(upbeat tech music) >> Announcer: From London, England it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Insp!re 19 Emea. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re 19. Very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the CEO and Chairman of Coupa, Rob Bernshteyn. Rob, welcome back. >> Thank you so much, thank you for being with me. >> It's great to be here, so we are in with all of these customers and partners, this has been busy all day. You started things off today with a great keynote. I was telling you before we went live, I lost count of how many big customer examples were sprinkled, and I think infused throughout your keynote. I was looking at some numbers, Coupa just keeps doing this. 5x increase in spend under management since 2016, that's only three years. You guys have thousands of customers, five million suppliers on the platform, lot of growth. What are some of the key drivers to this great growth that you're seeing? Well a couple of things, I mean first of all, this is a huge total addressable market. Every company in the world could do a better job of the way they manage their business spending, and they could use information technology, hopefully from Coupa to help make that happen, and we are so proud to cultivate this community of like minded, thoughtful professionals that want to apply best practices, best in-class modern technology solutions like the ones we offer obviously, to drive quantifiable, measurable, outcomes for the companies that they work for. So in many ways, this is a celebration of our customer community and it's a wonderful opportunity to be with our customers here like this every year in Europe and every year in the United States, and now frankly in lots of other places around the world. >> So one of the themes that was also expressed during the keynote was Rachel Botsman's theme of trust and I think about the open community, the open platform and the community that Coupa is building, there's a lot of earned trust there that Coupa has earned from this growing community. Talk to me about what that means to you and the whole team and how it's influencing the direction that Coupa is going in. >> It means a lot to me personally frankly. The O in Coupa stands for Open, and that means not only technically open in terms of APIs and integrations, but it means open in spirit, open in dialogue, honest, transparent communications. I feel that our industry in enterprise software has a legacy or a history of a lot of PowerPoints, and a lot of demos, but frankly, quite a few failures of large scale deployments and a whole host of sectors. And we want to be part of the solution, we want to have an open, authentic, honest communication with our customers, with our prospective customers in the sales process, with our partners, with all of my Coupa colleagues, so we can avoid the friction and nonsense of politics that often gets in the way of driving measurable, meaningful value for every constituent. It's a very, very important thing to me, it's important to my team, and that's something we're doing our very best to cultivate in this Coupa community that we're creating. >> Speaking of cultivation, Coupa is cultivating this category of Business Spend Management. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you are with that. >> Sure, Business Spend Management is a pretty straightforward three words to describe the fact that our buyers and our customers are responsible for literally trillions of dollars and pounds and dollars and euros of spend all over the world. And as information becomes more and more transparent, the buyer, the one who's repsonsible for that spend becomes more and more powerful. So we sit on the side of that buyer, we give them information technology solutions from sourcing, to inventory management, to spend analytics, to procurement, to expensing, to invoicing, to payments, to supplier performance. All the capabilities needed to help them make the best purchasing decisions for their organizations, and help their companies become more profitable so that every one of these Coupa community customers we have here could get more bang for their buck and be that much more operationally efficient frankly in driving their own company's visions and missions and whatever it is that they bring to the world. And that's very aspirational for us and we're excited that so many have come on board with this establishment of the Business Spend Management category with us. >> So if we look at the PIPE, as you were calling it this morning, P-I-P-E, procure, invoice, pay, expense, I memorized that, you've got this one platform that can deliver all of that to this growing community of users who have the ability to get that visibility. That is one of the biggest challenges, I was reading some stats recently about the number of businesses, they were the percentages of businesses that don't have complete visibility over their spend, it's high. >> It's very high, we just did a study of 250 or so CFOs in the UK, and they're doing a great job at budgeting and reporting, but they have minimal visibility into their supply relationships, especially with what's happening here with Brexit. They have minimal visibility in supply risks, supply chain risks, and one of the ingredients that I think we're very special at and I'm proud of is the U in Coupa, the user centricity. In order to have visibility into your spend, you have to have adoption, you have to have people purchasing, spending, expensing, paying, processing invoices, everything that you just mentioned through this pipe on one centralized platform with a common UI layer, User Experience layer or User Interface, common business logic layer, common data model, use of community intelligence to help you make the best purchasing decisions, spend decisions. So we're really on the forefront of something very, very exciting because this adoption level is happening through this user centricity, and it's given these companies control and visibility of spend, and what could be more important to driving profitability, sustained business development? I think we're