(upbeat music) >> Welcome to today's session of the AWS Startup Showcase, featuring Cordial. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Christy Parrish here, she's the director of client success at Cordial, and Hailey Pettit is here as well. She's the CRM manager at Nurx. Ladies, welcome to today's session. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> Excited about this conversation. You're going to be talking about personalizing at scale and we're going to look, learn how Nurx is re-inventing the digital patient experience, such a relevant topic. Let's go ahead and get started So the audience understands about each of your companies. Christy, we'll start with you. Give us an overview of Cordial and how you help customers? >> Absolutely. So Cordial is a cross channel messaging and data platform. So our clients can collect all of their unstructured customer and business data from wherever it lives in their tech stack and really use that data to build audience segments, discover trends and insights, and automate super hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale. So as someone who essentially grew up in the legacy email space, I actually worked at a legacy ESP for about 13 years. I see Cordial as a radical shift from heavy cumbersome data processes and the need for lengthy delays and heavy lift to send messages. We're activating massive amounts of consumer and business data kind of up to the second, regardless of its underlying structure or format. And we're making that available across any outbound channel to deliver these highly personalized messaging. So I think it's important to also mention that Cordial is more than just a platform. All of that power, all of the AWS powered power is backed by some of the best innovators and support teams in the industry. So I'm especially proud of how it partner with our clients like Nurx to help them build and execute on their business goals. We're enabling some of the best brands out there. You know, we have Eddie Bauer, we have 1-800 Contacts, REVOLVE Clothing. We're really bringing them agility and a solid marriage of art and science. >> Oh, I like that, a marriage of art and science Especially as we become more demanding as consumers. Whether we're consuming something in a retail environment or we're patients, we want the information to be really as you said, hyper personalized. So Hailey, let's talk about Nurx. This is a very interesting brand and I think it's very fitting that we're talking about this during Women's History Month as well. Give us an overview of what you guys do and why you're so radically novel? >> Yeah, so Nurx is a telehealth company and we are really focused on sensitive health needs. We're really a leader in the birth control space right now. So we prescribe and deliver online directly to our patients. So we offer not only birth control, but STI home testing prep, which is HIV preventative medication. We just launched acne treatment, migraine treatment. So really expanding within the healthcare space. I think what really sets Nurx apart is our one-to-one relationship with our providers, with our patients, and really at our core we really believe that healthcare should be accessible and affordable to everyone, no matter what their circumstances. So yeah, it's a very exciting space to be in and definitely being data-driven it really impacts that patient care and helps us really care for our patients in a really innovative, exciting way. >> It's very innovative. Christy let's talk a little bit about some of the other customers. We're going to dig into the Nurx story, but talk to me about some of the other customers that Cordial helps in other industries for example. You mentioned a few, but let's kind of open that up. >> Cordial really is helping a lot customers really in the retail space. So retail is that is a large focus on e-comm for us. What really kind of stands out to me about Cordial with retail and maybe even some of our publishing clients is our ability to sort of take that data agnostic approach. Data can come from anywhere, from anywhere in their tech stack and come into Cordial. And then we're really focused on making it accessible to them and meaningful for their outbound communications. So any channel, anytime kind of if they want to do direct mail or Facebook audiences, we really are able to bring in that data and look at their business goals, look at what they're trying to achieve inside of their vertical and then make that data powerful for them, not only for just talking to their customers and growing things like revenue per email or their lifetime value for their customers but really bringing it into their insights. And one of the things that I think Nurx is doing really well is using that data, using those insights to kind of feed the next evolution of their messaging programs. So that's a lot of what we're doing for our clients, and having some really stellar successes across verticals. >> So the data explosion, we have to address that. It's something that we're also helping to create as consumers, as patients, et cetera. But we also have this demand, like I said earlier. We want information on any channel. It's great if a brand can come to the channel that we want, that's rare to get that. But creating a data-driven customer experience is a really challenging thing to accomplish. Christy, how do you, how does Cordial help your customers in any industry actually do that and in a timely fashion so that the messages are relevant and personalized? >> Yeah, so I think in this case and in many cases, the key to creating that great customer experience is really using that data with empathy, being able to not just go out and check a box, look for the next logical data data point but really grabbing that data, making it into maybe thoughtful cohorts, thoughtful automated customer journeys, and using that not just to blast out marketing messages but to potentially, and like in the case of Nurx, address pain points or gaps in the knowledge