-date chart of the NASDAQ, and you can see it bottomed on March 23rd at 6,860. And then ran up until June 11th and had that big drop, but was still elevated at 9,492. And then it ran up to over 12,000 and hit an all-time high. And then you see the big drop. And that trend continued on Friday morning. The NASDAQ Composite traded below 11,000. It actually corrected to 10% of its high, 9.8% to be precise, and then it snapped back. But even at its low, that's still up over 20% for the year. In the year of COVID, would that have surprised you in March? It certainly would have surprised me. So to me, this pullback is sort of a relief. It's good and actually very normal and quite predictable. Now the exact timing of these pullbacks, of course, on the other hand is not entirely predictable. Not at all, frankly, at least for this observer. So the big question is where do we go from here? So let's talk about that a little bit. Now the economy continues to get better. Take a look at the August job report; it was good. 1.4 million new jobs, 340,000 came from the government. That was positive numbers. And the other good news is it translates into a drop in unemployment under 10%. It's now at 8.4%. And this is really good relative to expectations. Now the sell-off continued, which suggested that the market wanted to keep correcting, so that's good. Maybe some buying opportunities would emerge in over the next several months, the market snapped back, but for those who have been waiting, I think that's going to happen. And so that snapback, maybe that's an indicator that the market wants to keep going up, we'll see. But I think there are more opportunities ahead because there's really so much uncertainty. What's going to happen with the next round of the stimulus? The jobs report, maybe that's a catalyst for compromise between the Democrats and the Republicans, maybe. The US debt is projected to exceed 100% of GDP this calendar year. That's the highest it's been since World War II. Does that give you a good feeling? That doesn't give me a good feeling. And when we talk about the election, that brings additional uncertainty. So there's a lot to think about for the markets. Now let's talk about what this means for tech. Well, as we've been projecting for months with our colleagues at ETR, despite what's going on in the stock market and its rise, there's those real tech winners, we still see a contraction in 2020 for IT spend of minus 5 to 8%. And we talk a lot about the bifurcation in the market due to COVID accelerating some of these trends that were already in place, like digital transformation and SaaS and cloud. And then the work-from-home kicks in with other trends like video conferencing and the shift to security spend. And we think this is going to continue for years. However, because these stocks have run up so much, they're going to have very tough compares in 2021. So maybe time for a pause. Now let's take a look at the IT spending macroeconomics. This data is from a series of surveys that ETR conducted to try to better understand spending patterns due to COVID. Those yellow slices of the pies show the percent of customers that indicate that their budgets will be impacted by coronavirus. And you can see there's a steady increase from mid-March, which blend into April, and then you can see the June data. It goes from 63% saying yes, which is very high, to 78%, which is very, very high. And the bottom part of the chart shows the degree of that change. So 22% say no change in the latest survey, but you can see much more of a skew to the red declines on the left versus the green upticks on the right-hand side of the chart. Now take a look at how IT buyers are seeing the response to the pandemic. This chart shows what companies are doing as a result of COVID in another recent ETR survey. Now of course, it's no surprise, everybody's working from home. Nobody's traveling for business, not nobody, but most people aren't, we know that. But look at the increase in hiring freezes and freezing new IT deployments, and the sharp rise in layoffs. So IT is yet again being asked to do more with less. They're used to it. Well, we see this driving an acceleration to automation, and that's going to benefit, for instance, the RPA players, cloud providers, and modern software vendors. And it will also precipitate a tailwind for more aggressive AI implementations. And many other selected names are going to continue to do well, which we'll talk about in a second, but they're in the work-from-home, the cloud, the SaaS, and the modern data sectors. But the problem is those sectors are not large enough to offset the declines in the core businesses of the legacy players who have a much higher market share, so the overall IT spend declines. Now where it gets kind of interesting is the legacy companies, look, they all have growth businesses. They're making acquisitions, they're making other bets. IBM, for example, has its hybrid cloud business in Red Hat, Dell has VMware and it's got work-from-home solutions, Oracle has SaaS and cloud, Cisco has its security business, HPE, it's as a service initiative, and so forth. And again, these businesses are growing faster, but they are not large enough to offset the decline in core on-prem legacy and drive anything more than flat growth, overall, for these companies at best. And by the time they're large enough, we'll be into the next big thing, so the cycle continues. But these legacy companies are going to compete with the upstarts, and that's where it gets interesting. So let's get into some of the specific names that we've been talking about for over a year now and make some comments around their prospects. So what we want to do is let's start with one of our favorites: Snowflake. Now Snowflake, along with Asana, JFrog, Sumo Logic, and Unity, has a highly anticipated upcoming IPO. And this chart shows new adoptions in the database sector. And you can see that Snowflake, while down from the October 19th survey, is far outpacing its competitors, with the exception of Google, where BigQuery is doing very well. But you see Mongo and AWS remain strong, and I'm actually quite encouraged that it looks like Cloudera has righted the ship and you kind of saw that in their earnings recently. But my point is that Snowflake is a share gainer, and we think will likely continue to be one for a number of quarters and years if they can execute and compete with the big cloud players, and that's a topic that we've covered extensively in previous Breaking Analysis segments, and, as you know, we think Snowflake can compete. Now let's look at automation. This is another space that we've been talking about quite a bit, and we've largely focused on two leaders: UiPath and Automation Anywhere. But I have to say, I still like Blue Prism. I think they're well-positioned. And I especially like Pegasystems, which has, for years, been embarking on a broader automation agenda. What this chart shows is net score or spending velocity data for those customers who said they were decreasing spend in 2020. Those red bars that we showed earlier are the ones who are decreasing. And you can see both Automation Anywhere and UiPath show elevated levels within that base where spending is declining, so that's a real positive. Now Microsoft, as we've reported, is elbowing its way into the market with what is currently an inferior point product, but, you know, it's Microsoft, so we can't ignore that. And finally, let's have a look at the all-important security sector, which we've covered extensively and put out a report recently. So what this next chart does is cherry-picks of a few of our favorite names, and it shows the net score or spending momentum and the granularity for some of the leaders and emerging players. All of these players are in the green, as you can see in the upper right, and they all have decent presence in the dataset as indicated by the shared NS. Okta is at the top of the list with 58% net score. Palo Alto, they're a more mature player, but still, they have an elevated net score. CrowdStrike's net score dropped this quarter, which was a bit of a concern, but it's still high. And it followed by SailPoint and Zscaler, who are right there. The big three trends in this space right now are cloud security, identity access management, and endpoint security. Those are the tailwinds, and we think these trends have legs. Remember, net score in this survey is a forward-looking metric, so we'll come back and look at the next survey, which is running this month in the field from ETR. Now everyone on this chart has reported earnings, except Zscaler, which reports on September 9th, and all of these companies are doing well and exceeding expectations, but as I said earlier, next year's compares won't be so easy. Oh, and by the way, their stock prices, they all got killed this week as a result of the rug pull that we explained earlier. So we really feel this isn't a fundamental problem for these firms that we're talking about. It's more of a technical in the market. Now Automation Anywhere and UiPath, you really don't know because they're not public and I think they need to get their house in order so they can IPO, so we'll see when they make it to public markets. I don't think that's an if, that I think they will IPO, but the fact that they haven't filed yet says they're not ready. Now why wouldn't you IPO if you are ready in this market despite the recent pullbacks? Okay, let's summarize. So listen, all you new investors out there that think stock picking is easy, look, any fool can make money in a market that goes up every day, but trees don't grow to the moon and there are bulls and bears and pigs, and pigs get slaughtered. And I can throw a dozen other cliches at you, but I am excited that you're learning. You maybe have made a few bucks playing the options game. It's not as easy as you might think. And I'm hoping that you're not trading on margin. But look, I think there are going to be some buying opportunities ahead, there always are, be patient. It's very hard, actually impossible, to time markets, and I'm a big fan of dollar-cost averaging. And young people, if you make less than $137,000 a year, load up on your Roth, it's a government gift that I wish I could have tapped when I was a newbie. And as always, please do your homework. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, so check that out, and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts. Don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey action. Get in touch on Twitter, I'm @dvellante, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Robotic process automation solutions remain one of the most attractive investments for IT buyers. This is despite our overall 2020 IT spending forecast, which remained depressed at minus four to minus 5% for the year. Relative to previous surveys, we do see some softness in traditional RPA strongholds such as large financial services and big insurance and giant public and privates. But RPA relative to other IT investments remains at the top as a sector with the highest spending momentum ahead of machine learning, ahead of AI, ahead of containers, and ahead of cloud computing. Hello, everyone, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on the latest RPA trends and share fresh ETR data with our community. So let's get right into it with a quick summary. Now, as I said, despite our pretty tepid IT spending outlook for the entire year in 2020, demand for RPA software continues to grow at a 60 to 70% clip. Now remember, RPA mimics human computer interactions, it uses software scripts or robots that execute human tasks in a runtime assembly of discrete steps. The practice first became popular for back office functions mostly, is unattended bots. The pandemic appears to be accelerating front office adoption and this is creating a bit of a schism between front and back office. Digital transformation initiatives in many ways, they're going to create the connective tissue between front and back of the house. Now competitive dynamics are heating up. The two emergent leaders Automation Anywhere and UiPath are separating from the pack. Large incumbent software vendors like Microsoft, IBM and SAP are entering the market and positioning RPA as a feature. Meanwhile, legacy business process