in a very unique position to help these customers. >> So is one of the biggest challenges for those, think it was 96% of those UK financial decision makers that you guys surveyed said, "We don't have complete visibility." Is it because they have legacy siloed solutions that don't give them that common layer? Or is it because maybe that and a mixture of users just not adopting it because it's not as intuitive to use? >> It's a number of things. First of all, for every process, whether it's procurement, expenses, invoicing, or payments, they have seperate systems to your point. Some cases, they don't even have systems. They're calling in orders, they're handling paper invoices, so there are different levels of maturity in each of those four areas. So one is getting them on to a common platform where all of those are orchestrating together. Secondarily, there's an opportunity to create synergy between those areas, so a lot of things that are getting expensed really should be preapproved and should be routed toward preferential pricing that procurement can negotiate on behalf of the user. Many times invoices are duplicate coming in from suppliers and AP departments are so excited that they pay quickly, but they're not necessarily sure whether they received the goods and services that the invoice is for. So having one common platform, that's the C in Coupa, Comprehensive. One common comprehensive platform for all these business processes is critical, leveraging the synergy of all them working together is critical, and getting that widespread user adoption is part of the secret formula here. >> Let's talk about the community. It's big, it's growing, 1.3 trillion in spend managed, and I watched our video back that you and I did a few months ago, it was 1.2. So that was four months ago, and you showed a bar chart today of just the last 12 months, had to look up this way to see that, so this community that has the ability to help derive and leverage the insights, talk to me about the insights and being able to help businesses go from reactive to predictive as a game changer for Coupa. >> Sure, it's a huge game changer and we really aspire to be, if you will, the tail that wags the dog in the enterprise software industry overall because the enterprise software industry, in effect, every customer is on their own island using information technology for a certain business process. What we've done with community intelligence is we've aggregated, anonymized, and sanitized data from the customer base and then are distilling insights that we could be prescriptive about. So we could tell our customers and we're telling them, "Hey, our community is having challenges with such "and such supplier based on literally perhaps millions "of dollars and millions of pounds in transactional spend. "We recommend you consider this supplier in "that same category because our community is having "great success with them. "The products are being shipped on time, "there's no war over invoicing, there's no breakage in "what's delivered." Those are just some examples, we're helping them think through commodities. A lot of our customers forgiven commodity, they have 20, 30 different suppliers. We're helping them think through in their industry. How can they do supply consolidation that makes sense based on benchmarking across the entire industry? We're helping them avoid supplier risk, we're helping them avoid fraud, we're identifying employees that may be expensing things or doing things that are fraudulent based on the collective intelligence of what we're seeing around the entire world in real time and we're prescribing actions to be taken before payments go out. So these are just some examples of what we're doing, we're doing things in benchmarking based on community intelligence, we're really just at the tip of the sphere of what's possible and we've prescribed tens of thousands of prescriptions in our platform to our customers. Many of them are taking those prescriptions and are making their businesses more operationally fit, and more agile, which is something we're very, very proud of. >> Speaking of those prescriptions, I think the number you shared this morning was 22,000 prescriptions delivered in one year? >> In the last 12 months, that's right. >> So we've got to talk about acceleration 'cause we've talked about the COUP, the acceleration, that is one example of that. I also saw that you guys have gotten, customers are doing approvals 30% faster than they were a year ago. You're getting mid-market customers up and running in four months, large enterprises up in eight months, talk to me about that acceleration that you guys are achieving. >> Absolutely, the A in Coupa is about Accelerated, it's about learning from our entire customer base and taking those learnings and making them part of best practices-based appointments so we could go faster and faster and faster. We look at retail customer, we've done dozens of retail customers, large and small. We know how to set up catalogs, we know how to set up workflow, we know how to think through the analytics that they need. So when they get going with the deployment from Coupa, they can get up and running way faster than with going back to five or six years ago where you have to think about it from scratch and a blueprint. They could leverage the insight from the community with doing that in mid-market, with doing that in subverticals like credit unions, for example. Biotechs, we're doing it in insurance, we're doing it in pharma, all hosts of industries, and I think as we learn from every deployment and collect those insights, we're going to be able to drive value faster and faster to our customers. And the other element that's important here is it's not just taking the customer live, all of our customers grow with us. They get more and more value every year, this is why our renewal rate is so strong and customers add more business with us because they're getting value and that value continues to grow, and that's really what value as a service is about. We're not a software company, and we're not a software as a service