on the behalf of the consumer. Or even for retail, faults in the buying cycle, right? So are they going to buy again soon? What is going to happen next? So this will really kind of make or break the customer experience. And in this case with Nurx it's the patient experience with the brand. So we want to be of the moment. We don't want to send out something that's wrong, last week's news or something like that, or push them beyond where they're at in their cycle. So being able to have kind of that empathy with the data and looking at it from a holistic standpoint, I think is kind of the data magic that Cordial is able to bring. >> The empathy point is provocative. How do you look at data with empathy and deliver those customer experiences that relay that, so that that customer actually feels the empathy coming from the vendor? >> Yeah, I love that point as well, especially in the healthcare space it's all about patient care and understanding how each patient is different in their needs. And so utilizing the data, understanding where they are in their journey with healthcare is so important and Cordial really does allow us to do that. And we use that data to craft really empathetic messaging. So we know where they are in the flow. We know what pain points they may have or what questions they may have at that stage. And so addressing those head on is super important and it's like a key strategic goal of decisions that we've made and everything that we do. I also think there's a lot of stigma in the healthcare space and so education is also a very key factor around these service lines. And yeah, it's really exciting to be able to have a voice in this space and really educate our patients and address those needs. >> And meet them where they are. I think, again, as consumers we're more and more demanding. We can get anything anywhere, any time. And we want you to come where we are, rather than us have to go to where you are. And certainly with healthcare that's been a big challenge in the last year or so. But let's talk about some of the, Christy I want to get your perspective on some of the challenges and the roadblocks when businesses are trying to really form synergistic, empathetic customer relationships at scale, what are some the roadblocks that you help customers move out of the way? >> Right, yeah. So every day at Cordial the volume of data increases, right? So data's coming from all places and we're trying to be smart about using it. We're really working on helping marketers figure out ways to apply insights and meaningful communication strategies to get past this concept of data paralysis, right? It's making that data accessible and meaningful and then giving marketers tools to distill that data into more actionable views so that they can take what they have learned from it and then again iterate on it. So building out customer attributes, cohorts, different ways of slicing the data to make sure that it's as meaningful as possible for their program. And then we partner that with offline insights. So best practices, program strategy trends, to push that distilled data even farther on behalf of their marketing programs. >> You mentioned data paralysis, and that's certainly something that no business, especially in the last year as we've seen a demand for real time is no longer a nice to have, it's really table stakes, but that data paralysis can be a big challenge in terms of how to work around it. How do you pull actionable nuggets from the data to make decisions in the fast enough time that are still relevant for your audience? Can you walk us through how you're doing that at Nurx? >> Yeah, at X we definitely stay focused on the patient and when you have that clarity it's easier to navigate through the data and not getting caught up in that paralysis. I mean, I'm not saying we're perfect, because I've definitely experienced that where there's just so much information that you have. And if you were to touch on each point, a lot of your automations would get really thin. So using the data smart and with, but also you're creative is really important. Another roadblock that we've had is, when you have increasing demand, when you're at scale, really automating some of the one-to-one interactions that you have is so important. And digging down into what data is important to automate those interactions. And I think a great example for us is we launched a post prescription flow. So our patients are notified when their prescription is on their way. And our providers told us, "Like clockwork we get these questions once patients are notified. And so we validated that in the data, we put that data within Cordial and we were able to build out a really successful automation that proactively address those questions. And we saw a direct decrease in those types of tickets to our providers asking those questions." So, yeah, that was really great to see too. >> So taking a look at the data and seeing the most common questions for certain types of prescriptions that providers are getting, which I imagine takes time from the provider being able to treat somebody else, condensing those down, automating those and then you're freeing up the provider as well because you know the common questions they could ask. So in terms of the patient then they sort of proactively got messages about questions that they might have. >> Yes, so more specifically how to start their medication. And then also some of the side effects that may be involved with that medication and what would be normal versus abnormal and what you should pay attention to. So just putting that in a very user-friendly format within an email worked really well. And addressing that question that our providers were taking a lot of time to answer. >> So, Hailey, so a prospective patient would go online, order what they want prescription wise, gets to a provider. They write the prescription and then is that sent to the patient's home? So there's no like physical interaction, it's all digital? >> Correct, yeah. It's