automation players continue to focus on taking their install bases on a broader automation journey. However, all three of these constituents are on a collision course in our view, where deeper automation objective is kind of the North Star. Now there are two material changes to our previous scenario. First, we've expanded our thinking on the RPA TAM, and we're extending this toward a broader automation agenda more consistent with buyer goals. In other words, the TAM is much larger than we initially thought, and we'll explain why. Second, we no longer see this as a winner take all or even winner take most market. In this segment, we'll look deeper into the leaders and share some new data. In particular, well, it appeared in our previous analysis that UiPath was running the table in the market, we see a much more textured, competitive dynamic setting up. And the data suggests that other players including Automation Anywhere, and even some of the larger incumbents will challenge UiPath for leadership in this space. Now, as with many developing software markets, the ultimate leader is not crystal clear at this point. Let's talk about the effects of the pandemic. A conventional wisdom really suggests and by the way, we would agree that the automation mandate has accelerated by several years due to Coronavirus. It's three points here. One is that yes, COVID has put digital transformation on the front burner of executives priority lists. Second is automation isn't trivial. So there's a real difference between wanting and achieving. And third, we believe there's another driver for the automation mandate, which will survive a vaccine or herd immunity, and that is the productivity gap. So this chart here underscores that point and was brought to our attention by a friend of ours, Dave Moschella. Specifically, we've seen a noticeable decline in productivity in the US and EU, since remember the personal productivity boom from the personal computer? The PC and the internet brought forth those trends in Moschella's premise and we agree is that in order to solve the grand challenges of the 2020s and beyond automation is going to be necessary. Think about climate change, global competitiveness, aging populations and infrastructure, massive deficits, mass immigration, sustainable food sources, healthcare. These are all going to require huge injections of automation into the system to solve problems associated with these areas. Human labor just isn't the answer. So this in part has influenced our expanded thinking on the total available market. The diagram we're showing here updates our expectations on the TAM for RPA. The first takeaway is that we're envisioning a market for business automation well beyond software bots, which are represented really in the first two layers, that back office and front office divide, if you will. And we see that coming together in the third layer, those two are really going to happen through digital transformation initiatives. But we also envision a massive market for automated decision making, and very deep business integration where systems are communicating to each other, system to system, machine to machine, and also making real time decisions on behalf of humans. Sometimes we call that systems of agency. Now, I won't go deep into this TAM, as it's a bit academic, but suffice it to say this is an enormous market comprising many layers of the tech stack and services stacks. And this represents a serious opportunities for multiple players, both vendors and buyers. Okay, let's get a little bit more tactical and look at the spending data, the latest spending data, from the ETR survey. The chart we're showing here is one of our favorites. And it compares leading RPA vendors on two dimensions. The y-axis is net score or spending momentum. It's a simple metric, that for this last survey asked buyers are you spending more or less in the second half of the year than you had originally planned. Net score is derived by subtracting the lesses from the mores, and is really shown in the upper right of this chart. You can see that in the green highlights. Note that the total N in the survey is around 1200. And you can see that the number of responses for each vendor is shown in the upper right in that gray area. We eliminated any RPA vendor that didn't get at least 25 mentions in responses in the survey. And you can see that Automation Anywhere and UiPath have essentially traded positions on the vertical axis. Indicating that Automation Anywhere customers expect greater spending momentum with the company than UiPath customers for the second half of this year, than they did in the first half. UiPath at 62% net score is still very, very high but this marks the first time since our reporting that AA, has taken the lead ahead of UiPath in net score. And the small arrow show the general direction of their respective momentum over the last couple of surveys, and I'll discuss this later on. Now on this chart, you can also see Blue Prism and Pegasystems and, while they're significantly below Automation Anywhere and UiPath, these are very respectable net scores for more mature players like these. But I don't really consider them RPA specialists, and especially Pega. I mean, they have an automation play well beyond RPA and have built really an awesome business and in many ways are benefiting from the hype being created by the newbies. I have to say I'm in awe of the business that Alan Trefler and his team have built. We're talking about a billion dollar company here. They've got a valuation, over 9 billion, the stock's near an all time high, and they never took a dime of outside capital prior to their IPO, which is just unreal. Oh, yeah, one more thing I want to call your attention to. There's Microsoft with power automate, and kind of crashing the party with a 1.0 product that is making some noise in the marketplace. Now on the y-axis, you can see UiPath has the market share lead, but I want to remind you what this is. Market shares I mentioned of pervasiveness in the data set in the survey and is, calculated by dividing the number of mentions for a vendor in a sector by the total mentions in the survey. So you can see that UiPath has the share of voice lead, but it's still under 10% of the total survey base. So lots of room for this market to grow. But I want to make an important note here because UiPath has historically been a collection of point products, whereas Automation Anywhere their go to market typically involves going to larger accounts and selling this sort of Mongo and digital transformation project to the line of business. As I said earlier, these two and other companies are on a collision course because that is the big prize. UiPath has restructured its product and pricing strategy, done some acquisitions to go after this. But it stands to reason that UiPath has a bigger presence in the ETR data set as measured by market share. So it makes sense that Automation Anywhere, their number one net score position, it makes it even more impressive. Now the other nuance is that ETR tends to be somewhat weighted to the IT side of the house. And although it most certainly picks up line of business spending, there's a bias in the data toward IT. So that means RPA is most likely even stronger in the context of spending initiatives, and it's already number one relative to other sectors. So that's pretty impressive. Now let's look at how net score has changed over time. This chart shows the change in net score or spending momentum for Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism and Pegasystems over the last three survey periods. You see last October, this past April, the height of the lockdown in the US and the most recent July survey. And here you see that Automation Anywhere is accelerating and taking the lead over UiPath. And is the only one in the chart growing net score. Again, UiPath remains elevated despite the relative decline from previous surveys. The other two, I have to caution you again, the Pegasystems for example, and they're killing it in the market. The stock is up nearly 40% year to date, it's over 60% in the last 12 months. So because they're not so RPA only focused and they really are not an IT play per se, the survey data has to be digested in that context. But you do see them coming down from elevated levels last October. Now here's a time series view of that net score. This chart really what it does is it just extends the timeframe and shows more granularity of survey data back to January 2018. So we're talking about 11, quarterly survey data points and snapshots here. This really underscores the power of the ETR platform, because you can stretch the data over time. And you'll see Automation Anywhere overtakes UiPath for the first time since we started capturing the segment. UiPath along with the other shows a noticeable decline in net score in this survey, except for Microsoft, who's, you know, they're just showing up, as I said, they're elbowing their way into the marketplace. Now let's take that same sort of time series view but let's flip to market share. And this next chart shows that other favorite metric that we use all the time as market share or pervasiveness in the dataset, over a time series. Now remember, this is really mentions as a percent of the total. It's not an indication of spending amount, but it's a data point and we pay attention to this. And you can see how UiPath broke away from the pack. They did this back in October 2018, and that coincides with their big push on things like, events, and training, they really have done a good job of building a presence and awareness in the market. I've superimposed on the chart the upper left corner for context that shows net scores in the green and shared N in the gray. It's sorted off of that shared N. This refers to the number of mentions in the dataset for each vendor out of the 1192 total responses. So some of these have small Ns. So I'm not going to put too much emphasis on this except, that UiPath escalation is notable and hopefully I've explain that sufficiently. Okay, let's wrap. So we talked about the automation mandate, and the COVID wrecking ball effect. But it's more than that. The productivity pressures on the US and EU in particular make it exceedingly difficult to just throw labor at the world's grand problems. So this has opened up an enormous opportunity for technology companies and practitioners to drive automation. You know, we said this during the initial in the early days of the big data era. In fact, Peter Goldmacher, had this discussion with us on theCUBE really in the early part of last decade, that those companies that can implement automation at the time he was talking about big data are going to be the big big winners. So it's not just the tech players. Now of course, as we've seen, many of the big tech companies are benefiting enormously from the mega automation trend, but the broader set of industries has massive, massive upside. Now what this sets up is a multi-dimensional competitive environment. We have Automation Anywhere and UiPath battling it out to achieve escape velocity. Automation Anywhere just brought in Chris Riley to run go to market. So you know they're serious. He's a player who understands complex enterprise selling. And now you have UiPath, they're hiring engineers as fast as they can. And the other dimension is a classic battle of best of breed specialists like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, up against the bundlers, selling RPA as a feature of their services. Microsoft, IBM, SAP, etc, all see automation is a huge opportunity and everyone's going to hop on the bandwagon because this is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, at least. Okay. Thanks for watching this episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. Check it out, we've also put up an archive of all the breaking analysis segments on wikibon.com. There's a link on the menu bar right at the top of the homepage that has all 46 episodes that we've done since inception. I write weekly on that wikibon.com platform and I also publish on siliconangle.com where you can find all the relevant news. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data and analysis. Go there and sign up for a trial of the software. It's awesome. Okay, this is Dave Vellante, be well, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld iNspire, brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. And now that the dust has settled on the event, we wanted to have a little postmortem power panel, and I'm really excited to have three great guests here today. Adrian Swinscoe is a customer service and experience advisor and the best-selling author of a couple of books: "How to Wow" and "Punk CX." Adrian great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey Dave. >> And Shelly Kramer's a principal, analyst, and a founding partner at Futurum Research, CUBE alum. Shelly, good to see you. >> Hi, great to see you too. >> And finally, Don Schuerman who is the CTO of Pegasystems and one of the people that was really highlighting the keynotes. Don, thanks for your time, appreciate you coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, let's start with some of the takeaways from the event, and if you don't mind I'm going to set it up. I had some, I had many many notes. But I'll take a cue from Alan's keynote, where he talked about three things: rethinking the customer engagement, that whole experience, that as a service, I'm going to say that certainly the second part of last decade came to the front and center and we think is going to continue in spades. And then new tech, we heard about that. Don we're going to ask you to chime in on that. Modern software, microservices, we've got machine intelligence now. And then I thought there were some really good customer examples. We heard from Siemens, we heard from the CIO and head of digital at Aflac, the Bank of Australia. So, some really good customer examples. But Shelly, let me start with you. What were your big takeaways of PegaWorld iNspire 2020, the virtual edition? >> You know, what I love is a focus, and we have talked a lot about that here at Futurum Research, but what I love is the thinking that what really is important now is to think about rethinking and kind of tearing things apart. Especially when we're in a time, we're in difficult economic times, and so instead of focusing on rebuilding and relaunching as quickly as possible, I think that now's the time to really focus on reexamining what is it that our customers want? How is it that we can best serve them? And really sort of start from ground zero and examine our thinking. And I think that's really at the heart of digital transformation, and I think that both in this virtual event and in some interviews I was lucky enough to do in advance with some of the Pega senior team, that was really a key focus, is really thinking about how we can re-architect things, how we can do things in ways that are more efficient, that impact people more effectively, that impact the bottom line more effectively. And to me that's really exciting. >> So Adrian, CX is obviously your wheelhouse. A lot of the conversation at PegaWorld iNspire was of course about customer experience, customer service. How do you think the content went? What were some of the highlights for you? And maybe, what would you have liked to hear more of? >> Well I think, thanks Dave, I actually really enjoyed it. I actually kind of thought was, first of all I should say that I've been to a bunch of virtual summits and I thought this was one of the best ones I've done in terms of its pace and its interactivity. I love the fact that Don was bouncing around the screen, kind of showing us around the menu and things. I thought that was great. But the things that I thought really stood out for me was this idea of the context around accelerating digital transformation. And that's very contextual, it's almost being forced upon us. But then this idea of also the center-out thinking and the Process Fabric. Because it really reminded me of, and Don you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong here, is taking a systems-thinking approach to delivering the right outcomes for customers. Because it's always struck me that there's a contradiction at the heart of the rhetoric around customer-centricity where people say they want to do the right things by customers but then they force them down this channel-centric or process-centric way of thinking. And so actually I thought it was really refreshing to hear about this center-out and Process Fabric platform that Pega's building. And I thought it's really exciting because it felt like actually we're going to start to take a more systemic look and take to delivering great service and great experience. So I thought that was really great. Those were my big headlines out of the summit. >> So Don, one of the-- >> Adrian I think-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Yeah, I think the whole idea, you know, and Alan referred to center-out as a business architecture, and I think that's really an important concept because this is really about the intersection of that business goal. How do I truly become customer-centric? And then how do I actually make my technology do it? And it's really important for that to work where you put your business logic in the technology. If you continue to do it in the sort of channel-centric way or really data-centric, system-centric way that historically has been the approach, I don't think you can build a sustainable platform for great customer engagement. So I think that idea of a business architecture that you clued in on a little bit is really central to how we've been thinking about this. >> Let's stay on that for a second. But first of all, I just want to mention, you guys did a good job of not just trying to take a physical event and plug in into virtual. So congratulations on that. The virtual clicker toss, and you know, you were having some fun eating your eggs. I mean that was, that's great. And the Dropkick Murphys couldn't be live, but you guys still leveraged that, so well done. One of the better ones that I've seen. But I want to stay on your point there. Alan talked about some of the mistakes that are made, and one of the questions I have for you guys is, what is the state of customer experience today, and why the divergence between great, and good, and pretty crappy? And Alan talked about, well, people try to impose business process top-down, or they try to infuse logic in the database bottom-up. You really got to do that middle-out. So, Don I want to come back to you. Let's explore that a little bit. What do you really mean by middle-out? Where am I putting the actual business logic? >> Yeah, I think this is important, right. And I think that a lot of time we have experiences as customers. And I had one of these recently with a cable provider, where I spent a bunch of time on their website chatting with a chatbot of some kind, that then flipped me over to a human. When the chatbot flipped me to the human, the human didn't know what I was doing with the chatbot. And that human eventually told me I had to call somebody. So I picked up the phone, I made the phone call. And that person didn't know what I was doing on chat with the human or with the chatbot. So every time there's a customer, I'm restarting. I'm reexplaining where I am. And that to me is a direct result of that kind of channel-centric thinking, where all of my business logic ends up embedded in, "Well hey, we're going to build a cool chatbot. "And now we're going to build a cool chat system. "And by the way, "we're going to keep our contact centers running." But I'm not thinking holistically about the customer experience. And that's why we think this center-out approach is so important, because I want to go below the channel. And I want to think about that customer journey. What's the outcome I'm trying to get to? In the case of my interaction, I was just trying to increase my bandwidth so that I could do events like this, right? What's that outcome that I'm trying to get to and how do I get the customer to that outcome in a way that's as efficient for the business and as easy for the customer as possible regardless of what channel they're on. And I think that's a little bit of a new way of thinking. And again, it means thinking not just about the customer goal, but having an opinion, whether you are a business leader or an IT person, about where that logic belongs in your architecture. >> So, Adrian. Don just described the sort of bot and human experience, which mimics a lot of the human experience that we've all touched in the past. So, but the customer journey that Don talked about isn't necessarily one journey. There's multiple journeys. So what's your take on how organizations can do better with that kind of service. >> Well I think you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, actually during the summer I was talking, I was listening to Paul Greenberg talk about the future of customer service. And Paul said something that I think was really straightforward but really insightful. He said, "Look, organizations think about customer journeys "but customers don't think about journeys "in the way that organizations do. "They think discontinuously." So it's like, "I'm going to go to channel one, "and then channel three, and then channel four, "and then channel five, and then back to channel two. "And then back to channel five again." And they expect those conversations to be picked up across those different channels. And so I think what we've got to do is develop, as Don said, build an architecture that is, that works around trying to support the different journeys but allows that flexibility and that adaptability for customers to jump around and to have one of those continuous but disconnected conversations. But it's up to us to try and connect them all, to deliver the service and experience that the customers actually want. >> Now Shelly, a lot of the customer experience actually starts with the employees, and employees don't like when the customer is yelling at them saying, "I just answered all those questions. "Why do I have to answer them again?" So you've, at your firm, you guys have written a lot about this, you've thought a lot about it, you have some data I know you shared on theCUBE one time that 80% of employees are disengaged. And so, that affects the customer experience, doesn't it? >> Yeah it does, you know. And I think that when I'm listening to Don's explanation about his cable company, I'm having flashbacks to what feels like hundreds of my own experiences. And you're just thinking, "This does not have to be this complicated!" You know, ten years ago that same thing that Don just described happened with phone calls. You know, you called one person and they passed you off to somebody else, and they passed you off to somebody else, and you were equally as frustrated as a customer. Now what's happening a lot of times is that we're plugging technology in, like a chat bot, that's supposed to make things better but we're not developing a system and processes throughout our organization, and also change management, what do I want to say, programs within the organization and so we're kind of forgetting all of those things. So what's happening is that we're still having customers having those same experiences that are a decade old, and technology is part of the mix. And it really shouldn't be that way. And so, one thing that I really enjoyed, speaking about employees, was listening to Rich Gilbert from Aflac. And he was talking about when you're moving from legacy processes to new ones, you have to plan for and invest in change management. And we talk about this all the time here at Futurum, you know technology alone is never the answer. It's technology plus people. And so you have to invest in people, you have to invest in their training in order to be able to support and manage change and to drive change. And I think one really important part of that equation is also listening to your employees and getting their feedback, and making them part of the process. Because when they are truly on your front lines, dealing with customers, many times dealing with stressed, upset, frustrated customers, you know, they have a lot of insights. And sometimes we don't bring them into those conversations, certainly early enough in the process to help, to let them help guide us in terms of the solutions and the processes that we put in place. I think that's really important. >> Yeah, a lot of-- >> Shelly, I