company. We're truly a value as a service company, which is a very different concept and one that we're cultivating in this marketplace. >> What are some of your favorite, I know you love being in front of the customers, what are some of your favorite examples that really show the value that Coupa is delivering to the changing role of procurement, making that girl or guy much more strategic and much more of a partner to the business? >> Sure, I shared some examples this morning that I really loved and appreciated celebrating some of our trendsetters, or what we call spendsetters. You look at Zalando, our retailer where they weren't necessarily going to take them so seriously about savings, but when they went to marketing and said, "We can give you much more bang "for your marketing budget "so you could reach more potential consumers," well of course they embraced that. And we gave them a usable opportunity, a usable platform for doing that as similar Zalando, they engaged. Now they have something like 85% spender management. When we started working with them, they had zero purchase orders, everything was the wild west. You look at, I was just speaking to one of our customers at Procter & Gamble just five minutes ago here at the expo. They've run more than 50 billion pounds of spend through the Coupa platform, 50 billion. That's not easy, but they've done that in just a couple of years with us, and not only did they have visibility spent, but they're saving, they're routing purchases to preferred suppliers, so the list just goes on and on and on our website, at Coupa.com on the Customers tab, you'll see obviously dozens of customers holding up signs of the real measurable value they're getting from working with us and that's something that we really take a lot of pride in. >> That speaks for itself. Last question for you Rob, talk to me about those strategic partnerships that Coupa has. I know some news coming out today with what you guys are doing with American Express. >> Sure, we've entered the payment space and we entered it because our customer community asked us for it. They said, "Look, if we're procuring goods "and services through you, why wouldn't we all, "and we're doing invoice and we're doing all "of the components of the pipe, "why wouldn't we also go deeper into payments, help us pay." Because many now have to log in to all these different ERP systems and kick off batch process, so we went into payments. And in payments, we have a host of partnerships. Now, today we announced the relationship with American Express in the UK and Australia for virtual credit card payments. Now it's very simple in Coupa, someone needs a good or service, it gets routed through workflow for approval. Once approved, a dynamic credit card number is generated by American Express, the individual makes the purchase, and all the reconciliation, the back-end is handled by Coupa. All the reporting, the visibility, the insights to price points and category assessments are there and visible and the company's in a position to fine tune their spend profile. So that's just one example, and we're doing things in dynamic discounting and accelerating payments. We've just launched today in general availability and Robby will be discussing it tomorrow ahead of business acceleration. We launched our batch payments capability, the ability to do invoice payments in batch along any rail, whether it be banking relationships, whether it be eCheck, whether it be credit card, going into one environment and kicking off batch payments without having to wait for all these different ERP systems to take hold. So we're really at the, in my mind, at the very beginning of addressing a huge market opportunity, we're proud of what we've achieved so far. I'm particularly proud of the customer community developing around us, and we're excited about the days, weeks, months, quarters, and years to come. >> So you talked about, last question, the big TAM, in this total adjustable market. What are some of the core elements to Coupa's path to a billion in revenue? >> We're not as exciting to many investors as a hot startup that grows really quickly and maybe has some sort of viral component to it. We've been at this for over 10 years, we've grown thoughtfully, we've grown carefully. The growth is fast 30, 40 plus percent, but it's thoughtful and careful, it's one customer at a time. We're careful in how much we spend on sales and marketing, especially want customers to choose us rather than us hard-selling them on everything, we want the offering to sell itself. We have an ecosystem of systems integrators, now more than 3,000, Centric, APMG, Deloitte, and others that are certified on deploying Coupa. We're expanding our product footprint, our customers now use on average 4.7 applications from us and they're consuming those applications rather than us pushing them on them. We're expanding globally, we're expanding in terms of the enterprise business and the mid-market business. Our mid-market business is now really at scale and scaling beautifully, it's a beautiful business model. So those are just some of the vectors in which we'll continue to expand, but I think the path to $1 billion for us is very clear, and ultimately comes down to execution, delivering for every customer, making sure they're getting value from working with us year in and year out, and I think before you know it, we'll be on the doorstep of that $1 billion. >> Excellent. Rob, it's been a pleasure having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for having theCUBE out here in London, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> For Rob Bernshteyn, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re 19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this theCube's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. We've got three days of programming we've been doing. We're heading towards the end, but still going strong. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, John Apostolopousos, who's the vice president and CTO of Enterprise Networking and lab director of the Innovation's Lab with Cisco. It all rolls right off the tongue, right John. >> Yes, yes. >> But welcome to the program, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for joining me, it's a pleasure being here. >> Alright so you and I were rapping, we both have some background in networking in innovation labs. So, you know, it's one of the things I love to talk about, who doesn't love to talk about innovation. Tell us a little bit about your background and what are the innovation labs inside of Cisco? >> Okay, so I've been working in various areas of R and D and innovation for many years. And I joined Cisco about five years ago, both to be CTO and also to create a group, a lab, a group of people to help identify and try to solve problems of a strategic importance to Cisco's future. And by doing these, we believe that we can have a significant effect on our customers and bring great value to them and differentiation for Cisco. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. >> It's kind of a, you know what, one of the things I poked at, I worked in a CTO office at one of the big vendors for a few years, and it's like we need the place where people can play and learn and try and fail, it's okay. There's always a push from this, well it needs to lead to product that leads to revenue. How does that work inside of Cisco? >> So it actually works quite well because there's strong push from the top from Chuck Robbins, Dave Decker, from my boss, Scott Harrel, my junior colleagues, Robby Chandra and so forth, to identify these key problems, invest, try to solve them and so forth. Because they know if we can succeed, it's going to be huge revenues. >> Okay, yeah. John, the level we get a CTO on, there's no shortage of cool and interesting things to look at. What are some of the main areas that you and your team look at? >> Sure, so one of the things which actually I with Robby Chandra and other very talented colleagues across Cisco started about five years ago now, was looking at what are some of the key use cases that customers need to have addressed three to five years down the road? And what architectures do they need to solve it? And we started that work four or five years ago, that leads to what we call the digital network architecture DNA that we are hearing all about today. So that work actually started in December 2013, it would really ramp up in 2014 and 2015. And it takes so long because it takes a long time to figure out what are the real problems customers need to address and then how can you build the ASICs and the operating system and the software on top and the platforms and DNA center and now DNA center platform that's needed. And we have a whole bunch of additional things in the pipe. >> Yeah, so bring us back, because you know in technology three to five years, that's a really long time. >> That's a long time. >> So what were some of the original kind of customer needs that you saw and what was on target and what's changed in that time period? >> Sure, so some of the things the customer needs, is they need to be able to role out new services really fast, okay. Today it takes and it historically takes a long time to role out a new service. Let's say we want to have a tele-present system or let's say you want to bring a new IOT device on the network, and you want to segment it relative to all the other devices so there can't be any security threats. And you want to apply all the best practices for networking and security. Typically that's been really, really hard. It's been really hard because you have to figure out for the new application what network and security requirements do you need. Then how should that, how should the network be architected, how should each device in the network be programmed for QOS or anything else. And then go out and do it. Device by device typically. And then be able to look to say hey, is that actually working the way that I intended? Or is there a problem, if so, where's the problem. How can I fix it? How can I change it? Historically that process has taken a long time. Now what we've done is by taking a more wholeistic view, and with things like DNA center, we have a full understanding of what's happening end to end. So we can role out a new service, we can identify both the network policies that are required, the security policies, figure out what's needed in each element in the network, go out and employ it. Then look to see what's happening, verify if it's doing what's needed, and if not, make recommended fixes and so forth. So this is one of the major fundamental shifts that is occurring and it's something we're very excited about and our customers are also really excited, which is, because it brings them great value. It increases their speed. It increases their security, lowers their costs. It's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yeah, John, if I wind the clock back 10 or 15 years ago, intelligence in the network, using data and analytics in the network, we were talking about it back then. >> We were, we were. >> So tell me why it's different now. Why, you know, I know all the people that work on this, we're quite excited for the things that we can actually accomplish today. Not like we were just talking about it, we were building real solutions, but what's different today? >> It's different at every single level. For example, 10 years ago we did not really have ASICs to be programmable. Today with a lot of the ASICs we have with UADP, unified access data platform ASIC. As new protocols become important, we can go and change more for to support it. Our new Cat9ks actually we have x86's built in, so you have an x86, which you can have a containerized environment there, so third parties can take their applications in a container, deploy it and run it across switches. That was never possible before. So these are some of the major advances that happened that just makes it so much easier to deploy these. >> Yeah, well one of the things that we've been really interested to dig into is some of the new applications that aren't just running on the network but the network is involved in how we build those