all digital. We have our own pharmacy that fills the prescriptions and sends it right to your door. >> Yeah, excellent, on demand. So if we look at the last year there's been so many challenges, too many to count. But I'm wondering how, as the channels expand, we're all dependent on text and email and mobile, as the channels expand, Christy, how does the Cordial data architecture allow customers like Nurx to be able to flex as data sources expand, as data volumes grow, as channels expand, how do you allow them to have an architecture that will allow them to grow and continue to scale? >> Yeah, it's really important to ask that we be able to bring in all of this data and then like you said, a really critical point to Nurx and to a lot of our customers and our clients is, "Hey, we want to send it out across any channel." So Nurx, Hailey didn't mention that they're sending not only prescription information and follow up out by SMS or MMS marketing. They're also sending marketing messages too. So they're able to really leverage what we've built in terms of making that data accessible through all of these different channels, this channel agnostic at this point. So leveraging all of the bells and whistles of the platform, and also then using their data smartly, that's really where the clients are seeing a huge lift with the Cordial platform. They're able to visualize their data, see it, access it, even manipulate it, where in a legacy ESP, it's very limited in terms of manipulating data, aggregating it, looking at it from different angles and then being able to actually make it useful inside the platform for them. >> And Hailey, question for you. We talked about that automated prescription workflow a second ago. You also talked about this, each patient patient's journey being unique, wanting to deliver personalized, hyper-personalized actually is the word, Christy that you use. How does Cordial's platform allow you to respect the individual patient journey, customize it, and also do automation at scale? >> Yeah, I think with Cordial it's an incredible platform. We're able to pull in data from multiple sources and then it's very user-friendly in the way that you can interact with that data and manipulate it and really get at the cohorts that you were trying to reach. I think it's really a special platform. Honestly I think I haven't seen a lot of other platforms like this where it does make it really visually accessible to a brand or a company. >> Something, Christy that I wanted to ask you. I saw in the marketing messaging that what you're aiming to do is making marketing not personalized. And I thought, "Ooh, that's an interesting statement." What's the difference between personal and personalized from Cordial's point of view? >> It really goes back to that whole checking a box, right? So the traditional way of doing outbound communications marketing, even going back to the days of direct mail is to sort of wedge our customers into little boxes or even big boxes, and then send out messages that we think will resonate with them. Now we're really looking at it in real time as the messages are being generated and sent out of a platform where at the moment of send we're reading some signals that the customer is giving us, like what did they do on a website? Or did they respond to an SMS message or a text message? And at the moment of said we're actually sending content that is relevant at that time. It's vastly different from the way that we've traditionally marketed in outbound communications across all channels. So looking at real time, Hailey mentioned that she can visualize, we have a feature called orchestration builder that allows Hailey to come in and say, "Okay, based on these signals or triggers, I want to send this message to these users or these patients, but they need to be in that moment ready for that message. Or she could say, "If they're not ready for that message, let's skip them and come back to them later." And be able to really kind of narrow in and get super personal with those messages. Nurx is incredible, the way that they've used the platform and the way that she's built out these orchestrations, all credit to Haley on this. The way that she's smartly used her tools, it's not only effective, but it's sort of revolutionary, just in the way that she's able to find the right message at the right time. And in email we've said that for years. Right message at the right time. But really we haven't said, "Let's make it personal. Let's use the data that we just got 10 seconds ago and send the message now." So it's been great. >> Yeah, that's a game changer. Using the data that we just got about this person. Speaking of that, on-demand culture, that's a game changer for retail, for healthcare, to be able to tune that in an automated way. I imagine that the campaign ROI numbers, Christy are probably pretty much off the wall for your customers? >> In a lot of cases, they are. Yeah, they're doing really well. They're leveraging data in ways that I've never seen before. We've got some clients who are looking across periods of time, especially in retail, looking across periods of time at their customer's behavior. And then looking for ways to communicate them when maybe there wouldn't be a way to communicate with them that day. So it's the day that they send out a sale but they're are a person who doesn't like sales or doesn't respond to sales. So they may send them a different piece of content something lifestyle, or, you know, curating content, that kind of thing. So it's really been it has been a bit revolutionary in the way that the clients have leveraged the ability to let you know to use their data in new and kind of special ways. >> I can only imagine the last year has affected this in a good way, because we've become even more demanding as a society. Everybody everywhere struggling to get certain supplies for example, but Christy, how has the last year affected Cordial's growth and that of your customers? >> Yeah, so