think-- >> If I may, a lot of the frustration with some employees sometimes is those processes change, and they're unknown going into it. We saw that with COVID, Don. And so, your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the environment employees are working in is changing rapidly. We've got a customer, a large telecommunications company in the UK where their customer service requests are now being handled by about 4,000 employees pulled from their marketing department working distributed because that's the world that we're in. And the thing I was going to say in response to Shelly is, Alan mentioned in his keynote this idea of design thinking. And one of the reasons why I think that's so important is that it's actually about giving the people on the front lines a voice. It's a format for engaging the employees who actually know the day-to-day experiences of the customers, the day-to-day experiences of a customer service agent, and pulling them into the solution. How do we develop the systems, how do we rethink our processing, how does that need to plug into the various channels that we have? And that's why a lot of our focus is not just on the customer service technology, but the underlying low code platform that allows us to build those processes and those chunks of the customer journey. We often refer to them as "microjourneys" that lead to a specific outcome. And if you're using a low code based platform, something that allows anybody to come in and define that process, you can actually pull employees from the front lines and put them directly on your project teams. And all of a sudden you get better engagement but you also get this incredible insight flowing into what you're doing because you're talking to the people who live this day in and day out. >> Well and when you have-- >> So let's stay on this for a second, if we can. Shelly, go ahead please. >> Sure. When you have a chance to talk with those people, to talk with those front line employees who are having an opportunity to work with low code, no code, they get so excited about it and their jobs are completely, the way they think about their jobs and their contribution to the company, and their contribution to the customer, and the customer experience, is just so wonderful to see. And it's such an easy thing to do, so I think that that's really a critical part of the equation as it relates to success with these programs. >> Yeah, staying close to the customer-- >> Can I jump in? >> Yeah, please Adrian. >> Can I jump in on that a little, a second. I think Shelly, you're absolutely right. I think that it's a really simple thing. You talk about engagement. And one of the key parts of engagement, it seems to me, is that, is giving people a voice and making them feel important and feel heard. And so to go and ask for their opinion and to help them get involved and make a difference to the work that they do, the outcomes that their customers receive, and the overall productivity and efficiency, can only have a positive impact. And it's almost like, it feels self-evident that you'd do that but unfortunately it's not very common. >> Right. It does feel self-evident. But we miss on that front a lot. >> So I want to ask, I'm going to come back to, we talked about people process, we'll come back to that. But I want to talk about the tech. You guys announced, the big announcement was the Pega Process Fabric. You talked about that, Don, as a platform for digital platforms. You've got all these cool microservices and dynamic APIs and being able to compose on the fly, so some pretty cool stuff there. I wonder, with the virtual event, you know, with the physical event you've got the hallway traffic, you talk to people and you get face-to-face reactions. Were you able to get your kind of real-time reactions to the announcement? What was that like? Share with us please. >> Yeah, so, we got well over 1,000 questions in during the event and a lot of them were either about Process Fabric or comments about it. So I think people are definitely excited about this. And when you strip away all of the buzzwords around microservices and cloud, et cetera, I think what we're really getting at here is that work is going to be increasingly more distributed. We are living proof of that right now, the four of us all coming here from different studios. But work is going to be distributed for a bunch of reasons. Because people are more distributed, because organizations increasingly are building customer journeys that aren't just inside their walls, but are connected to the partners and their ecosystem. I'm a bank but I may, as part of my mortgage process, connect somebody up to a home insurer. And all of a sudden the home buying process goes beyond my four walls. And then finally, as you get all of these employees engaged with building their low code apps and being citizen developers, you want to let the 1,000 flowers to bloom but you also need a way to connect that all back together. And Process Fabric is about putting the technology in place to allow us to take these distributed bits of work that we need to do and weave them together into experiences that are coherent for a customer and easy for an employee to navigate. Because I think it's going to be really really important that we do that. And even as we take our systems and break them up into microservices, well customers don't interact with microservices. Customers interact with journeys, with experiences, with the processes you lay out, and making sure we can connect that up together into something that feels easy for the customer and the employee, and gets them to that result they want quickly, that's what the vision of Process Fabric is all about. >> You know, it strikes me, I'm checking my notes here. You guys talked about a couple of examples. One was, I think you talked about the car as sort of a mobility experience, maybe, you know, it makes me wonder with all this AI and autonomous vehicle stuff going on, at what point is owning and driving your own vehicle really going to be not the norm anymore? But you talked about this totally transformed, sorry to use that word, but experience around autos. And certainly financial services is maybe a little bit more near-term. But I wonder Shelly, Futurum, you know, you guys look ahead, how far can we actually go with AI in this realm? >> Well, I think we can go pretty far and I think it'll happen pretty fast. And I think that we're seeing that already in terms of what happened when we had the Coronavirus COVID-19, and of course we're still navigating through that, is that all of a sudden things that we talked about doing, or thought about doing, or planned doing, you know later on in this year or 2021, we had to do all of those things immediately. And so again, it is kind of like ripping the Bandaid off. And we're finding that AI plays a tremendously important role in relieving the workload on the frontline workers, and being able to integrate empathy into decision making. And you know, I go back to, I remember when you all first rolled out the empathy part of your platform, Don, and just watching a demo on that of how you can slide this empathy meter to be warmer, and see in true dollars and cents over time the impact of treating your customers with more empathy, what that delivers to a company. And I think that AI that continues to build and learn and again, what we're having right now, is we're having this gigantic volume of needs, of conversation, of all these transactions that need to happen at once, and great volumes make for better outcomes as it relates to artificial intelligence and how learning can happen more quickly over time. So I think that it's, we're definitely going to see more use of AI more rapidly than we might've seen it before, and I don't think that's going to slow down, at all. Certainly, I mean there's no reason for it to slow down. The benefits are tremendous. The benefits are tremendous, and let me step back and say, following a conversation with Rob Walker on responsible AI, that's a whole different ball of wax. And I think that's something that Pega has really embraced and planted a flag in. So I think that we'll see great things ahead with AI, and I think that we'll see the Pega team really leading as it relates to ethical AI. And I think that's tremendously important as well. >> Well that's the other side of the coin, you know. I asked how far can we go and I guess you're alluding to how far should we go. But Adrian, we also heard about agility and empathy. I mean, I want an empathic service provider. Are agility and empathy related to customer service, and how so? >> Well, David, I think that's a great question. I think that, you talk about agility and talk about empathy, and I think the thing is, what we probably know from our own experience is that being empathetic is sometimes going to be really hard. And it takes time, and it takes practice to actually get better at it. It's almost like a new habit. Some people are naturally better at it than others. But you know, organizationally, I talk about that we need to almost build, almost like an empathetic musculature at an organizational level if we're going to achieve this. And it can be aided by technology, but we, when we develop new muscles it takes time. And sometimes you go through a bit of pain in doing that. So I think that's where the agility comes in, is that we have to test and learn and try new things, be willing to get things wrong and then correct, and then kind of move on. And then learn from these kind of things. And so I think the agility and empathy, it does go hand in hand and it's something that will drive growth and increasing empathetic interactions as we go forward. But I think it's also, just to build on Shelly's point, I think you're absolutely right that Pega has been leading the way in this sort of dimension, in terms of its T-switch and its empathetic advisor. But now the ethical AI testing or the ethical bias testing adds a dimension to that to make sure it's not just about all horsepower, but being able to make sure that you can steer your car. To use your analogy. >> So AI's coming whether we like it or not. Right, Shelly? Go ahead. >> It is. One real quick real world example here is, you know, okay so we have this time when a lot of consumers are furloughed. Out of work. Stressed about finances. And we have a lot of Pega's customers are in the financial services space. Some of the systems that they've established, they've developed over time, the processes they've developed over time is, "Oh, I'm talking with Shelly Kramer and she has a "blah-blah-blah account here. "And this would be a great time to sell her on "this additional service," or whatever. And when you can, so that was our process yesterday. But when you're working with an empathic mindset and you are also needing to be incredibly agile because of current circumstances and situations, your technology, the platform that you're using, can allow you to go, "Okay I'm dealing "with a really stressed customer. "This is not the best time "to offer any additional services." Instead what we need to ask is this series of questions: "How can we help?" Or, "Here are some options." Or whatever. And I think that it's little tweaks like that that can help you in the customer service realm be more agile, be more empathetic, and really deliver an amazing customer experience as a result. And that's the technology. >> If I could just add to that. Alan mentioned in his keynote a specific example, which is Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And they were able, multiple times this year, once during the Australian wildfires and then again in response to the COVID crisis, to completely shift and turn on a dime how they interacted with their customer, and to move from a prioritization of maybe selling things to a prioritization of responding to a customer need. And maybe offering payment deferrals or assistance to a customer. But back to what we were talking about earlier, that agility only happened because they didn't have the logic for that embedded in all their channels. They had it centralized. They had it in a common brain that allowed them to make that change in one place and instantly propagate it to all of the 18 different channels in which they touch their customer. And so, being able to have agility and that empathy, to my mind, is explicitly tied to that concept of a center-out business architecture that Alan was talking about. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And, you know, this leads to discussion about automation, and again, how far can we go, how far should we go? Don, you've been interviewed many many times, like any tech executive, about the impact of AI on jobs. And, you know, the typical response of course is, "No, we want augmentation." But the reality is, machines have always replaced humans it's just, now it's the first time in terms of cognitive function. So it's a little different for us this time around. But it's clear, as I said, AI is coming whether we like it or not. Automation is very clearly on the top of people's minds. So how do you guys see the evolution of automation, the injection of automation into applications, the ubiquity of automations coming in this next decade? Shelly, let's start with you. >> You know, I was thinking you were going to ask Don that question so I'm just listening and listening. (laughing) >> Okay, well we can go with Don, that's-- >> No I'm happy to answer it. It's fine, it just wasn't what I expected. You know, we are really immersed in the automation space. So I very much see the concerns that people on the front line have, that automation is going to replace them. And the reality of it is, if a job that someone does can be automated, it will be automated. It makes sense. It makes good business sense to do that. And I think that what we are looking at from a business agility standpoint, from a business resilience standpoint, from a business survival standpoint, is really how can we deliver most effectively to serve the needs of our customers. Period. And how we can do that quickly and efficiently and without frustration and in a way that is cost effective. All of those things play into what makes a successful business today, as well as what keeps employees, I'm sorry, as well as what keeps customers served, loyal, staying around. I think that we live in a time where customer loyalty is fleeting. And so I think that smart businesses have to look at how do we deepen the relationships that we have with customers? How can we use automation to do that? And the thing about it, you know, I'll go back to the example that Don gave about his cable company that all of us have lived through. It's just like, "Oh my gosh. "There's got to be a better way." So compare that to, and I'm sure all of us can think of an experience where you had to deal with a customer service situation in some way or another, and it was the most awesome thing ever. And you walked away from it and you just went, "Oh my gosh. I know I was talking to a bot here or there." Or, "I know I was doing this, but that solved my problem. "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't wait to buy something from this company again!" You know what I'm saying? And that's really, I think, the role that automation can play. Is that it can really help deepen existing relationships with our customers, and help us serve them better. And it can also help our employees do things that are more interesting and that are more relevant to the business. And I think that that's important too. So, yes, jobs will go. Yes, automation will slide into places where we've done things manually and repetitive processes before, but I think that's a good thing. >> So, we've got to end it shortly here but I'll give you guys each a last opportunity to chime in. And Adrian, I want to start with you. I invoked the T-word before, transformation, a kind of tongue-in-cheek joking because I know it's not your favorite word. But it is the industry's favorite word. Thinking ahead for the future, we've talked about AI, we've talked about automation, people, process and tech. What do you see as the future state of customer experience, this mix of human and machine? What do we have to look forward to? >> So I think that, first of all, let me tackle the transformation thing. I mean, I remember talking about this with Duncan Macdonald who is the CIO across at UPC, which is one of Pega's customers, on my podcast there the other week. And he talked about, he's the cosponsor of a three year digital transformation program. But then he appended the description of that by saying it's a transformation program that will never end. That's the thing that I think about, because actually, if you think about what we're talking about here, we're not transforming to anything in particular, you know. It's not like going from here to there. And actually, the thing that I think we need to start thinking about is, rather than transformation we actually need to think about an evolution. And adopting an evolutionary state. And we talked about being responsive. We talked about being adaptable. We talked about being agile. We talk about testing and learning and all these different sort of things, that's evolutionary, right? It's not transformational, it's evolutionary. If you think about Charles Darwin and the theory of the species, that's an evolutionary process. And there's a quote, as you've mentioned I authored this book called "Punk CX," there's a quote that I use in the book which is taken from a Bad Religion song called "No Control" and it's called, "There is no vestige of a beginning, "and no prospect of an end." And that quote comes from a 1788 book by James Hutton, which was one of the first treaties on geology, and what he found through all these studies was actually, the formation of the earth and its continuous formation, there is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. It's a continuous process. And I think that's what we've got to embrace is that actually change is constant. And as Alan says, you have to build for change and be ready for change. And have the right sort of culture, the right sort of business architecture, the right sort of technology to enable that. Because the world is getting faster and it is getting more competitive. This is probably not the last crisis that we will face. And so, like in most evolutionary things, it wasn't the fittest and the strongest that survived, it was the ones that were most adaptable that survived. And I think that's the kind of thing I want to land on, is actually how, it's the ones that kind of grasp that, grasp that whole concept are the ones that are going to succeed out of this. And, what they will do will be... We can't even imagine what they're going to do right now. >> And, thank you. And Shelly, it's not only responding to, as Adrian was saying, to crisis, but it's also being in a position to very rapidly take advantage of opportunities and that capability is going to be important. You guys are futurists, it's in the name. Your thoughts? >> Well I think that, you know, Adrian's comments were incredibly salient, as always. And I think that-- >> Thank you. >> The thing that this particular crisis that we are navigating through today has in many ways been bad, but in other ways, I think it's been incredibly good. Because it has forced us, in a way that we really haven't had to deal with before, to act quickly, to think quickly, to rethink and to embrace change. Oh, we've got to work from home! Oh, we've got 20 people that need to work from home, we have 20,000 people that need to work from home. What technology do we need? How do we take care of our customers? All of these things we've had to figure out in overdrive. And humans, generally speaking, aren't great at change. But what we are forced to do as a result of this pandemic is change. And rethink everything. And I think that, you know, the point about transformation not being a beginning and an end, we are never, ever, ever done. It is evolutionary and I think that as we look to the future and to one of your comments, we are going faster with more exciting technology solutions out there, with people who are incredibly smart, and so I think that it's exciting and I think that all we are going to see is more and more and more change, and I think it will be a time of great resilience, and we'll see some businesses survive and thrive, and we'll see other businesses not survive. But that's been our norm as well, so I think it's really, I think we have some things to thank this pandemic for. Which is kind of weird, but I also try to be fairly optimistic. But I do, I think we've learned a lot and I think we've seen some really amazing exciting things from businesses who have done this. >> Well thanks for sharing that silver lining, Shelly. And then, Don, I'm going to ask you to bring us to the finish line. And I'm going to close my final question to you, or pose it. You guys had the wrecking ball, and I've certainly observed, when it comes to things like digital transformations, or whatever you want to call it, that there was real complacency, and you showed that cartoon with the wrecking ball saying, "Ehh not in my life, not on my watch. "We're doing fine." Well, this pandemic has clearly changed people's thinking, automation is really top of mind now at executive. So you guys are in a good spot from that standpoint. But your final thoughts, please? >> Yeah, I mean, I want to concur with what Adrian and Shelly said and if I can drop another rock quote in there. This one is from Bob Dylan. And Dylan famously said, "The times they are a changing." But the quote that I keep on my wall is one that he tossed off during an interview where he said, "I accept chaos. "I'm not sure if it accepts me." But I think digital transformation looks a lot less like that butterfly emerging from a cocoon to go off happy to smell the flowers, and looks much more like accepting that we are in a world of constant and unpredictable change. And I think one of the things that the COVID crisis has done is sort of snapped us awake to that world. I was talking to the CIO of a large media company who is one of our customers, and he brought up the fact, you know, like Croom said, "We're all agile now. "I've been talking about five years, "trying to get this company to operate in an agile way, "and all of a sudden we had to do it. "We had no choice, we had to respond, "we had to try new things, we had to fail fast." And my hope is, as we think about what customer engagement and automation and business efficiency looks like in the future, we keep that mindset of trying new things and continuously adapting. Evolving. At the end of the day, our company's brand promise is, "Build for change." And we chose that because we think that that's what organizations, the one thing they can design for. They can design for a future that will continue to change. And if you put the right architecture in place, if you take that center-out mindset, you can support those immediate needs, but set yourself up for a future of continuous change and continuous evolution and adaptation. >> Well guys, I'll quote somebody less famous. Jeff Frick, who said, "The answer to every question "lives somewhere in a CUBE interview." and you guys have given us a lot of answers. I really appreciate your time. I hope that next year at PegaWorld iNspire we can see each other face-to-face and do some live interviews. But really appreciate the insights and all your good work. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante and our coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Be right back, right after this short break. (lighthearted music)