environments. So when I think about you know just the theme of the show, it's you know, imagine what we can do, and here in the dev net zone, it's customers talking about helping to build those applications. Talk a little bit about that. How does that tie in to some of these mega trends like machine learning, AI, you know, choose your favorite buzz word of choice there. >> Yeah, so what happens is now when you role out a new application, one of the key things you want is visibility and know how it's working. In the past you've had visibility at the server. You may have visibility in the client. You haven't had visibility end to end, and you often haven't had it real time. But now you can actually have end to end visibility and you can be able to automatically self optimize the network to be able to do what needs to be done. For example, here we have thousands of people just on this floor here, and you want to optimize which APs they're talking to and what paths they're taking through their networks. So that whatever they're doing, could it be a Face Time or anything else could be done with very high end to end quality. And all that you want to happen automatically. >> Yeah, the place I've actually been a little critical of Cisco is when we first started talking about IOT, it was like well everything needs a networking part of it. I'm like well a lot of these devices aren't going to have connectivity or have limited connectivity. Transport isn't, you know, the piece of it, but when I take that, when I look at solutions like NFV that are coming out, all of these coming together, this great new term we're talking about, edge computing. So what are you seeing, what's happening today, what are you looking at from a research standpoint? And, you know, where does the edge start? >> Yes, so the edge is a really fun topic. And it's something Cisco cares a lot about because it's often for many applications you have to run them at the edge, especially for IoT. For instance today, you mentioned IoT, you mentioned machine learning. Each of those applications, it's typically a lot of the process ended, the analytics for IoT, the machine learning AI for other sort of applications, that's usually done in the Cloud. However, many times you can't do it in the Cloud or you don't want to do it in the Cloud, because it's too expensive or you just can't get things to the Cloud. >> Yeah, if I'm driving an autonomous vehicle, I can't wait for it to do the round trip before I hit you know whatever that was. >> Yes, and that's a great point. Because what happens is there's a latency issue. There's also scalability. Scalability in the amount of data that's coming for a single IoT device or in a place like this you may have thousands of IoT devices. So it's huge scalability issues. Also reliability. You want your systems, your IOo applications, everything to work. And usually you're counted on being connected to Cloud, but in case you're not connected, in case something breaks down, a storm, a backhoe takes out your internet connection, you still want it to work. So for reliability, you also want to do things at the edge. Also for privacy. You see for privacy, what happens is you want to limit the information that you send to the Cloud. And if it's possible not to send anything, or just to summarize and send only a very small part of information. That could lead to major gains in privacy. So doing processing at the edge, especially with machine learning, AI, can lead to improvements in scalability, lower latency, improved reliability, lower costs, and improvements in privacy. So lots of gains by doing things at the edge of the network. >> Okay, and were does Cisco play in some of these edge solutions? >> Yes, first of all, Cisco has been building computer at the edge with ISRs for many years, okay. I view this as one of the hidden gems that Cisco has. Also we've been working on, what we call, fog commuting for many years. Actually I joined Cisco five years ago, but even before that, my colleagues realized that hey, for some IoT applications, you can't do it in the Cloud. You actually have to do it in the edge. And so they coined the term fog, which basically means taking a part of the Cloud, bringing it to the edge of the network, and a cloud on the ground is called fog, hence the term. And then we've been developing it ever since. And so this is what led to us including for example x86s and containerized frame works on switches and so forth so it makes it much easier for developers to deploy things at the edge of the network. >> Yeah, we just have to make sure enterprises don't choke on it because then it would just be smog. (laughter) >> Luckily we're working really hard on that, and also to make it very secure. Because that's another key component. High scalability, privacy, reliability, low costs, and security. >> Okay, so. >> And no smog. >> No smog. What are some of the things, you know, give us a little inside into the innovation labs, what are some of the things as you look out that maybe we're not yet talking about on the show floor here? >> Sure, for example, some of the major things upcoming is 802.11ax, it's the next generation of wifi. So it gives significant improvements in wifi performance. We've been working on that for a number of years. When I say we, it's myself and other colleagues throughout Cisco. And often colleagues and universities and standards organizations and other companies, wherever it makes sense, because we're trying to push the industry forward. So 802.11ax is a major effort we're working on. Also 5G cellular, you may have heard a lot about it because it's getting a huge amount of attention. And we're also trying to connect these two. Because, for example, in indoor environments like this, wifi is going to be, wifi is the best solution. On the other hand, as you take your mobile device and you go outside, you have 5G, or you will have 5G. As a concrete example, you're familiar with network segmentation, okay, this is incredibly powerful. It's very good for security, for giving the applications the bandwidth allegiance they need and so forth, so