I say this frequently, we have sort of trained a new generation of e-com buyers in the last year. We've taught people how to buy online and that has affected a lot of our brick and mortar clients who also have e-comm business. You know, so we have a large group of furniture clients. And so they've really seen some incredible success, retraining their their customers to buy large items online. It's not an easy thing, but they've really become sort of renegade in the way that they're pushing out messaging and finding the right people to send those to these new econ buyers. So it's been really interesting and they've come back and invested in technology that has enabled them to build trust and build out these individualized brand experiences so that they can actually scale those programs. Now this year, as we're reopening, the strategy is shifting, right? We're looking at, "Okay, we had an incredible year in some cases last year with e-com. Now we're going to have a store that's opened." How do we make that experience special? How do we continue the dialogue with these customers? >> Such an interesting thing that sounds like it's Cordial's been a facilitator of the many pivots that so many businesses have needed to go through. And to your point, sort of re-pivoting back towards some mixture of online e-com and in physical retail or store rather experience, it'll be interesting to see how that happens. And then, Hailey, some pretty big statistics you have to share in terms of some of the things that Nurx saw in the last 12 months with respect to use of your platform and personalization. Talk to us about that? >> Yeah, it's been a very interesting year for Nurx for sure. We've seen a 50% increase in our demand for birth control, with medical providers, brick and mortar medical providers, having limited capacity. We've been able to really step up and serve these patients and make sure they have their healthcare needs met during this really difficult time. We've also seen about a three X increase in our demand for emergency contraception, 130% in STI home test kits. Yeah, it's just across the board it's been really incredible to be able to really fill this need in such a difficult time. So it's been exciting. I love being able to help serve these patients during this time, yeah. >> Yeah, and that need to do something so personalized during such an incredibly difficult time. That's a really interesting mix there. And congratulations on the success that you guys have had. I want to wrap things up, Christy with you. Let's just talk a little bit about the Cordial AWS relationship. You guys started on day one back in 2014, or you built on AWS, tell me about that? >> Yep, so definitely built on AWS. We leveraged the AWS system extensively and yeah, we started in 2014. I think the founders were looking for, where do we go for stability? Where do we go for efficiency and reliability? And so came over to AWS and since then we've become an advanced tier independent software vendor. And then I think more recently in the last couple of years, we've kind of gained a couple of competencies, retail and digital customer experience. So super embedded there. And really, I think AWS not only contributed to the foundation of the platform, it allows us to store and manage that massive volume of customer and business data for our clients and be able to actually house it in the cloud. Really it kind of empowers us to do that, to deliver that messaging at scale that we've been talking about. >> So AWS is an enabler of the way that you help your customers create this personalized experience at scale? >> Yeah, absolutely. And it really it helps us solve these challenging problems that we have where we're working with a client like Nurx and we have a few others where we have to be HIPAA compliant. So we rely on the AWS architecture to not only enable our scalability and reliability, but also with those high security and compliance standards. This is incredibly important to us in servicing our clients. >> Well, ladies, thank you so much for joining me today on the Showcase and sharing what your companies are each doing and what they're doing together. Big changes, big opportunities, and that personalized experience that I think we all crave. Thank you so much for joining me today. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you. For my guests, Christy Parrish and Hailey Pettit. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Stu Miniman! (bubbly music) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio, we're talking about storage and SDI solutions. But before we get into STI and all the industry buzz, we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the real business drivers. And joining me for this segment, happy to welcome back, Randy Arseneau and Steve Kenniston, gentleman, great to see you. >> Thanks for bein' here Stu. >> Thanks Stu great to be here. >> Thank you! Alright, so, talkin' about transformation, customers are going through transformations, IBM's going through transformation, everything's going in some kind of journey. But, let's talk about, you know, it used to be IT sat on the side, Randy we talked about in the intro, you know, IT in the business, you know, wait, they actually need to talk, communicate, work together. What are some of the key drivers that you're hearing from customers? >> So, it's a good question, and we talked a little bit about it on the previous segment. But, I think what's really happening now is that a lot of the terms that our industry has kind of overused and commoditized, have sorta become devalued, right? So, they no longer really mean anything significant. Terms like agility and flexibility and IT business alignment and transformation, which we hear a million times everyday, they've become just kind of background noise, but the reality is, especially now, in this era where, you know, information and data and analytics are driving businesses, and they're no longer, you know, nice things to have for the super