>>This is Dave Volante, and I want to tell you about an event we're holding this week with support from you. I path. As you know, we've been reporting on the automation space and the impact of Cove it. Earlier this month, you I path had a big launch, and we're able to get some of their execs to come on the Cube and talk about the future of automation. So on Thursday, May 21st 12 noon, Eastern time, we're running a program on the cube dot net. It's going to start with my independent breaking analysis, talking about some of the r p a challenges and updating you on the market. And we'll be looking at the latest CTR spending data at commenting on the competition with a particular focus on your path, but also automation anywhere, Blue Prism and even some thoughts on Pegasystems. We then have four U i path exact execs that we've interviewed, including CMO, Bobby Patrick, Ted Kumar, who's their new head of products talking about software architectures. We also interviewed Erik Madkour about R p a in the cloud, and we close with Brendan not well, I'm gonna ask to defend you I pass vision of a robot for every person. Very ambitious. And I'm gonna push Brendan a little bit on how much? Israel versus marketing hype. So go the cube dot net. Look for the U I path event that you can add to your calendar. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you there.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are joined by Craig Le Clair, he is the vice president of Forrester and also the author of the book "Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night: How AI and Automation will Restructure the Workforce". Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Craig: Thank you! Thanks for having me. >> And congratulations, it's already made #11 on Amazon's AI and automation bestseller list. >> Wow, it's not quite best seller but OK, that's great, thank you, it's doing well. >> So if anyone calls your book a bestseller you just take 'em on that. >> (Craig) I'll just take it. >> So it is a, it's a bleak story right now, I mean there's a lot, there's so many changes going on in the workforce and there's so much anxiety on the part of workers that they're going to lose their job that all these technologies are going to take away their their livelihood, so how are companies managing this? Are they managing it well, would you say, or is the anxiety misplaced? Give us an overview. >> Yeah, so I don't think companies are really aware of the broader implications of the automation and AI that's developing. They tend to focus on the things that companies focus on. They focus on more efficiency and productivity and so forth, and underlying that is this digital anxiety that we call it, and the fact that a lot of the jobs that we, particularly the middle class have, the working class have, are the targets of the invisible robots, and that's really the point of the invisible robot book is that there's a lot of media attention on the hardware aspects of robotics, in fact the Super Bowl last year had 10 commercials with hardware robots. But if you look at this conference you look at the number of people here. What are these people doing? They're going back to their companies and saying "You know, this UiPath, and there are other providers "in the market, we can build software robotics, "we can build bots to do some of these tasks "that a lot of these humans are doing." And while there is elevation of the human capability in spirit for many of them, there's also a comfort level in employees that do things that they have control over, have incited. And when you extract those you are left with a series of more exciting moments, perhaps, but it's not going to make you more relaxed as an employee. And then you look at the overall job numbers, and our estimates are very conservative compared to some of the other reports, that are 45, 50% of workers over 10 years being displaced. We think it's 16%, but still, when you look at just the US numbers, that's of 160 workers today, 160 million workers, that's a lot of people. >> Rebecca: It is indeed. >> So, displaced and then sort of re-targeted or? >> A percentage, >> Vaporized. >> No, no, well the 16% is the automation, is the net loss of jobs. Now in that, automation's expensive, so there are a tremendous number of new jobs that are created by the work that's been going on here. So we have a formula to calculate that for these 12 different work personas, and the work personas have different relationships to AI and automation, so you would be crossed so many knowledge workers and be very well protected for a long time. >> Rebecca: All right, there we go. >> So you're good, but... for coordinators, people that have clip boards in their hands, for those who work in cubicles, they're going to have a lot of people leaving those cubicles that aren't going to be able to migrate to other personas. And so we have a changed management issue, we need to start driving more education from the workplace through certification, and that's a really critical thing I'll talk about tomorrow, that the refresh of technology with automation is 18 months to 24 months, you can't depend on traditional education to keep up, so we need a different way to look at training and education and for many it's going to be a much better life, but there's going to be many that it will not be. >> What was the time frame for your net 16% loss? >> 10 years. >> 10 years, okay, to me a lower net loss number makes sense, and in fact if you can elongate your timeline it probably shows a net job creation, you can make that argument anyway I don't know if you. >> Craig: It's being made. >> Dave: You don't buy it though? >> I don't, the world economic foundation and others are having huge net new numbers for jobs based on AI. Some of the large integration companies that want to build AI platforms for you are talking about trillions of dollars that would be added value to the world economy, I just don't buy it, and you know the reason I wrote this book was because what's going on here is very quietly preparing to displace a lot of efforts starting with relatively small tasks, it's called task automation but then expanding to more and more work and eventually adding a level of intelligence to the task automation going on here, that's going to take a lot of jobs. And for most of those 20 million cubicle workers, they have high school educations. You know, the bigger problem is this level of anxiety, you know, you go into almost any bookstore and there's a whole section For Dummy books, and it's not, is it because we have this sort of cognitive recession or because there's a, it's because the world's getting faster and more complicated. And unless you have the digital skills to adapt to that, the digital skills gap is growing. And we need to have as much focus that you see here and energy on building automation. We need to have an equal amount of focus on the societal problems. >> Yeah, it really comes down to education, too. I mean if I were able to snap my fingers and transform the educational system, there might be a different outcome but that's very unlikely to happen. Craig, one of the things we talked about last year was you had made the statement that some of these moonshot digital transformations aren't happening for a variety of reasons but our PA is kind of a practical way to achieve automation. >> Still very true. >> Have you seen sort of a greater awareness in your client base that, "You know, hey, maybe we should dial down "some of these moonshots and just try to "pick some clear winners." >> Yeah, we have a number of prediction reports coming out from Forrester and they're all saying basically that. I'm doing reports on what I'm calling the intelligent process automation market and that's really our PA plus AI, but not all aspects of AI. You know, it's AI that you can see in ROI around, you know it's AI that deals with unstructured documents and content and email. It's not the moonshot, more transformative AI that we have been very focused on for a number of years. Now all of that's very very important. You're not going to transform your business by doing task automation even if it's a little more intelligent and handles some decision management, you still need to think about "How do I instantiate "my business algorithmically," with AI that's going to make predictions and move decision management and change the customer experience. All that's still true, as true as it was in 2014/2015, we're just seeing a more realistic pull back in terms of the invested profile. >> Well, and so we've been talking about that all day, it is taking automating processes that have been around for a long time, and you, I think identified this as one of the potential blockers before, if you get old processes that are legacy and I think you, you gave the story of "Hey, I flew out here "on American Airlines in the old SABRE system." How old are those processes, you know? We've, you know the old term "paving the cow path." So the question is, given all the hype around RPA, the valuations, et cetera, what role do you see RPA having in those sort of transformative use cases? >> Well here's the interesting thing that was, I think, somewhat accidental by the, you know what really changed from having simple desktop automation? Well you needed some place to house and essentially manage that automation, so the RPA platforms had to build a central management capability. UiPath calls that the orchestrator, others call it the control tower, but when you think of all the categories of AI none of them have a orchestration capability, so the ability to use events to link in machine intelligence and dispatch digital workers or task automation to coordinate various AI building blocks as we call them and apply it to a use case, that orchestration ability is pretty unique to the RPA platforms. So the sort of secret value of RPA is not in everything that's being talked about here but eventually is going to be as a coordinating mechanism for bringing together machine learning that'll begin in the cloud, conversational intelligence that might be in Google. Having the RPA bots work in conjunction with those. >> But if I recall, I mean that's something that you pointed out last year as well that RPA today struggles with unstructured data that... >> Well it can't do it. >> You're right, we've talked about it NLP versus RPA, RPA, given structured data, I can go after it. >> That's the RPA plus AI bit, though. I mean, you take text analytics layer, and you combine it with RPA bots and now you have the unstructured capability plus the structured capability that RPA does so well. And, with the combination of the two, you can reach. I think what the industry needs to do or the buyers of RPA need to take the pressure off this immediacy of the ROI. In a sense, that's what's driven the value. I can deploy something, I can get value in a few months but, to really make it effective and transformative you need to combine it with these AI components, that's going to take a little longer, so this sort of impatience that you see in a lot of companies, they should really step back and take a look at the more end to end capabilities and take a little hit on the ROI immediately so that you can do that. >> No, I mean I can definitely see a step function, okay, great, we've absorbed that value, we get the quick ROI, but there's, to your point there's got to be some patient capital to allow you to truly transform in order for RPA, I don't want to put words in your mouth, to live up to the hype. >> Absolutely, I totally agree. And I am still very, very high on the market, I think it's going to do extremely well. >> Well, if you look at the spending data, it's quite interesting. I mean RPA as a category is off the charts. You know, UiPath, from the, your last wave kind of took the lead but, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism spending, even in traditional incumbents, maybe not even RPA, maybe more "process automation" like Pegasystems. Their spending data suggests that this is the rising tide lifting all boats so, my question to you is, how do you see this all shaking out? I mean, huge evaluations, the bankers are swarming around. You saw them in the media yesterday. You know, at some point there's got to be a winner takes most. The number two guy will do pretty well and then everybody else kind of consolidates. What's your outlook? >> Well, there are a lot of emerging players coming into the market and, part of my life is having to fend them off and talk to them, and the RPA wave is coming out in a week. It's going to have four new players in it. Companies like SAP. >> Well, they acquired a company right? >> They acquired and they built internally, and have some interesting approaches to the market. So you are going to see the big players come into the market. Others I won't mention that'll be in the market in a month It's getting a lot of attention. But also I think that there are domains, business domains that, the different platforms can start to specialize in. The majors, the UiPaths to the world, will be horizontal and remain that way. And depend on partners to tailor it for