very, very powerful. DNA provides that capability within the campus branch, across wired and wireless. And that's what we're shipping today. What happens is with 5G as defined by 3GPP standards, when they come out, you're going to have something very similar, it'll be called network slices, instead of network segmentation. But exact same concept. And it'll be provided on service provider networks. And now what you can do is you can use DNA center to set up the policies in the network segment to go across the enterprise campus and also on the service provider network. So when you go outside with your mobile devices, wherever you are, you'll still have your network segment with your security, you QOS and so forth that they need for applications. >> John I'm just sitting here smiling because I worked in telecom back in the nineties. And there were the trucking companies that was like my phone was a walkie talkie, and then it was also a cell phone, which was pretty cool back in the nineties. When we talk about data, that's been the ultimate promise. It should be ubiquitous, 5G, working with the wireless has been an interesting thing to kind of dig into. So how long until, you know, that becomes reality? >> Well in the enterprise, indoors, campus branch, so forth, end up going to data center. We're working with our data center team very closely to build network segments across both. That's, in some cases it's already available today, in other cases it'll be coming in six months and so forth. With 5G, it depends on the deployment of 5G. And so that's 2020, 2021. But we're already working to make that possible. >> Alright, John, I want to give you the final word. I've worked on some of those projects when it's kind of years in the making, and something comes out the door and then that's what you have with the DNA solution. You know, tell us a little bit about the celebration, the pride, the excitement, that the team is seeing. >> Yeah, it's a lot, right now, it's a great time because as you mentioned, we started some of this work four years ago. We brought some of it out, SDA and DNA center, last summer. Assurance in January. IoT, DNA IoT recently. We just brought out the world's best AP with a 4800. So it's all these sequence of things that finally came out that we've been working on for years, so it's really an awesome feeling. And there's a lot more in the pipe. And so it's going to be a fun, fun future ahead. And our customers are going to get a lot of value. >> John Apostolopousos, really a pleasure. Thank you for joining. You're now a part of theCube alumni here where we always love talking about innovation, driving that pipeline to help customers through all of these new technologies. Stay with us, we got a couple more interviews left. Three days, wall to wall coverage here in Orlando, Florida. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always thank you for watching theCube. (techno sounds)

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, its theCUBE. Covering LeMon 2018. Brought to you by VeeAM. >> Welcome back to the windy city everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We track the signal, extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with co-host Stu Miniman. This is our second year here at VeeAMON. Hashtag Veeamon, simple enough. Kate Hutchison is here, she's the CMO of VeeAm. >> Yes, thank you very much for having me. Its a pleasure to be here. >> You're very welcome, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, great show. You've painted the town in green. >> We certainly have. (laughs) >> So VeeAM obviously didn't need your expert help in creating awareness in places like this. >> Kate: Yes. >> And having a persona around around the green team. Awesome. Your background, Riverbed, Polycom, VMware, Citrix, BEA, some rockstar companies. You've got a lot of experience there. Why did you come to Veeam, and why now? >> Yes, so I was attracted to VeeAM for many reasons. We have some, as you know, some stellar attributes as a company. We've been talking about our net promoter score of 73, which is three and half times the industry average. And of course the executive team themselves, and meeting them and really wanting to be a part of that team. So that was a huge reason for me joining, but as it relates to my career and my background and what I thought I could bring to VeeAM. Very much about enterprise marketing. So I've spent about the last 20 years in the industry, as you mentioned the company names. Really helping those companies build the powerhouse brand, and so I just love being a company who is known for one thing, but is very successful that being known for something that's even broader and more strategic. And that's why I wanted to join the company. >> You mentioned the phrase powerhouse brand. What is a powerhouse brand, and how do you go about building it? >> Well everybody probably has a different definition of a powerhouse brand, but having spent a good 15 years in the Bay area, Silicon Valley, when you're walking around Silicon Valley and you say who you work for and everyone recognizes it, you're working for a powerhouse brand. That hasn't been the case with VeeAM. Now we're very strong, we do our research. We come out pretty strong it Europe, but in terms of our brand awareness in North America we have a ways to go there. Again, and I think because when it comes to building a brand and a powerhouse brand, enterprises really rely on customers to do that. To really leverage the voice of customers, to get the word out and to get the customers to go on record to talk about the power and value of VeeAM. Because when customers go on to talk about it, there really is no better marketing that you can do. >> Ya Kate, one of the things I saw. VeeAM started out with the geeks, and I say that in the most loving terms. People that did virtualization. >> Kate: Yes. >> VeeAM solved a problem, simple, huge adoption in that market, but as we've been talking about all day here, data protection is going up the stack. >> Kate: It is. >> It's hitting the seed sweep more, so. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you could explain to a lot of our audience are the techies and they're like I don't understand this brand in marketing things. >> Kate: Sure. >> We just want the next little containers and things there. >> Kate: Absolutely. >> So why the brand elevation? >> So, first and foremost, we're known for one thing in the industry, as it relates to our product. It just works, and we're not leaving that behind, and certainly the enterprise cares a lot about the product, but as we go into the enterprise space, there's some things that an enterprise customer is going to look for, that an SMB may not. Enterprise is one of the assured company that they're doing business with, has long term viability. They want to make sure that there's plenty of addressable market and headroom for them to go far and above, beyond their sights of, a billion in our case. The other thing is, enterprise customers have a different way of engaging with that company, as it relates to the selling motion. So whether it's our partners, our alliance partners, our resellers, our sales teams directly, they want to be able to work with them as trusted advisors, and they want our folks to be able to anticipate their needs, well ahead of when they actually encounter them. So, we're talking a lot about a journey for our customers. We've been talking about intelligent data management, and the five stages of getting to that. So its really, its building on our core. Which has been SMB and commercial, but also now, up leveling the story, and by the way, the technologists at all companies of all sizes, want to be doing more to influence the outcomes, the business outcomes. So we're telling a story that we think will resonate with them and there's always plenty of click downs into the technology if you want it. (laughs) >> So you guys are putting a lot of emphasis on the up leveling. As Stu mentioned, CXO is becoming more aware of the data protection problem. >> Kate: Yes. >> Its becoming a board level topic. >> Kate: Yes. >> So I think I get the why now. >> Kate: Yes. >> My question is, why VeeAM? And what is the brand promise that you're going to bring to that enterprise? >> So I think, traditionally, VeeAM has been thought of as more of an S&B and commercial play. So the why now is that we have a much broader portfolio then we had a few years ago, and yet we're thought of as just back up and replication. Now, we're building on what our reputation is and back up and replication, but we want to take customers to where we know the puck is going. So for example, as enterprise customers want to take advantage of public clouds, of manage clouds, of SAS applications, they need to be able to get control of all their data. That's the one thing we hear over and over. I don't know where all my data is. Right? So they need to have a platform that can give them that visibility and that aggregated view, that single paint of glass. Then they're going to eventually want to take advantage of being able to move workloads into places where it makes more sense to have them. In cases where there needs to be tighter protection, or in the case of archive data, that they don't need to spend a lot of money on primary storage. It just depends on what our customers want to do. And, ultimately, to be able to move to more of a behavior based way of managing that data. For example, if we see malware crossing that network we can immediately respond and make sure that those workloads are secure. It could also happen as it relates to weather systems and being able to have the data be smart enough to sense and respond where it needs to move to. >> We saw some slides this morning that Peter McKay was showing, like off the platform slide, and I tweeted out that we learned years ago, working with Eric Brinyawlson and Andy McAfee that platforms beat products. >> Kate: Yes. >> So, talk about the importance of platforms through the enterprise. >> Yes, so first of all you cannot be a platform provider without an ecosystem that's embracing and extending the value, and we're working with our ecosystem through the API's, the application programming interfaces, that we make available to them so that they can integrate with our products, and actually allow our platform to be able to be the most complete platform for intelligent data management. That is not all coming from VeeAm, we are very heavily dependent on our ecosystem. >> Dave: Right. >> So that's really the crux of how important a platform is because customers have a lot of technology already in their environments. They want to make sure that if I'm buying something from you, that it'll integrate into my existing environment so I don't have to do a complete rip and replace. That's a very expensive proposition. So, we have been investing and we have thousands of technology partners that are embracing our API's and again, extending the value of our platform. >> I don't want to jump in but, I was going to ask you how you add value to those partners, and it's not just the product and the features, and doing what you say you're going to do from a product standpoint, it's having that platform that makes it easy to integrate, >> Kate: That's right. >> And creating that scale effect, that flyaway effect. >> Absolutely, and a solution that is better together. So, customers really like buying solutions that are already packaged and integrated as it might relate to Cysco and VeeAM or HPE and VeeAM or NetApp and VeeAM. That's what we've been doing with those partners in particular and really going to market together, and that is a preferred way for many customers to buy. >> Or IBM and VeeAM, or Microsoft and VeeAM, >> Yes >> Botanics and VeeAM. VMware and Veeam, we don't want to leave anybody out. >> Kate: We don't want to leave anyone out. Those three that I mentioned, we're on their price list and we are reselling. >> So that's the difference. >> Yes. That's the difference >> Okay, that's really the point. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> So my question is, as you go up the stack a bit, talk about platforms and things like orchestration, >> Kate: yes >> the swim lanes get a little bit muddy, because if you talk about those same partners, the VMware, Microsoft, the Newtanics of the world. >> Kate: Yes. >> They want to own a lot of those pieces in the multi cloud world. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you can help explain that. >> I think we're all probably saying some of the same words, but defining them a little differently. So when we talk about orchestration, it's very much about allowing workloads to move seamlessly across multi-clouds. To do that while the data is secure and protected, and eventually introduce, we have partnerships today that allow us to leverage artificial intelligence. So that those workloads can move seamlessly without any disruption to the business as they're moving to the right location. So yes, I think you hear a lot of the terms, but as you drill down into it and you double click on what does that mean for, in your environment, it's a little different. >> So when VeeAM decided to expand deeper into the enterprise, it's putting its money where its mouth is. I mean Robby brought in Peter McKay, he brought in a number of folks on the sale side with enterprise, now yourself. >> Kate: Yes. >> We saw Dave Russel up on stage today. >> Kate: Yes. >> He's got some enterprise jobs. >> I'm looking forward to working with him. >> You're not just talking to talk, you're walking to walk. Which is great to see, and thinking about the total available market, its a TAM expansion move, can you address that at all? >> Kate: Yes. >> I know you guys are very research oriented, as a company. >> Kate: Yes. >> You have relationships with all the big research houses. What do you see from a taman standpoint. >> Yes, so, remember that our proposition is to have the most complete platform for intelligent data management. By virtue of saying that, it really means we have to look at adjacent markets for additional capabilities to put into our platform, to ensure that we remain ahead of the competition as it relates to intelligent data management. We're looking at various adjacent markets. Whether that be through a build buyer partner strategy. So one of the largest market opportunities in an adjacency is the cloud infrastructure as a service market. It's huge. Its about 90 billion. It's got a very fast clip in terms of its compounded annual growth rate, and we've already made some pretty great progress there, both organically, as well as through the acquisition of N2WS. When we move into fast growing market segments like that, and we have many others that are adjacent as well, it's creating an addressable market of about 30 billion for us as we look out into 2022. So we're pretty excited about that, and again, that gets back to making those investments so that an enterprise customer feels confident betting their business on us. We have that scale ability. We have that addressable market, and we are increasingly helping our folks on the front lines become trusted advisors to our customers. >> In your estimation, I know some of this is hard when you're doing the analysis >> Kate: Yes. >> I used to do that for a living so I know. In your estimation is that sort of an approximation of spend, or does it include what we look at, as the money that's left on the table by the global 2000 because they have inadequate data protection. Presume it does not include that. >> Kate: Yeah. >> Because if it did, it would probably be a trillion. >> Kate: Right >> But I wonder if you can add some color to it. >> Well I think as we get into an era of compliance, we have GDPR coming down this month, I think companies are taking a new look at what does it really mean to ensure that I know where all my data is, that I ensure it's protected, that I'm sure that it's secure, and that it's in compliance. I think you're seeing more attention, more money. You mentioned earlier that this is becoming more of a sea level issue, and I think in an era of compliance and regulations that are coming down, you're going to see that only increase. >> One of the interesting things that we saw about VeeAM when we were looking at the show here, you're almost, how do I say it, a tweener. You're still kind of a startup, but you're one of the bigger companies in the space. There's a lot of buzz and energy, and customer interest >> Yes. >> In this all market thing. How do you look at yourself compared to some of the legacy giants, >> Yeah. >> And some of the new startups? >> So we are a very fast growing company. We posted 40 percent growth in Q4. We were at 36% year over year. I mean off the very big numbers. I haven't seen these numbers since I was at VMware. So that is a rapid growth company that grows up quickly when it's growing at that clip, so I think there's a part of us that's extremely paranoid about the competition and looking at some of the new entrance to make sure that we are really staying ahead and innovating, continuing to innovate. Then we look at some being legacy companies that have been in this space, and we see in some cases, a downward trend in their revenue and in their investments in this era, in this area. Again, I think it's a healthy balance of innovative and paranoid, and recognizing that customers want the solution that VeeAM offers, and they do want to be able to migrate off of the legacy systems that are out there. We are seeing that time and again. We just showed, this morning in the general session, we showed a Royal Caribbean video and that was a case where they abandoned their legacy system to go with VeeAM. >> Well that's quite a story. Nearly a billion dollars, growing at 35 plus percent a year. You got to look to companies like Service Now, Work Day. >> Kate: Yes. >> You're in that rare-ified air. Well Kate thanks so much for coming. >> Absolutely. >> Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. >> Really excited to see you sort of take VeeAM up into that new stratosphere. >> I'm very excited to be here. >> It's great to be part of VeeAMON 2018. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back with our next guess, right after this short break. (techno music)