advanced very sophisticated companies, they're table stakes, I mean, they're needed to survive in today's global economy. So they've taken on a whole different meaning, so when we talk about agility, for instance, agility means something very specific in the context of IT business alignment, and our solution stacks in particular. Generally speaking, the kinda the way I like to think of it is, I, I overuse sports analogies, but I think this one's relevant. So, a good quarterback is able to read and react. So, as the defense is shifting and making pre-snap adjustments, the quarterback views the field, sees what's happening, and is able to very quickly develop or institute a new offensive game, play, to take advantage of that situation. So that whole read and react idea is something that's very important for a business, especially now. So businesses are under constant pressure, competitive pressure, market pressure, compliance pressure, to be able to exploit their own IP, and their own data, and their own information, very very quickly. So that's number one. By using things like integration and automation within their IT organization as opposed to the old, you know, kind of vertical method of doing things. IT organizations are now able to respond to those rapid course corrections much more effectively. Same thing with flexibility, so when an organization needs to be flexible, or wants to be flexible, to adapt to a very rapidly changing environment. Things like, and this is really where Steve's product line is particularly relevant, things like data reuse, right? So we've got organizations that are running their business on this data, which is their most important asset. We're helping them develop new and creative ways to repurpose that data, efficiently, quickly, cost-effectively, so they can expand the value. So any given piece of data can now have a multiplicative value compared to its original form. >> Yeah, I think it's actually pretty important. When you think about, we're out there talking about products, right? And a lot of vendors are doing this, right? Buy my products you'll get agility or you'll get flexibility or that sorta thing, or maybe even more importantly, in a lot of the enablement we use to educate people on, we'll say, you know, this product enables data reuse. Well what does that really mean, right? What does that mean for business, right? And, when you say okay well it makes the business more agile well, how do you do that? Then it encompasses a whole breadth of solution sets around making that data available for the user, things like software defined storage, things like particular technologies, that can do data reuse. So, it kinda boils itself down in the stack, but to Randy's point, it's been so commoditized, the words, that we don't really understand what they mean, and I think part of what we're trying to do is, make sure when we talk agility, flexibility, or even our three patterns that we talked about, modernize and transform. What do they mean to us? What do they mean to you, the user? What do they mean--? Because that's very important to connect those two. >> Yeah, and I love, 'cause for a while we used to say, it used to be well, you know, do I get it faster, better, or cheaper? Or maybe I can give you some combination, and there're certain customers you talk to and it's like look, if you can just go faster, faster, faster, that's what I need. But, it's not speed alone, like the differentiation for things like agility is, number one: we are all horrible at predicting. It's like, okay, I'm gonna buy this, I'm gonna use this for the next three to five years, and six months into it, I either greatly over or underestimated, or everything changed, we made an acquisition, competition came in. I need to be able to adjust to that, so that was, I love the sports analogy, we love sports analogies on theCUBE. >> Well, you know. >> So that, you know, if I planned for, you know, this was the plan of attack, and what do ya know, they traded for a player the day before or their star quarterback went down, and the backup, who I didn't train against, all of a sudden their offense is different and we get torn apart, because we didn't plan, we couldn't react to it, you run back at halftime and try to adjust, but, you know, you need to be able to change. >> And again, I think another, from my perspective, from and IT business alignment, another, another metaphor that works well, is, you know, kinda what I call the DevOps-ification of business, right? So what's happening now, and it's interesting I think, is that you're seeing some of the practices around DevOps and agile development, which by the way, IBM uses for our own products. You're seeing that push upstream to the business, so the business is actually adopting DevOps-like methodologies for prototyping, you know, testing hypothesis, they're doing interesting things that kinda grew out of that world. So if you think about, even 10 years ago, that would've been kind of unimaginable, you would always have the business applying pressure, and projecting it's requirements onto IT, now you're seeing much more of a collaborative approach to attacking the market, gaining competitive advantage, and succeeding financially. >> Yeah, and if people aren't really familiar with DevOps, the thing that, you know, I really like about it is, number one it's no longer, you know, we used to be on these release trains. Okay, everybody on board the 18 to 24 month release train, we're gonna plan, oh wait, we didn't get this feature in, it'll be in the next one, we'll do a patch in six or eight months, no, no, no. There's the term CICD, continuous, you know, integration, and continuous deployment. It's, you know, push. Often. You know, daily, if not hourly, if not more, and, it's like wait what about security, what about all these things? No, no, no. If we actually plan and have a culture that buys in and understands and communicates, and you've got proper automation. You know, it's a game changer, all