a particular application area. But you're going to see RPA companies come into the testing market, software testing market. You're going to see them come into the contact centers to deal with attended mode in more sophisticated ways perhaps than those that don't have that background. You're going to see tailored robots that are going to be in these robot communities that are springing up. That'll give a lot of juice to others to come into the market. >> And like you say you're going to see, we've talked about this as well Rebecca, the best of breed versus the suite, right? Whether its SAP, Inforce talking about it, I'm sure Oracle will throw its hat in the ring I mean, why not, right? Hey, we have that too. >> Well, if you're those companies that the RPA bots are feasting on, they're slowing the upgrades to your core platforms, in some ways making them less relevant, because their argument has been, let's integrate, you get self integration when you buy SAP, when you buy Oracle, when you buy these big platforms. Well, the bots actually make that argument less powerful because you can use the bots to give you that integration, as a layer, and so they're going to have to come up with some different stories I think if they're going to continue to move forward on their platforms, move them to the cloud and so forth. >> So, finally, your best advice for workers in this new landscape and how it is going to alter their working lives. And also, your best advice for companies and managers who are, as you said, maybe not quite, they're grappling with this issue but maybe not and they're not being disingenuous to workers about who's going to lose their jobs, but this idea of as they're coming to terms with understanding quite all of the implications of this new world. >> Yeah, I know, I'm presenting data tomorrow that shows that organizations, employees, and leaders are not ready and I have data to show that. They're not understanding it. My best advice, I love the concept of, it's not a Forrester concept, it's called constructive ambition. This is the ability in an employee to want to go a little bit out of the box, and learn, and to challenge themselves, and move into more digital to close that digital skills gap. And, we have to get better at, companies need to get better at identifying constructive ambition in people they're hiring, and also, ways to draw it out. And to walk these employees up the mountain in a way that's good for their career and good for the company. I can tell you, I'll tell a few stories on the main stage last night, I interviewed Walmart employees and machinists that could no longer deal with their machine because they had to put codes into it so they had to set it up with programming steps and the digital anxiety was such that they quit the job. So a clear lack of constructive ambition. On the other hand, a Walmart employee graduated from one of their 200 academies and was able to take on more and more responsibility. Somebody with no high school degree at all. She said, "I've never graduated "from anything in my life. "My kids have never seen me "succeed at anything, and I got this certification "from Walmart that said that I was doing this level "of standard work and that felt really, really good." So, you know, we, companies can take a different view towards this but they have to have some model of future of work of what it's going to look like so they can take a more strategic view. >> Well Craig, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really great talk. Another plug for the book, "Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night" you can buy it on Amazon. >> Craig: Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. (techno music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering AWS reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. It was two cubes. Live coverage in Boston, Massachusetts, for Amazon Web services reinforces A W s, his first inaugural conference around security, cloud security and all the benefits of security vendors of bringing. We're here with a man who runs the marketplace and more. Dave McCann Cube, alumni vice president of migration, marketplace and control surfaces. That's a new tail you were that you have here since the last time we talked. Lots changed. Give us the update. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great to be back, ma'am. Believe it's seven months of every event. >> Feels like this. Seven years. You know, you've got a lot new things happening. >> We do >> explain. You have new responsibility. You got the marketplace, which we talked about a great product solutions. What else do you have? >> So we've obviously been expanding our service portfolio, right? So either us is launching. New service is all the time. We have a set of service is a road in the migration of software. So I run. No, the immigration Service's team and interesting. We were sitting in Boston, and that's actually headquartered 800 yards down the road. So there's a set of surfaces around the tools to help you as a CEO. Move your applications onto the clothes. Marketplace is obviously where we want you to find short where you need to buy. And then once you get into the topic of governance, we had one product called Service Catalog and reinvent. We announced a new product. That was a preview called Control. Yesterday we went to G A full availability off control, Terror and Control term service catalog together are in the government space, but we're calling them control service is because it's around controlling the access off teams to particular resources. So that's control service. >> What people moving into the cloud and give us a sense of the the workload. I know you see everything but any patterns that you can see a >> lot of patterns and merging and migration, and they are very industry specific. But there are some common patterns, so you know we're doing migrations and frozen companies were weighed and professional service is run by. Todd Weatherby is engaged in hundreds of those migrations. But we also have no over 70 partners that we've certified of migration partners. Migration partners are doing three times as many migrations as our old professional service is. Team are doing so in collection. There's a lot going on there, one of the common patterns. First of all, everybody is moved a Web development other websites have done. They're all running on the AWS know what they're doing is they're modernizing new applications. So the building in Europe or bring enough over moving onto containers. So it was a lie that ran on a sever server on. As they move into the clothes, they're gonna reshape the throw away. Some of the court brief the court up into micro service is on. Deploy out, Let's see on E. C s, which is continuing. There's a lot of application organization, and then on the migration side, we're seeing applications clearly were migrating a lost a lot of ASAP. So the big partners like Deloitte and Accenture are doing a C P migrations, and we've done a lot of ASAP migrations. And then there are other business applications are being moved with particular software vendors. You know there's a company here in Boston called Pegasystems. They do a world leading workflow platform. We've worked with Pagan, and we have migrated loss of paga warped floors in dozens of paying customers up on the float. >> You innovated on the marketplace, which is where people buy so they can contract with software. So now you got moving to the cloud, buying on the cloud, consuming the cloud and then governing it and managing that aspect all under one cohesive unit. That's you. Is that good? >> Yeah, it's a good way to think about it. It's a san of engineering teams with Coleman purpose for the customer. So you know, one of the things we do AWS is we innovate a lot, and then we organize the engineering teams around a common customer needs. So we said, above all of the computer stories service is on. We pay attention to the application layer. We described the application, So if you think of a migration service is says, I've actually got a service called Discovery, I crawl over your servers and I find what you have way. Then what we do is we have a tool that says, Are you gonna bring and move the till. So you have to build a business case. We just bought a company in Canada called TSA Logic. They had a Super Two for building a business case that said, what would this absolutely running with either of us. >> So is the need of the business case. What's the courtney that you guys have focused on? What was that? >> So, interestingly, we run more Windows Server and the clothes when Microsoft. So you actually have to business keys here. So many windows servers are running on print. What does it look like when a run on either the U. S. And T s so logic? Really good, too. And we find our customers using it. That says, Here's your own prim Windows server configuration with an app on run the mortal What would it look like when it runs on AWS? >> But why would you just do that with a spreadsheet? What? What is the T s so logic do that you couldn't do especially >> well? First of all, you want to make a simple too Somebody has to go run a spreadsheet. They've turned it into a tool that a business years Ercan used a sales person you could use on. They've built on top of a database. So it's got a rich set of choices. You are richer than you put in. A special with a U IE is intuitive, and you're gonna learn it in 20 minutes. I'm not gonna have you made up >> this date in their best practice things like that that you can draw a library >> of what's going down, and it keeps the data store of all the ones we've done. So we're turning that into two. Were giving Old Toller solution architect. >> Well, you got a good thing going on with the marketplace. Good to see you wrapping around those needs there. I gotta ask for the marketplace. Just give us the latest stats. How many subscriptions air in the marketplace these days? What's the overall number in the marketplace? It's >> pretty exciting. Way decided just at San Francisco to announce that we now have over 1,000,000 active subscriptions in the marketplace, which is a main boggling number on its own 1,000,000 subscriptions. Ice of Scrape. Within those subscriptions, we've got over 240 foes and active accounts, you know, and the audience doors you could be an enterprise with 100 cases and in an enterprise. What we typically see is that there are seven or eight teams that are buying or using software, so we'll have seven or eight accounts that have the right to subscribe. So you could be a one team and you're in another team you're buying B I tools. You're buying security tools. So those accounts on what? We're announcing the show for the first time ever. Its security is we have over 100,000 security subscriptions. That's a while. That's a big number. Some companies only have 100 customers, and the market, please. Our customers are switched on 100,000 security. So >> many product listings is that roughly it's just security security. At 300 >> there's over 100 listings. Thing is a product with a price okay on a vendor could be Let's see Paolo off networks or crowdstrike or trains or semantic or McAfee or a brand new company like Twist located of Israel. These companies might have one offer or 20 offers, so we have over 800 offers from over 300. Vendors were having new vendors every week. >> That's the next question. How many security app developers are eyes? Do you have over 300? 