of those things that you used to be like: ugh, I couldn't do it. Now it's like no, we can do it, so. >> The only thing constant in business these days is change. >> Absolutely. >> So, if you know that, and you have to be able to plan and articulate and be ready for change, how do you make sure that the underlying infrastructure is ready to kind of adapt to whatever request you may have of it, right? It's now alive, right, it's like a person, I wanna ask it a question, and I need it to help respond quickly. >> And a lot of the focus of this series, as we talked about in the intro section, is our software defined infrastructure portfolio, which in many ways is kinda the fabric upon which a lot of these things are being woven now, right? So, we talk about DevOps, we talk about this rapid cycle, and this continuous pace of change and adaptability, adaptation. We're delivering solutions to market that really accelerate and enable that, right, so, one of the things we wanna make sure we communicate, you know, both internally and externally is the connective tissue that exists between solutions, products, technology capabilities on the software defined infrastructure side, and how that affects the business, and how that allows the business to be more agile, to be more flexible, to transform the way it thinks about taking solutions to market, competing, opening up new markets, you know, seizing opportunities in the marketplace. >> Yeah, it's, if you think about when you talk about strategy, smart companies, they've got feedback loops, and strategy is something you revisit often and come back leads to, when you talk about modernizing an environment, I always used to, you poke fun at marketing, oh we're going to make you future ready! Well when can I be in the future? Well, the future will be soon, well, then when I get to there am I now out of date because the future's not now? So, what is modernize, what does that really mean, and, you know, how does that fit in? >> Yeah, and it's a great point, and I think, we look at modernization as kind of the the constant retooling, right? So, IT is constantly looking for ways to be more responsive, to be more agile, be more closely aligned than a lockstep with the business, and align business. And again, we're trying to deliver solutions to market that enable them to do that effectively, cost effectively, quickly, you know, get up to speed rapidly. There's another, so we talked a little bit in the intro section about the C-level survey, the study that was done globally by IBM, it's done every year, the 2018 one was introduced recently, or published recently. Another one of the themes that was very important is that it's this concept of innovate don't institutionalize and the idea is that old companies, slow moving companies, more traditional companies, have a tendency to solve a problem or introduce and implement a system of some sort and be wed to it, because they adapt all of the ancillary work flows and everything around it, to fit that model. Which may make sense the day that it implements and goes live, but it almost immediately becomes obsolete or gets phased out, so, you need to have the ability to integrate, automate, innovate, like constantly be changing and adapting. >> Yeah, I love that, actually, in the innovation communities they say you don't want best practices, you want next practices, because I always need to be able to look at how I can do, right, learn what works and share that information, but, you're right not, this is the way we're doing it, this is the way it must always be, so let it be written, so let it be done. You know, no, we need to move and adjust. >> And I think, if you think about these things as in, in the beginning of the year when IBM launched global refining was, when we launched kind of our educational context for our sellers in the beginning of the year, it was really three patterns, right? There was modernize and transform, next gen applications, and then application refactoring. And in the beginning when we started to talk about, which I think is where 90% of the clients fall into, it's this modernize and transform, right? Easy to say, but what does it really mean? So, if you break it down into that fact that we know what clients have today, right? We know, you know, VMware's big, KVM is big, you know, Sequel is big, Oracle is big, right? If that's foundationally who you're talking to on an everyday basis, how do you help them take that solution set, and, don't start refactoring today, right, but take them to a point where when they start to do the refactoring, they're well positioned to do that simply and easily, right? So it's a long journey, but to get there you really need to kind of free up and shake loose some of that, some of the bolts, so that it's a lot more flexible over here. >> Yeah, so, talking about things that are changing all the time, so tell me, transformation, it's not about an angle, it's, you know, it's about journeys and being ready, so, you know, help us close the loop on that. >> Yeah, so we talk a lot about that internally, and again, transformation is another one of those kinda buzzwords that we're, we're trying to sorta demystify it, because it can be applied in a million different ways, and they're all relevant and valid, right, so transformation is a very broadly applicable term. When we talk about transformation, we're specifically talking about kind of the structural transformation of the infrastructure itself, so how are we making the storage and the compute more cloud like, more flexible, more easily provisioned, more self-service. So there's kind of a foundational level piece at the infrastructure level. We talk about transformation at the workflow level, so things like DevOps, like continuous development and integration. How do we provide our clients with the material they need, the raw materials, whether it's software, technology, education, best practices, all of the above, to be able to implement these new ways of doing business? And