300? Okay. About 100. Anyway, I heard >> this morning from Gartner that they believe that are over 1000 security vendors. So I'm only 30% done. I got a little work >> tonight. How >> do you >> govern all this stuff? I was a customer. Sort of Make sure that they're in compliance. >> Great question. Steven Smith yesterday was talking about governance once she moved things on the clothes. It's very elastic. You could be running it today, not running a tomato, running it in I d running in Sydney. So it's easy to fire up running everywhere. So how did the governance team of a company nor watch running where you know, you get into tagging, everything has to be tagged. Everything has to have a cord attached to it. And then you do want to control who gets to use what I may have bought about a cuter appliance. But I don't know that I gave you rates to use it, right, so we could have border on behalf of the company. But I need to grant you access. So we launched a couple of years ago. Service catalog is our first governance to and yesterday we went into full release over new to call the control tower. >> Right. What you announced way reinvents >> preview. And yesterday we went to Jenny. What control does is it Natural Owes me to set up a set of accounts. So if you think of it, your development team, you've got David Kay and tested and the product ain't your brand new to the company. I'm a little worried. What, you're going to get up. You >> don't want to give him the keys to the kingdom, >> so I'm actually going to grant you access to a set of resources, and then I'm gonna apply some rules, or what we call God reels is your brand. You you haven't read my manual, you're in the company. So I'm gonna put a set of God reels on you to make sure that you follow our guide length >> Just training. And so is pressing the wrong button, that kind of thing. So I gotta ask you I mean, on the buying side consumption. I heard you say in a talk upstairs on Monday. You have a buyer, buyer, lead, engineering teams and cellar Let engineering, which tells me that you got a lot of innovation going on the marketplace. So the results are obviously they mention the listings. But one of the trends that's here security conference and it was proper is ecosystems importance in monetization. So back in the old days, Channel partners were a big part of the old computer industry. You're essentially going direct with service listings, which is great. How does that help the channel? Is there sinking around channel as a buyer opportunity? How do you How does that work with the market? Is what your thinking around the relationship between the scale of a simplicity and efficiency, the marketplace with the relationships the channel partners may have with their customers? And how do you bridge that together? What's the thinking >> you've overstayed? Been around a long time? >> Uh, so you have 90 Sydney? Well, the channels have been modernizes the nineties. You think about a >> long time. It's really interesting when we conceived Market please candidly. Way didn't put the channel in marketplace, and in retrospect, that was a miss. Our customers are big customers or small customers. Trust some of the resellers. Some resellers operates surely on price. Some resellers bring a lot of knowledge, even the biggest of the global 2000 Fortune 100. They have a prepared advisor. Let's take a company record. You often got 700 security engineers that are blue chip companies in America trusts or they buy the software the adoptive recommends. So mark it, please really didn't accommodate for Let's Pick another One in Europe, it would be computer center. So in the last two years we've dedicated the data separate engineering team were actually opened up. A team in a different city on their sole customer is a reseller. And so we launch this thing called Consulting Partner Private offer. And so now you're Palo. Also, for your trained, you can authorize active or serious or s h I to be the re sailor at this corporation, and they can actually negotiate the price, which is what a role resellers do. They negotiate price in terms, so we've actually true reseller >> write software for fulfillment through the marketplace. Four partners which are now customers to you now so that they could wrap service is because that's something we talk to. People in the Channel number one conversation is we love the cloud. But how do I make money and that is Service is right. They all want to wrap Service's around, So okay, you guys are delivering this. Is that my getting that right? You guys are riding a direct link in tow marketplace for partners, and they could wrap service is around there, >> will you? Seeing two things? First of all, yes. We're lowering the resale of to sell the software for absolutely. So you re sailor, you can quote software you build rebuild for you so that I become the billing partner for a serious or a billing partner for active on active can use marketplace to fulfill clothes software for their customers. Dan Burns to see you about pretty happy. You crossed the line into a second scenario, which is condone burns attached. Service is on. Clearly, that's a use case we hear usually would we hear use cases way end up through feeling that a little, little not a use case I have enabled, but we've done >> what you're working on It. We've had what the customer. How does the reseller get into the marketplace? What kind of requirements are there. Is it? Is it different than some of your other partners, or is it sort of a similar framework? >> They have to become an approved resale or so First of all, they have to be in a peon partner. I mean, we work tightly with a p N e p M screens partners for AWS. So Josh Hoffman's team Terry Wise, his team, whole part of team screen. The reseller we would only work with resellers are screened and approved by the PM Wants the AP en approved way have no set up a dedicated program team. They work with a reseller with trained them what's involved. Ultimately, however, the relationship is between Splunk in a tree sailor, a five and a three sailor named after a tree sailor or Paulo trend or Croat straight. So it's up to the I S V to tail us that hey, computer centers my reseller. I don't control that relationship. A fulfillment agent you crow strike to save resellers, and I simply have to meet that work so that I get the end customer happy. >> So your enabler in that instance, that's really no, I'm >> really an engine, even team for everybody engineer for the Iast way, engineer for the buyer. And they have to engineer for the re. So >> you have your hands in a lot of the action because you're in the middle of all this marketplace and you must do a lot of planning. I gotta ask you the question and this comes up. That kind of put on my learning all the Amazon lingo covering reinvent for eight years and covering all the different events. So you gotta raise the bar, which is an internal. You keep innovating. Andy Jassy always sucks about removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting. So what is the undifferentiated heavy lifting that you're working toe automate for your customers? >> Great questions. Right now there's probably three. We'll see what the buyer friction is, and then we'll talk about what the sale of friction is. The buyer frustration that is, undifferentiated. Heavy lifting is the interestingly, it's the team process around choosing software. So a couple of customers were on stage yesterday right on those big institutions talked about security software. But in order for an institution to buy that software, there are five groups involved. Security director is choosing the vendor, but procurement has to be involved. Andre. No procurement. We can't be left out the bit. So yesterday we did. The integration to Cooper is a procurement system. So that friction is by subscribing marketplace tied round. Match it with appeal because the p O is what goes on the ledgers with the company. A purchase order. So that has to be a match in purchase order for the marketplace subscription. And then engineers don't Tidwell engineers to always remember you didn't tag it. Hi, this finance nowhere being spent. So we're doing work on working service catalog to do more tagging. And so the buyer wants good tagging procurement integrated. So we're working on a walk slow between marketplace service catalog for procurement. >> Tiring. So you've kind of eliminated procurement or are eliminating procurement as a potential blocker, they use another. Actually, we won't be >> apart for leading procurement. VPs want their V piece of engineering to be happy. >> This is legal. Next. Actually, Greek question. We actually tackled >> legal. First, we did something called Enterprise Code tracked and our customer advisory board Two years ago, one of our buyers, one of our customers, said we're gonna be 100 vendors to deploy it. We're not doing 100 tracks. We've only got one lawyer, You know, 6000 engineers and one lawyer. Well, lawyers, good cord is quickly. So we've created a standard contract. It take stain to persuade legal cause at risk. So we've got a whole bunch of corporations adopting enterprise contract, and we're up to over 75 companies adopting enterprise contract. But legal is apartment >> so modernizing the procurement, a key goal >> procurement, legal, security, engineering. And then the next one is I t finance. So if you think of our budgets on their course teams on AWS, everything needs to be can become visible in either of US budgets. And everything has become visible in course exporter. So we have to call the rate tags. >> I heard a stat that 6,000,000 After moving to the cloud in the next 6,000,000 3 to 5 years, security as a focus reinforces not a summit. It's branded as a W s reinforce, just like reinvents. Same kind of five year for security. What's your impression of the show so far? No, you've been highly active speaking, doing briefing started a customer's burn, the midnight oil with partners and customers What's that? What's your vibe of the show? What's your takeaway? What's the most important thing happening here? What's your what's your summary? >> So I always think you get the truth in the booth. Cut to the chase. I made a customer last night from a major media company who we all know who's in Los Angeles. His comment was weeks, either. These expectations wasn't she wanted to come because he goes to reinvent. Why am I coming to Boston in June? Because I'm gonna go to reinvent November on this. The rates of security for a major media company last night basically said, I love the love. The subject matter, right? It's so security centric. He actually ended up bringing a bunch of people from his team on, and he loves the topics in the stations. The other thing he loved was everybody. Here is insecurity, reinvent. There's lots of people from what's the functions, But everybody here is a security professional. So that was the director of security for a media company. He was at an event talking to one of the suppliers, the marketplace. I asked this president of a very well known security vendor and I said. So what's your reaction to reinforce? And he said, Frankly, when you guys told me it was coming, we didn't really want the bother. It's the end of the quarter. It's a busy time of year. It's another event, he said. I am sure glad we came on. He was standing talking to these VP of marketing, saying, We want to bring more people, make sure, So he's overjoyed. His His comment was, when I go to Rio event 50,000 people but only 5% of their own security. I can't reinforce everybody's insecurity >> in Houston in 2020. Any inside US tow? Why Houston? I have no clue what I actually think >> is really smart about the Vineyard, and this is what a customer said Last night. I met a customer from Connecticut who isn't a load to travel far. They don't get to go to reinvent in Vegas. I think what we did when we came to Boston way tapped into all the states that could drive. So there are people here who don't get to go to reinvent. I think when we go to Houston, we're going to get a whole bunch of takes its customers. Yeah, you don't get a flight to Vegas. So I think it's really good for the customer that people who don't get budget to travel >> makes sense on dry kind of a geographic beograd. The world >> if we're expanding the customers that can learn. So from an education point of view, we're just increase the audience that we're teaching. Great, >> Dave. Great to have you on. Thanks for the insights and congratulations on the new responsibility as you get more coz and around marketplace been very successful. 1,000,000 subscriptions. That's good stuff again. They were >> you reinvented and >> a couple of months, Seven days? What? We're excited. I love covering the growth of the clouds. Certainly cloud security of his own conference. Dave McCann, Vice president Marketplace Migration and Control Service is controlled cattle up. How they how you how you move contract and governed applications in the future. All gonna be happening online. Cloud Mr. Q coverage from Boston. They just reinforced. We right back with more after this short break