then there's really transformation of the business itself, now, a couple of those, the first two, are kind of happening within IT, but they are being driven by the transformation that the business is undergoing, so, the business is constantly, again, if they're still around and they're prospering, they're constantly looking for new markets to reach into, looking for ways to compete more effectively, looking for ways to gain and sustain competitive advantage in this very very dynamic environment. So transformation touches all of those, they're all equally valid, from our perspective, specifically as IBM, we're trying to tackle the sorta foundational level, and then kinda, by using assets like this, you know, research that we do at the C-level, we're trying to kinda build the connective tissue between the ground level IT stuff, and how the business is changing. >> Think, think, I mean, really as importantly, right, we're trying to build the foundation such that as we're thinking about the business, think taxis transforming to I wanna be more Uber like, or think even automotive industries wanting to be more Uber like, right? I read an interesting article about, you know, auto manufacturers today are thinking about no more buying of cars, right? That's a transformation of my business, right? How do I do that? Now a lot of it is, you know, I gotta set up the infrastructure, I gotta set up, you know, people, and process to do some of this, but the infrastructure has to adapt as well, right? And we gotta cause, and that's not gonna happen tomorrow, to your point Stu, like I wanna design for tomorrow, then the next day, then the next day, then the future, when is the future, right? But I need to have an infrastructure that can evolve with me as my business evolves and I get to this goal. >> And the shifts are now happening, they're no longer kinda tectonic shifts, they're seismic, right, they're not gradual, incremental, I mean they are in some cases, but they're more often seismic changes, and that's a great example. Uber burst onto the scene and fundamentally changed the way humans transport themselves from one place to another. And there's a million examples of that right? There's been genomic research, and even in media and entertainment, there's lots of ways and lots of places in which this shift towards more seismic change in the industry, or in a particular use-case is happening everyday. >> Yeah, so I love your insight, when you talk about your partners, you know, the old days were great where you used to just say hey, you've got a problem, I've got a product that will solve what you need, transaction, box, done. Now, it's like, we've been saying, when are we gonna have that silver belt in security, it's like, never. It's like, security is, you know, it's a practice, or, you know, it's a general theme that you have to do, it's like DevOps isn't a product, it's something we need to do. I heard a great line it was like, you know, oh, this whole AI stuff, well can I have a box and a data scientist and I can solve this stuff? No, no, no, this is going to be an initiative, we're gonna go through lots of iterations, and there's lots of pieces, so. It's a different world today, how do you help people through this as to, you know, what the relationship is now? >> No, it's very interesting, and to your point, can I buy a box that does that, right? We were at Think this year, and our security team, or actually I think it was our blockchain team was up, and I'm very interested in blockchain and what is it gonna do for the community as we kinda grow and that sorta thing. And up on the, on a chart they put this slide that had a million different, I mean thousands of different partners that we partner with, and we also enable to kinda deliver stuff, and in some cases we're competitive, in some cases it solves security, in some cases it does this. Now all of a sudden, it's not one thing anymore, it's like how does it fit into our infrastructure, but, back to your point about partnerships. I think IBM is constantly looking to its partners because they have really that trusted value and trusted relationship with the client, and at the end of the day, as much as we can come in and say oh this box will solve your problem, we don't really know what their problems are, right? It's the people who have those relationships that know where they're going along that evolutionary scale, that we really need to work and tie in with closely, to make sure that the solutions that we deliver on the underlying side are meeting their needs, which then in tern meet our clients needs, I think that's where we're goin'. >> And actually the blockchain is a great example of kinda building these vibrant ecosystems, right? Which is something else that large companies like IBM sometimes struggle with kinda building these very dynamic, very vibrant ecosystems, but I think IBM's very good at it, and I think we've demonstrated that in a number of different places, blockchain being a recent example, but there are many others. And the STI portfolio is no different right, we've got strong partnerships across the board with other software providers, other go-to-market partners, you know, other content providers, there's a million different angles that we are able to, to introduce into the conversation. So we think all of those things taken together allow our sellers and our partners to bring a solution to their clients, regardless of their industry or their size or their particular use-case, that helps them optimize their performance in this new world of super agile, constantly changing, continuous transformation, and do so, we think, better than anyone else in the industry >> Constantly changing, distributed in nature, sounds just like the blockchain itself. (both laugh) Alright, Steve, Randy, thank you so much for helpin' us demystify some of these key business drivers that we're going to. Lots more we'll be covering, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (bubbly music)